Testosterone

**Ira Glass** (0:01)
WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Okay, so maybe you saw in the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered everybody in the armed services over 30 years old to have their testosterone levels tested. That's men and women both. And then anybody who wants to get special shots to get a testosterone boost, they can get them.
The goal here, Hegseth's social media post about this was titled, The High Tea, High Testosterone, Department of War.
And maybe you saw people had all kinds of reactions to this, including lots of people joking about how Hegseth was suddenly embracing gender-affirming care. I personally had a strong reaction to the idea of testing everybody's testosterone levels in a workplace, which was, I've lived through that. Here, at my job, at This American Life. We did that. Back in 2002, we did a show where we talked about testosterone and the personality traits that supposedly go along with higher testosterone levels. And as part of that show, all of us on staff got our testosterone levels tested to see who had the highest. And then before the results came back, we all sat down and discussed who we thought might have the highest, and then we revealed the results. Anyway, today, as a cautionary tale to the men and women of the armed services about what it's like for an entire workplace to test their testosterone, we are re-running that old show. Our staff experiment, you'll hear, comes up a little ways into the show. It's Act Two, but the original episode started with one of our producers at the time, Alex Blumberg, joining me in the studio to explain why we took up the subject in the first place back in 2002

**Alex Blumberg** (1:36)
Hello, Ira.

**Ira Glass** (1:37)
Alex?

**Alex Blumberg** (1:38)
Yes.

**Ira Glass** (1:39)
What's the reason for this week's show?

**Alex Blumberg** (1:41)
Well, I've been thinking about that, and for me, the reason for today's program goes back to a book I read when I was 15 It's called The Women's Room.
Maybe people listening will remember The Women's Room. It was a seminal feminist novel from the 70s. I first came across The Women's Room when I was digging through my parents' bookshelves looking for porn, books with naughty parts in them, like Fear of Flying. So I picked it up and I read it.

**Ira Glass** (2:16)
Because the word women was in the title.

**Alex Blumberg** (2:18)
In Lipstick, probably, or maybe not. Yes.
It's incredibly polemical. It describes basically a group of women going from the 50s through the 60s. They all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives. Women are slowly being driven crazy by their husbands' incessant criticism, or they're being called ugly after they get mastectomies, or they're being stifled by their husbands' emotional shallowness.

**Ira Glass** (2:55)
I noticed you happened to have brought into the studio with you today a copy of the Women's Room.

**Alex Blumberg** (2:58)
Yeah. Well, I recently reread it just to see. For example, I sort of bookmarked a couple of these things.
You know, on page 198, the narrator comes in and she says, you know, you think I hate men? I guess I do. And then a little bit further down, she says, my feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watched the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach. And I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. And then a little bit later, my hatred is learned from experience. That is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then perhaps I could unlearn it.
It's not very much pornographic about that.
It's incredibly strange thing to read this book at that age, because at that age, I felt like there's one other woman who sort of comes into play at this point, and that's, I probably shouldn't say her name. Let's just call her Kelly. And she was in eighth grade with me, and she sat two rows away from me. And I remember one time sitting in homeroom with her and seeing her button-down shirt was open a little bit, and I could catch the bare sliver of her little training bra. And it was perhaps the most desire I've ever felt in my life, maybe. I mean, it was all consuming, and I couldn't concentrate for the rest of the day. I remember it to this day. And so at the time I was reading this book, I felt like, oh my God, this is what, this is, like, I could see myself becoming the people that she was describing, the men she was describing, and it was really terrifying. My testosterone and how it affects me and how I react to it, I think about on a daily basis all the time.