There’s this worrying trend at the moment – rising male aggression, the so-called “male loneliness epidemic,” or just lots of “non-emotional” men whinging, or worse, painting roundabouts, screaming racist slurs, and taking to the streets dressed as Temu Templar Knights.
Whatever you call it, there is undeniably a growing contingent of blokes who are absolutely furious that women have collectively decided they’re not tolerating disrespectful behaviour anymore, that people want to escape war zones, and that City lost their last game. And because we live in a world where people understand precisely fuck all about endocrinology, everyone’s blaming testosterone.
Except that’s not how testosterone works. At all.
And understanding how it actually works makes the current situation significantly more concerning – because the problem isn’t the hormone, it’s the culture. And testosterone? Well, testosterone is just going to amplify whatever cesspit these men are marinating in.
What Testosterone Actually Does (Spoiler: It’s Not What You Think)
Here’s the thing everyone gets wrong: testosterone doesn’t cause aggression. It doesn’t make you violent. It doesn’t turn you into some sort of knuckle-dragging rage monster who communicates exclusively through grunts and punching walls.
What it actually does is amplify whatever behaviours earn you status in your social context. It’s called the “social status hypothesis,” and once you understand it, the current state of male behaviour becomes significantly less mysterious and significantly more depressing.
The research is clear: testosterone causes both prosocial AND antisocial behaviours depending on what gets you respect and validation in your particular environment. In controlled studies, men given testosterone were more generous when offered fair deals – but also punished unfairness more severely. When being observed by others, testosterone increased charitable giving and prosocial behaviour. In Eastern cultures where high social status is associated with generosity, testosterone enhances these prosocial tendencies.
The hormone doesn’t create specific behaviours. It just makes you desperate to excel at whatever gets you status in your tribe.
And therein lies the problem.
The Lemming Effect (Or: Why Your Mates Are Making You Worse)
If your peer group values kindness, emotional intelligence, and treating people with respect, testosterone will push you toward being kinder, more emotionally intelligent, and more respectful.
But if your peer group is a bunch of emotionally illiterate angry men who think women are the problem, who consume Andrew Tate content like it’s a religious text, who’ve decided that the “male loneliness epidemic” is somehow women’s fault rather than the predictable consequence of their own inability to form genuine emotional connections?
Well. Testosterone is going to make you double down on that too.
Like a band of lemmings, except the lemmings have podcasts and think feminism is why they can’t get laid.
This is why the current situation is so concerning. It’s not that testosterone is causing the problem – it’s that testosterone is amplifying a culture that’s already rotting from the inside out. These men aren’t angry because of their hormones; they’re angry because they’ve been radicalised by other angry men, and their hormones are just making them more committed to the cause.
Why This Creates The Homoromantic Cathedral (But Only For Men)
And this – THIS – is why straight men end up emotionally monogamous with other straight men while straight women generally don’t do the same with other women.
Testosterone drives status-seeking behaviour within your peer group. For men, particularly in cultures that discourage emotional vulnerability with women, their primary source of validation becomes other men. The hormone pushes them to perform for, compete with, and ultimately seek approval from their male peers above all else – including their female partners.
They’re not trying to impress you, love. They’re trying to impress Dave from the gym. And testosterone is making damn sure they stay focused on that goal.
Women, with lower testosterone levels on average, simply don’t experience the same hormonally-driven compulsion to seek status within same-sex hierarchies. We’re perfectly capable of deep female friendships, obviously, but we’re not biologically driven to prioritise our mates’ opinions about us over our actual romantic partners’.
The irony is rather spectacular, really. These men complain about being lonely while being literally incapable of forming genuine emotional connections with women because they’re too busy performing masculinity for an audience of other men who are equally terrified of vulnerability.
The Projection Problem (Or: Why They Hate The Women They Need)
Here’s where it gets properly psychological: people tend to get most annoyed by traits in others that they don’t like in themselves. And nothing illustrates this better than men screaming about independence while being completely dependent on women they don’t value nearly as highly as other men.
Their mothers. Their wives. Their girlfriends. Their sisters.
These men will argue fiercely that they’re independent, self-sufficient, that they don’t need anyone – all while some woman is doing dozens of hours of unpaid labour for them every single week. She’s managing the household, remembering birthdays, doing the emotional labour, making sure there’s food in the fridge, coordinating social events, keeping track of appointments.
And does he acknowledge this? Does he say “actually, I’d not have clean pants or time to play golf every Saturday if you weren’t running the entire backend of my life”?
Does he fuck.
Instead, he gets angry. At himself, initially – because on some level he knows he’s dependent on someone he’s been taught to view as less valuable than his male peers. But rather than simply admit “I literally couldn’t function at this level without her labour,” he does what emotionally illiterate people do best: he projects that self-hatred outward.
Onto her.
The woman doing the work becomes the target for his rage about needing her to do the work. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife, serve it at dinner, and he’d still not notice because someone else set the table.
And now? Now they’re getting scared. Because women are far less likely to look for relationships or consider marriage anymore – ironically, precisely because of this behaviour. And when they get scared, they get angrier. The vicious circle is absolutely wild.
So now you’ve got men who are dependent on women, angry at themselves for that dependence, taking it out on the women they depend on, increasingly panicked that women are opting out entirely, and responding to that panic with even more anger. All while insisting they’re independent and don’t need anyone. And their peer group – other men in exactly the same situation – reinforces this delusion because admitting otherwise would require vulnerability.
Testosterone isn’t making them angry. Their complete inability to acknowledge their own dependence and the value of the labour that enables their entire lifestyle is making them angry. The hormone’s just making them more committed to the mental gymnastics required to avoid that realisation.
The Terrifying Bit
So here’s what keeps me up at night: we’ve got a generation of men who are increasingly radicalised into believing that their loneliness and frustration is someone else’s fault – specifically, women’s fault for having standards and boundaries. They’re congregating in online spaces that reinforce aggression, misogyny, and emotional stunting as masculine virtues.
And testosterone is going to make them more committed to whatever their peer group values.
If their peer group valued emotional honesty, communication skills, and genuine human connection, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But their peer group values “holding frame,” “maintaining alpha status,” and viewing relationships as zero-sum power struggles.
Testosterone doesn’t make them aggressive. But it absolutely makes them more invested in whatever bollocks their mates are selling – and right now, their mates are selling some deeply troubling bollocks indeed.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Blaming testosterone for male aggression is scientifically illiterate and lets men entirely off the hook for their choices. The hormone isn’t the problem. The culture is the problem. The peer groups are the problem. The complete inability to form emotional connections with anyone except other men – and even then, only in the most superficial, performative ways – is the problem.
But testosterone? Testosterone is going to amplify whatever environment you’re in and whatever your social group values. And if your social group is a bunch of angry men who think the problem is women having boundaries rather than their own catastrophic emotional illiteracy?
Well. Strap in, because it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
The solution isn’t to blame biology. The solution is to build cultures and peer groups that actually value the things that make humans bearable to be around – emotional intelligence, genuine vulnerability, treating people with basic fucking respect. Because testosterone will happily amplify those things too, if men would actually let it.
But that would require them to stop performing for the lads long enough to consider that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the hormone or the women or the loneliness epidemic.
The problem is them. And the mates they’ve chosen. And their complete unwillingness to do anything about either.
Time to find a new excuse boys…and some new friends.
Sources: Dreher et al. (2016) “Testosterone causes both prosocial and antisocial status-enhancing behaviours in human males.” PNAS; Wu et al. (2020) “Exogenous testosterone increases the audience effect in healthy males: evidence for the social status hypothesis.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B; Eisenegger et al. (2011) “The role of testosterone in social interaction.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences
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