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Competition is crucial to evolution and may increase testosterone but also is selectively discouraged for women and encouraged for men via gender norms. Gender socialization may affect testosterone by encouraging men but not women toward behaviors that increase testosterone. Low testosterone is framed as a health crisis and the hormone is linked to unrealistically muscular bodies and sexual performance. Research suggests that about 20% to 40% of your calories should come from fat for healthy testosterone levels. Another factor to think about when it comes to your environment and healthy testosterone levels is to make sure you’re not bathing in T-killing chemicals.
He said a single testosterone test, assuming it was accurate, could "at best, only tell you the concentration of testosterone in your blood at the time you took the test". Symptoms commonly attributed to low testosterone were often non-specific and overlapped with fatigue, stress, anxiety, depression and relationship difficulties, Cheung said. Testosterone naturally declines with age but it is not inevitable for all men, and lower levels may also be linked to factors including type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome and the use of certain medications. "This creates a sense of urgency for solutions, which in turn fuels lucrative markets for pharmaceuticals, supplements and medical devices, even in the absence of clear clinical benefit. This meant "men may come to perceive themselves as inherently deficient or in need of medical intervention", she said. They shape how men understand their bodies, ageing and identity, and often lead to negative self-perception and mental health," she said.
Manosphere influencers are whipping up fear over low testosterone levels, encouraging supplements with long-term dangers. When researchers at the University of Chicago restricted young men to five hours of sleep a night for one week, their testosterone levels fell 10-15%. It's best to measure free testosterone levels in the morning.
Testosterone therapy is approved for the treatment of delayed male puberty and abnormally low production of testosterone secondary to malfunction of the testes, pituitary or hypothalamus. Women may have a testosterone deficiency due to diseases of the pituitary, hypothalamus or adrenal glands, in addition to removal of the ovaries. Although testosterone may make prostate cancer grow, it is not clear that testosterone treatment actually causes cancer.
"Manosphere-driven health narratives can amplify fear, shame and distrust of mainstream healthcare. "When testosterone is sold as a shortcut to confidence and success, it’s doing more harm than good. "Promoting testing and treatment to men without clear medical indications raises concerns about overdiagnosis and overtreatment," added Dr Nickel. "Like many men, I’m appalled by the manosphere and these misguided and misleading versions of masculinity, which only serve to undermine the capacity of men and boys to have meaningful and mature human relationships," he said. 85 percent were published by individuals rather than health organisations, 67 percent included direct purchase links and 72 percent had financial interests, such as selling tests, supplements or clinic consultations. None of the posts included in the study cited scientific evidence to support their claims.
"The problem isn’t that men care about their health, it’s that social media is medicalising normal experiences and selling young men a dangerous, often false diagnosis." "Young, healthy men are being told that common experiences like tiredness, stress or changes in libido are signs that something is medically wrong and that testosterone is the solution." "Influencer marketing is reframing everyday experiences like fatigue, stress, lower libido or ageing as signs of testosterone ‘deficiency’ that requires medical intervention," said Dr Brooke Nickel, senior author on the study and senior research fellow at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health
Posts frequently used crisis language around sexual performance, energy and confidence, encouraged men to "be their own advocate" and seek testing, and positioned private clinics and direct-to-consumer products as faster and more effective than conventional healthcare. "What we’re seeing isn’t health education, it’s marketing and fearmongering dressed up as medical advice," said Dr Nickel. Published in Social Science & Medicine, the study analysed 46 high-reach Instagram and TikTok posts promoting testosterone tests and treatments. During the direction session the director worked with participants on their performance, providing detailed instructions on style and motivation. Saliva samples are widely used as a less-invasive alternative to blood sampling in behavioral research, and salivary assays for testosterone and cortisol are well-validated (6). For example, the monologue incorporates several interruptions that could be differentially dealt with according to gender norms.
At their baseline laboratory session, participants responded to 10 items about their typical acting style (emotional vs. cognitive) and indicated their number of years of experience with acting. Recruitment materials specified that participants must be at least 18 y old and be experienced actors. Cortisol is a confound of particular relevance given its potential links to both testosterone and status (32).
This may map more closely onto daily interactions; even though firing someone is not a daily occurrence for most people, social interactions that involve leveraging power can be. Our experiment supports this theory and falls in with empirical evidence, with results that support an association with competition rather than masculinity. Testosterone is typically understood to underlie masculinity and maleness despite theory suggesting it is related to other phenomena such as competition (6).

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