The Atlantic ran a piece this week noting that average testosterone levels in men have declined significantly over the past half century, with researchers unable to agree on the cause. Simultaneously, The New Yorker published a reading guide for what to pick up after Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel about the last cowboys driving cattle from Texas to Montana, one of the definitive elegies for a certain kind of physical, frontier American masculinity. These two stories are not adjacent. They are the same story told by different departments.
The Hormone No One Can Explain
The Atlantic's survey of testosterone research lands in an uncomfortable place: every proposed cause, obesity, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyle, stress, explains some of the decline but none explains all of it. The scientific honest answer is that something systemic is happening to male endocrine function and the field does not yet have a unified theory. What is notable is the cultural moment in which this ambiguity is being reported. Testosterone has become one of the most politically loaded hormones in public discourse, weaponized by everything from supplement marketing to ideological movements to TikTok wellness culture. The scientific uncertainty is being resolved culturally, loudly, and badly.
McMurtry, Frontiers, and the Nostalgia for Stakes
The New Yorker's post-Lonesome Dove reading list is a different register of the same anxiety. The novel's enduring appeal is not really about cattle drives. It is about a world where physical competence, loyalty, and geographic expansion created a legible form of meaning for men whose psychological complexity the culture had no other framework to hold. McMurtry spent the whole novel mourning that world while it was still technically visible on the horizon. The contemporary revival of the Western as a genre, tracked by everyone from cultural critics to fashion observers watching the gorpcore-to-cowboy pipeline, is not nostalgia for history. It is nostalgia for a particular hormonal experience of consequence. W. David Marx's analysis of taste, subculture, and masculine identity formation, examined at Culture Slop, traces how the collapse of coherent male subcultures creates the conditions for the kind of reactionary nostalgia the testosterone discourse is currently feeding. The decline may be chemical. The response to it is entirely cultural.