Testosterone Dreams Rejuvenation Aphrodisia Doping

Testosterone has inspired dreams—of restored youth, recharged sexual appetites, faster running, quicker thinking, bigger muscles—since it was first synthesized in 1935. This provocative book investigates the complex, bizarre, and sometimes outrageous history of synthetic testosterone and other male hormone therapies. Exploring many little-known social arenas—both inside and outside the medical world—in which these substances are becoming increasingly available and accepted, Testosterone Dreams examines the implications and dangers of their use in professional sports, in the workplace, in our sex lives, and beyond.

Testosterone Dreams tells the story of testosterone's growing and sometimes concealed influence in our culture over the past 70 years. It explores such controversial topics as the invention and marketing of the male menopause, the disturbing history of hormonal and other medical treatments aimed at boosting or suppressing women's sexuality, and hormone doping in sporting events such as the Tour de France and the Olympics, and in Major League Baseball. It brings to light the hidden use of hormone doping by policemen, soldiers, and other workers in a variety of jobs. It also discusses the burgeoning steroid use in the gay community and its relation to AIDS, and takes a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry's promotional campaigns to create new markets for testosterone products.

Testosterone Dreams is the first book to bring together the whole story of testosterone and to consider its social and ethical implications: Where does therapy end and performance enhancement begin? How are changing medical technologies affecting how we think about our identities as men and women and the elusive goal of "well-being"? This book will be essential reading as we move inexorably toward the wide-open, libertarian pharmacology that is now making these drug regimes available to a wider and wider clientele.

"Testosterone Dreams is a detailed and frightening look at the shifting balance between patients' fantasies and the entrepreneurial bioscience that fuels these desires. Hoberman reveals the darker side of medicine that enhances athletic performances, and how the publicity given those performances generates wider demands for enhancement medicine. This book is a crucial contribution to the ethical deliberation of who we humans want to be, as bodies and as selves."—Arthur W. Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller

John Hoberman is the author of Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (1997), Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (1992), The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order (1986), and Sport and Political Ideology (1984).

Introduction. Testosterone Dreams:

Pharmacology and Our Human Future

1. Hormone Therapy and the New Medical Paradigm

Enhancements: Where Are the Limits?

Testosterone as Therapy and Myth

"Psychic Steroids": Prozac as a Performance-Enhancing Drug

Back to the Future: The Sex Hormone Market from Organotherapy to "Andro"

2. The Aphrodisiac That Failed: Why Testosterone Did Not Become a Mass Sex Therapy

What They Did to Women: The Origins of Sex Therapy

Sex before Kinsey: What Doctors and Patients Did Not Know

Hormones and the State: Sex and Marital Stability

Patriarchal Sex Therapy: Curing "Frigidity" with Hormones

Reorienting Male Desire: Curing Homosexuals with Sex Hormones

Aphrodisia for the Masses?

The Secret Life of Testosterone Therapy

3. The Mainstreaming of Testosterone

Celebrating Testosterone

Hormone Therapy and the Discovery of Sexual Deficiency

Preserving the Feminine Essence: Estrogen and Menopause

Does the Male Menopause Exist?

4. "Outlaw" Biomedical Innovations:

Hormone Therapy and Beyond

Hormone Therapy and Cosmetic Procedures: The New Medical Ethos

Offshore Entrepreneurial Medicine: From Embryos to Cloning

Medical Populism and Outlaw Medicine: Fertility Techniques and Medical Marijuana

Hormone Therapists and Hormone Evangelists

5. Hormone Therapy for Athletes:

Doping as Social Transgression

Doping before Steroids: Clean Amateurs and Doped Professionals

The Entrepreneurial Physician

Medical Ethics

The Doctor-Athlete Relationship

The Patient as Athlete, the Athlete as Patient

6. "Let Them Take Drugs": Public Responses to Doping

7. A War against Drugs?

The Politics of Hormone Doping in Sport

International Doping Control before Reform

Sportive Nationalism and Doping

International Doping Control after Reform

A War on Drugs?

Athletes and the Doping of Everyday Life

Athletic Doping and the Human Future

Epilogue. Testosterone as a Way of Life

Notes

Index