Have We Reached Peak Testosterone?

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts When some clever cultural historian writes the story of the Donald Trump years, this summer’s Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary will be a marker of … something: The 90-foot open-air “Claw,” near-naked gladiators, bloody faces, fireworks, and flyovers, with the most enduring remark coming from the heavyweight Josh Hokit, who told the podcaster Joe Rogan in his post-fight interview: “Michelle Obama is a man.

Am I right, America?” The spectacle, the staff writer Helen Lewis says on Radio Atlantic , represented “a level of masculinity that was … so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.” The second Trump administration rode in on a wave of masculinity-obsessed media.

But the White House is unpopular, the podcast bros have withdrawn, and the midterms are only weeks away.

Is it possible that the cultural-political force of extreme masculinity is losing its power? Lewis and her fellow staff writer Sophie Gilbert join Hanna Rosin in a live Radio Atlantic taped at this year’s The Atlantic Festival to discuss the intriguing hypothesis that the culture has reached “peak testosterone” and may soon perhaps enter a more balanced phase.

We discuss evidence on both sides.

Yes, the Tate brothers are facing extradition and prosecution abroad, but no, the U.S. does not feel all that much closer to electing a female president.

Yes, James Talarico, mocked as “Low-T Talarico” by Texas Republicans, is ahead in the U.S.

Senate race.

But the requirement that all candidates prove their high-T quotient by filming themselves working out at the gym has been so widely accepted that Democrats are doing it too.

The live debate went on, until it reached an absurd conclusion of encouraging women in the audience to buy more meat.

The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: I had a thought.

Maybe it was when I was watching race car after race car zoom loudly down Pennsylvania Avenue this summer—and a very buff man standing next to me, dressed in very tight red-white-and-blue overall-shorts getup, cheering.I had the thought that maybe we have reached peak testosterone.

That is, this long era we’ve been living in, fueled by Donald Trump but also other cultural forces, such as the manosphere, has reached its organic comical extreme.

And thus, the era might be on its way out.