You should know up front that his book might cause you to reevaluate your life. It might influence you to quit your job and switch careers. You might start to look at your relationships in a different way. Hell, it might even cause you to realize that you're not in a good marriage. That's not just hyperbole, either. T. C. Luoma's popular weekly column-the best of which are featured here in The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff-has elicited exactly such potentially life-changing thoughts from the people who regularly read his work. He doesn't preach or rap you on the knuckles. Instead, he shows you glimpses of what life-your life-could and maybe should look like. If you've got even a speck of self-awareness, you end up asking yourself, "Hey, is he talking about me" His observations, liberally backed up with science and spiced up with quirky references to popular culture, serve as a guide to the weird, conflicted, often horribly flawed creature called man.
The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff
By TC LuomaBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 TC Luoma
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-4372-7Contents
Preface....................................................xiiiWhy You Suck...............................................1A Mobius Strip Life........................................7Mom Was a Stripper.........................................14Generation Dope............................................20My Speech to the Graduates, 2007...........................27The Pornification of America...............................35Osama and the B-52's.......................................43An Inconvenient Truth About Your Balls.....................49Slay the Dragon............................................54She Wants Me!..............................................62The Wedding Crasher........................................68A Sinful Taste for Tiny Waists.............................74Yahtzee!...................................................81The 7 Cowboy Values........................................87Shape of Thighs to Come....................................97The New Rat Pack...........................................103Top Ten Testosterone Facts.................................110A Harpoon Through the Heart................................120Drunken Girls..............................................126Get Bent, Beckham..........................................132Teabagging.................................................138My Speech to the Graduates, 2009...........................144Why-Oh-Why Aren't You Hot?.................................153Protecting Your Balls......................................159The Gathering..............................................167How to Pick Up Girls.......................................175All Women are Lesbians.....................................182The Bikini Contest.........................................18820 Layers of Butt Makeup...................................194The Horribleness of High Testosterone......................203Vision Quest...............................................212The Death of Female Sex Drive..............................217Cool Viking Hats With Big Shiny Horns......................224Tragic Maturity............................................232Hygiene for Real Men.......................................239The Influence of Playboy...................................246Rogue Males................................................253Married at the Spearmint Rhino.............................260Like Hell You Could........................................266Rude Bastards..............................................272My Speech to the Graduates,2010............................279What Women Find Attractive.................................288Fruit of the Loins.........................................295The Hadron Collider in My Pants............................302The Little Death...........................................310Happy Dress Like a Whore Day!..............................315Men, Love, and Sex.........................................322Back to the Butt...........................................329Four, Up! Like Elephant!...................................337Coma Boy and the Centegenarian.............................344About the Author...........................................351
Chapter One
Why You Suck
There it was again, hours of practice accrued equates to success. Nothing magical. The more psychologists in Gladwell's book looked at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
It seems the universe has done some of you an injustice. Like a malicious, pimply-faced McDonald's employee, the universe has surreptitiously hawked a loogie into your Diet Coke and you never even knew it.
As unlikely as it may first sound, whether you were conceived during your parents' coupling on the first warm day of spring or summer - perhaps in a field of daisies after they shared a cheeky Pinot Noir - or whether your conception instead occurred in a warm ski lodge during winter - your parents underneath a couple of bear skins and smelly all- day skiing socks still covering their cold, cold feet - could have played a huge part in whatever success or lack of success you're experiencing now.
That's right, the month your shiny, blood-slick bawling baby self emerged into the world either gave you a huge advantage in life, or affixed a huge metaphorical two-ton career anchor to your ass.
But don't worry, I'm not going to go all astrology on you. Your possible problems are a lot more terrestrial, at least as explained in the new book, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell.
The story, or at least my abbreviated version of it, starts in southern Alberta, Canada, in the mid 1980's. Psychologist Roger Barnsley was attending a junior hockey game with his wife when they noticed something a little spooky about the program -for some reason, there were a disproportionately large number of January, February, and March birth dates.
Barnsley went home that night and looked up the birth dates of as many junior and professional Canadian hockey players as he could find and he saw the same pattern. More players were born in January than any other month. The second most frequent birth month? February. The third? March.
In fact, there were almost five and a half times as many players born in January as were in November.
When Barnsley looked at any elite group of hockey players, 40 percent of the absolute best were born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December.
Here's a hint: in Canada, the eligibility cut-off date for any junior division of hockey is January 1st. That means that if you turned 10 on January 2nd, you'll be playing with some boys that don't turn 10 until the end of that year, which constitutes an enormous difference in physical maturity. They are Nelson Muntz compared to Milhouse.
Nine or ten is also the age at which coaches start picking hockey all-star teams. Invariably, the comparatively older, bigger players are picked. Those players get better coaching, they get to play against better players, and perhaps most importantly, they get to play in 50 or 75 games instead of 20.
The same sequence invariably occurs as they move from age division to age division, league to league.
What starts out as a small but distinct advantage snowballs year after year, until those that were born earlier in the year are almost invariably much, much better.
Football and basketball don't select, stream, and differentiate to the same degree as hockey, but baseball does.
The cutoff for nonschool baseball leagues is July 31st and more players are born in August than any other month. In 2005, there were 505 major leaguers born in August, compared with 313 in July.
You can find the same temporal injustice occurring in European soccer. In England, the cutoff date is September 1st, and at one point in the 1990's, 288 professional players were born between September and November and only 136 were born between June and August.
Likewise, in international soccer, the cutoff date used to be August 1st and in one recent Junior World Championship, 135 players were born in the three months after August 1st and only 22 were born in May, June, and July.
Unfortunately, these temporal death zones aren't the exclusive purview of sport; a big one also dogs our educational system.
Again, kids who are born in the early part of the year are lumped in with those that were born in the summer, fall, or winter of that year. The older kids are put in an advanced stream where they learn better skills and the next year, because they're in a more advanced group, they do even better. What starts out as a small advantage persists, year after year.
Teachers invariably confuse comparative maturity with ability, and kids are locked into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on.
As evidence, Gladwell points to a study of 4-year colleges in the United States where students in the youngest group are under-represented by 11.6 percent!
This lopsided success rate demonstrated by the older students is called "accumulative advantage" by sociologists, and it's a kind of cold, sterile term for those millions of potential superstars that were pushed into athletic or academic oblivion just because of a silly, arbitrary bureaucratic whim based on the calendar.
The main reason all this "accumulative advantage" ends up damaging the prospects of millions of kids around the world has partly to do with the 10,000-hour rule.
In the 1990's, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson conducted an experiment with the Berlin Academy of Music. He divided the school's violinists into three groups: the elite, the good, and those that were unlikely to ever play professionally.
All of the kids had started playing when they were 5 years old, but what divided them, aside from ability, was simply how many hours each had spent practicing. The really good ones had totaled 10,000 hours of practice, while the good ones had only managed to squeak away on the catgut for 8,000 hours or so.
The underachievers? Just 4,000 hours of practice.
The most surprising thing was that they really couldn't find any "naturals." Nor could they find any grinders, people who just worked harder than everybody else but just didn't have the talent to become elite.
The thing that distinguished one from another was simply hard work, nothing else.
But the weird thing is that 10,000 hours - roughly the amount of practice a truly committed devotee could accrue over 10 years - keeps popping up in different fields. Whether you're a writer, a concert pianist, a basketball player, computer programmer, or chess master, true greatness seems to pivot on that magic number.
Gladwell notes only one exception - chess player Bobby Fisher, who took only nine years to achieve Chess Master status.
The Beatles are an old-fogey rock band anachronism to most modern music lovers, but few would probably deny their influence on the world's music. Interestingly, the Beatles were afforded certain circumstances that allowed them to become great.
Early in their career, before anybody had heard of them, they got the opportunity to fly from their England homes to Hamburg, Germany, where a strip club owner had gotten the idea to have bands play non-stop music while sexy Sadie did a little helter skelter on stage.
And play non-stop the Beatles did, for seven days a week, eight hours a night. They made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. By the time they had their initial taste of success, they'd performed live approximately 1200 times, which is extraordinary in that most bands never play live 1200 times over their entire careers.
Writer Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles' biography Shout, explained it this way:
"They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them."
There it was again, hours of practice accrued equates to success. Nothing magical. The more psychologists in Gladwell's book looked at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Those hockey, baseball, and soccer players who weren't good enough to make it? They might have been too young to compete with older, more physically mature players, so they weren't picked to all-star teams, didn't get the extra coaching, never got close to hitting 10,000 hours of practice by the time the professional teams came around looking for players.
One can't help but wonder how many Gretzkys, A-Rods, or Ronaldos got left behind because of the calendar. One wonders how many Einsteins, Steve Jobses, or Bill Gateses got lumped in with the "lessmature" students because they had the bad luck to be Sagittarius instead of Aquarius.
Gladwell encapsulates the problem thusly:
"Because we so profoundly, personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those that succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail."
The answer might be that often, your perceived failures might not be so much genetic as they are sociological, might not be so physiological as they are psychological, and armed with that knowledge, maybe you're not necessarily destined to be the loser society thought you were.
- 2008
A Mobius Strip Life
For the first time in a long time, he felt despair. His goal, the one thing that kept him going, was moving further from his reach. It's like he's in a prison cell and he's managed to coldcock the screw with a rolled up copy of Popular Mechanics, but he can't quite reach the keys attached to the guard's belt. Just when he's about to snare them with a rolled up poster of Rita Hayworth, the guard twitches and kicks the keys further away.
There were five of them, all probably under 21, all wearing their best Las-Vegas-out-on-the-town-slut-wear.
They walked towards him in a row, almost like they were the opening sequence for some new television action series.
Sure, new from the WB network this fall, Fox Force 5.
And they were all pretty. Real-life Bratz dolls. And each was wearing stiletto-heeled shoes so colorful they must have been candy-coated by the M&M people. Their dresses or skirts were CD cellophane-wrapper tight and they collectively showed yards of tanned, coltish leg.
The people-watching was one of Jason's favorite things about Vegas. He'd sat down next to the motorized walkway outside the Bellagio hotel to sip his Slurpie, contemplate his life, and of course watch the people, or in this case, the babes.
He'd just spent seven hours at the poker table and he was up a few hundred dollars. Still, he didn't know if he'd made the right move; not the right move at the poker table, mind you, but the right move in life.
Back home in San Diego, Jason owned a little neighborhood café that served coffee drinks, sandwiches, and pastries. He was a success, but my God how he had to work! He woke up at 3:45 in the morning and he usually didn't get home until 9 or 10 at night.
Weekends were a little better, 12-hour days instead of 18-hour days, but he still felt like the walking dead. Luckily, he had the alarm clocks, 6 of them. The first one, right next to him, would hopefully start to rouse him from what was closer to a coma than sleep. He'd take a bear-paw swipe at it, either turning it off or knocking it across the room, but it was hardly enough to rouse him.
Then the others would start to buzz, trill, drone, or clang. Sometimes they'd go off for 15 minutes before he woke completely, or what passes for completely in someone so perpetually sleep deprived.
For Jason, life was all about schedule, highly orchestrated 15-minute chunks of time. Botch up one and it has a cascade effect on the remaining 15-minute blocks of time until they start piling up on each other like delicate ceramic dolls on a runaway conveyor belt.
If he did everything right, if nothing screwed up his delicate schedule, if no pudknocker stopped to ask him about his goddam day, he had two 15-minute blocks of time to study Texas Hold `Em at the end of his obscenely long day.
He didn't drink during the day because that meant he'd eventually have to take time out to pee. Eating consisted of jamming bits of pastry or lunchmeat down his throat as he worked.
He didn't do laundry; he just bought boxes of shirts from Costco. He'd throw the one he was wearing away at the end of the day and he'd unbag a new one in the morning. He didn't make his bed because he didn't have one. Having a bed requires washing sheets and pillowcases, so he slept on a mat on the floor. Besides, he worried that sleeping on a bed would make him "soft."
It was all because of what he called his 80-month plan. He'd continue working at the same pace for the next 80 months until he had his bankroll. At that point he'd sell the café and move to Las Vegas to become a professional poker player.
You're probably thinking that there's no way he can do it; there's no way he can keep it up, but he'd already kept that pace for five years.
You can keep your DiMaggio's and Ripken's; those iron men had nothing on Jason.
But then the economy got funky. Household income dropped for the sixth year in a row, gas prices soared, companies laid off people everywhere, and the mortgage crisis kicked us in the balls.
Traffic to the café slowed down. People started staying home and drinking Maxwell House Instant Coffee instead of schlepping down to the coffee shop for a three or four dollar coffee drink.
It was bad enough that the cost of his raw supplies like flour and milk had almost doubled in the last year or two, but when the economy put a chokehold on his customer life line, Jason started to worry; he could see his 80-month plan turning into the 100 Year War.
For the first time in a long time, he felt despair. His goal, the one thing that kept him going, was moving further from his reach. It's like he's in a prison cell and he's managed to coldcock the screw with a rolled up copy of Popular Mechanics, but he can't quite reach the keys attached to the guard's belt. Just when he's about to snare them with a rolled up poster of Rita Hayworth, the guard twitches and kicks the keys further away.
So he experiences a few dark nights of the soul, arranged in 15-minute blocks, of course. He decides to make the best of the situation. Rather than see his 80-month plan turn into a repeating one-sided loop, a Mobius strip, he makes a bold decision.
Monday through Friday, he'll work at the café. Friday night after work, he'll hop the red eye to Vegas, get a cheap room, and play as many hours of poker as he can until he flies back on Sunday night. He'll let his employees run the store while he's away.
It's not exactly what he wanted to do, but it's not bad. He gets to keep the sure income stream in the café and he gets to see if he's cut out to play poker.
He's into the third week of his grand experiment but he's not sure he's on the right track. He's a little short of his poker goals, money-wise, and he's worried.
And that brings him to the front of the Bellagio, sipping a Slurpie and watching the living Bratz dolls. The girls get to within ten feet of him when one of them, unnoticed by the others, falls a step or two behind them. She tiptoes up behind a dark-haired one wearing a fuchsia tank dress and like a hockey goon, she pulls her friend's dress up over her head in one deft motion.
The others back off, hands over their mouths to stifle their shrieks of laughter while the victim of the prank starts screaming like Oprah had just given her a Toyota. She's clearly embarrassed but her embarrassment goes beyond the pale because, lordy, lordy, she's not wearing any underwear! Instead of thongs, Jason sees a dark bacon strip of pubic hair against the one part of her body that isn't tan.
To make things more embarrassing, the perpetrator of the prank has gathered up the material of the poor booty-exposed girl's frock over her head and she's gripped it tightly with her clenched fist like she's trying to prevent a weasel from getting out of a gunnysack.
And she won't let go.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuffby TC Luoma Copyright © 2012 by TC Luoma. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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