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 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.
Table of Contents
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
Author Biography
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).
