Q Toon: A Shot of Preposterone

 

Remember when the Baby Boomers hit middle age, and suddenly newsmagazines were running cover stories about menopause (it's not just for women any more!) and 50 being the new 39?

Well, now it's Gen X's turn.

Having discovered erectile dysfunction, Fox Noise host Tucker Carlson has decided to devote a week of his program to his fears that American men are losing their testosterone. The montage of manly images in the ad promoting his series included this bizarre image:

It turns out that this wasn't some idiot plugging into a hilltop Tesla recharging station. Instead, it has something to do with some self-appointed expert whose Rx for iron-poor testosterone is to bathe one's testicles in red light. I assume he was inspired by the folks who claim to have found health benefits from exposing their anuses to ultra-violet light to explore arousing his sperm by exposing his testes to the other end of the visible spectrum.

Look, I'm sure the dude has published dozens of peer-reviewed studies. 

I mean, click-bait dick pics.

The peers interviewed by Newsweek, on the other hand, were not amused.

Urologist Petar Bajic, MD, at the Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, in Ohio, ... told Newsweek that men considering red light therapy to enhance their testosterone levels would be wasting their money.

Dr. Bajic said: "The bottom line about red light therapy for low testosterone is that there is no evidence to support its use and no psychological basis for how it might even work because light wouldn't penetrate the skin to enter the testicles. ... "

Mr. Crotchy McSunbather, the guy prescribing submerging into ice baths, and whatever the deal is with the shirtless fellow milking cows without a bucket — they all fit into the melting together of New Age Holistic Anti-medicine and anti-vaxxer eagerness to try anything from horse dewormer to injecting bleach, as long as the doctor didn't order it.

Sometimes it feels as though that particular crowd are just testing us all to find out just what weirdness and ridiculousness they can foist on their followers before even those gullible disciples crack up laughing at the utter inanity of it all.

Kind of like fashion designers.

It's stylish, and, what the hell, it promotes fertility!

Anyway, getting back to Tucker's War on Flaccidity, it's hard (no pun intended) to believe that his fearmongering isn't meant to frighten his viewers into believing that transgender persons and gender dysphoria are brand new phenomena, a novel threat never seen before in the history of Manlinesskind.

But just as every generation is the very first to discover sex, every generation eventually, inexorably becomes the first to discover diminished sex drive.