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 Luoma

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2012 TC Luoma
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4372-7

Contents

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,...