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 acceptedTestosterone Dreams examines the implications and dangers of their use in professional sports, in the workplace, in our sex lives, and beyond.

Testosterone Dreams tells the story of testosterone's growing and sometimes concealed influence in our culture over the past 70 years. It explores such controversial topics as the invention and marketing of the male menopause, the disturbing history of hormonal and other medical treatments aimed at boosting or suppressing women's sexuality, and hormone doping in sporting events such as the Tour de France and the Olympics, and in Major League Baseball. It brings to light the hidden use of hormone doping by policemen, soldiers, and other workers in a variety of jobs. It also discusses the burgeoning steroid use in the gay community and its relation to AIDS, and takes a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry's promotional campaigns to create new markets for testosterone products.

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.

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 acceptedTestosterone Dreams examines the implications and dangers of their use in professional sports, in the workplace, in our sex lives, and beyond.

Testosterone Dreams tells the story of testosterone's growing and sometimes concealed influence in our culture over the past 70 years. It explores such controversial topics as the invention and marketing of the male menopause, the disturbing history of hormonal and other medical treatments aimed at boosting or suppressing women's sexuality, and hormone doping in sporting events such as the Tour de France and the Olympics, and in Major League Baseball. It brings to light the hidden use of hormone doping by policemen, soldiers, and other workers in a variety of jobs. It also discusses the burgeoning steroid use in the gay community and its relation to AIDS, and takes a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry's promotional campaigns to create new markets for testosterone products.

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.

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