Choo-Choo! Get on the Castration Train

The reaper will give you a few extra years in exchange for your testicles.

I don’t mean to bum you out, but it looks like my days are numbered.

Oh, it’s not the big C or anything; it’s because of those damn death nuggets I walk around with.

Maybe you’re thinking “death nuggets” is a euphemism for the Arby’s Jalapeno Poppers I picked up this morning and put in my pocket so I’d have something to snack on throughout the day but no, “death nuggets” is the term used by researcher and author Cat Bohannon to describe men’s testicles. She believes that we men go through life “smuggling two little death nuggets” and that orchiectomy (surgical removal of the testicles) could lend a few more years to our lives.

Lest we dismiss her entirely as some man-hating, testicle-despising harridan, she does have some receipts to back up her assertion. She cites a 2012 study published in Current Biology that found that the average lifespan of 81 eunuchs born between 1556 and 1861 was 14.4 to 19.1 years longer than the average lifespan of testicled men.

Another study, this one observed in castrated, institutionalized men in the mid-20^th century, found that the castrated men lived longer than their “regularly-balled peers.”

So, what are you waiting for? Precious seconds of your waning life span are ticking off! Quick, anesthetize your balls with a tube of Bengay and then snip them off with your wife’s seamstress shears! Alternately, you could raw dog it in one final act of manly bravado and sit pantsless on your document shredder. Just have plenty of styptic pencils and Bactroban on hand.

Of course, you could, you know, wuss it out and have a surgeon do it with anesthesia and bandages and all that.

Still, I guess maybe we should look a bit more carefully at her receipts before we act so rashly.

It appears fairly conclusive that eunuchs live(d) longer than intact males, but the first thing that comes to my mind is a quote by French philosopher Blasé Pascal (I’m paraphrasing here):

“All man’s troubles arise from his inability to sit in his room quietly.”

Catch my drift? The ballless are less likely to stray from the relative safety of their homes. They’re less likely to scale the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro so they can take a selfie while perched atop Jesus’ nose, only to be knocked off their perch by a flock of kestrels and fall to an ignominious death. They’re less likely to attach a rocket to a grocery store cart and climb in to see if they could break the world land speed record for rocket-propelled grocery store carts. They’re less likely to do whatever grim fate awaits them after saying the words, “Hey Bro, watch this.”

So, sure, it only makes sense that removing the glandular driver of those impulses would help men live longer, but is the reason for those findings as simple as that? The testicle-maligner Bohannon thinks there’s more to it than risk taking.

She asserts that the relationship between the lack of testicles and a longer lifespan “seems to have something deeply to do with the immune system and cellular repair,” adding that males “get more cancer” and “get more infections” and their prognoses in many cases “tend to be a bit worse.”

Again, what appears to be an anemic immune system might be at least partly explained by the general reticence of high-testosterone men to receive medical attention, perhaps best represented by the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

“Tis but a scratch.”

Another theory attempting to explain why eunuchs might live longer is their lack of sexual activity, as the endless pursuit of nookie undertaken by many intact men leads to a whole lot of potentially life-shortening stress, what with all the hours trying to get your hair just right and worrying whether all those articles that promised you that size doesn’t matter were written by guys with small penises.

But let’s look further to see if there’s any legitimate medical or biochemical advantages to being castrated, at least regarding lifespan. The trouble is, there really aren’t any comprehensive double-blind, peer-reviewed studies that we can peruse. For one thing, men live too long (despite having balls) for any study to be realistically seen to its conclusion. Furthermore, how would you find willing test subjects? Even struggling college students would want more than beer money to give up their testicles.

We’ve no recourse but to go to the animal kingdom for answers and, unfortunately, we find a chilling study involving sheep.

Epigeneticist Victoria Sugrue of the University of Otago in New Zealand, along with her colleagues, confirmed what sheep farmers have allegedly known for a long time, that castrated sheep live on average much longer than their intact counterparts.

However, rather than take the discrepancy at face value and call it a day, Sugrue compared DNA degradation between the two sets of animals. To do this, they created an “epigenetic clock” for each animal, based on the presence of chemical tags (methyl groups).

Once they calibrated their “clocks” by analyzing a number of sheep, they were able to compare how castrated and intact sheep age. It turns out the epigenetic clocks of castrated sheep ticked way slower than those of intact sheep.

The assumption is of course that there’s a clear link between castration, male hormones (mainly testosterone), and DNA aging.

Clearly, men aren’t sheep, so it’s not entirely certain that these findings translate to us human types. However, the correlation can’t be dismissed as mammals are hormonally (and genetically) pretty similar.

But here’s where I shear those observations of sheep and throw a couple of testicle knuckleballs at Bohannon’s “death nuggets” theory.

Might They Instead be “Life Nuggets”?

I can’t refute the theory that testosterone – or at least higher amounts of it – are linked to premature DNA aging. We just don’t know enough about the topic.

What we can do, however, is we can look at the relationship between testosterone and heart disease, the latter of course being the numero uno cause of death in men (rocket powered grocery carts notwithstanding).

Testosterone, or testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) has been shown to have the following healthful effects on the male cardiovascular system:

• TRT has been shown to slow down the rate of atherosclerosis.

• TRT has been shown to favorably affect blood pressure.

• TRT has been shown to increase cardiac output and reduce vascular resistance (making it easier for blood to flow through vessels).

• TRT has been shown to play a protective role against stroke or myocardial infarction (heart attack).

TRT has been shown to have other beneficial effects on the health of men, any one of which could also prolong life:

• TRT has been shown to reduce the mortality rate of men with Type 2 diabetes.

• TRT has been shown to reduce fasting glucose levels and fat mass in obese patients.

Further, some studies have shown higher levels of testosterone to reduce all-cause mortality (death from any cause).

While we can certainly find studies that contradict some of these findings, they seem to be outliers while most of the beneficial effects were revealed in meta-studies (studies that compiled the findings of bunches of studies).

So, what are we to make of this apparent paradox? Castration has the possibility of making men age less quickly on the molecular scale, but wouldn’t the resultant low or zero levels of testosterone increase the progression of heart disease, thereby reducing male lifespan?

We don’t know. Yet.

The discussion, of course, is academic at best because I’m pretty sure that castration won’t become mainstream, something potentially offered as a service at spas or longevity clinics (meditation at 6 AM, coffee enema at 7, castration at 8, followed by water aerobics at 9).

Balls Defeated the Nazis (Along with a Little Help from Howitzers, Submarines, and B-17s, of Course)

Let me explain to Ms. Bohannon why her suggestion is untenable, explain to her what she doesn’t understand about men’s testes and testosterone.

I think society would be a sadder place without testosterone. Granted, a good many evils of aggression and lust might be averted and no one on the Vienna Boys’ Choir would ever have to retire, but testosterone combined with virtue, as is begot by being solidly embedded in social networks, having strong parental support, a high level of education, a stable marriage and a steady job, and with numerous friends and social contacts, is a good thing.

Let me quote the late James McBride Dabs, noted testosterone researcher:

“Testosterone promotes spontaneity and impulsiveness, with a focus that disregards danger. Altruistic values and testosterone together produce an impressive mix of direction and drive. Testosterone can help a person who wants to do the right thing do it, especially when the right thing is difficult or dangerous.”

In theory at least, testosterone built the pyramids (not that we couldn’t have done without them, but still…), conquered the American West, explored the oceans, travelled to the moon, and defeated the Nazis. The list of achievements is likely long and storied (and I’m not discounting the high-testosterone women who helped make all those things happen).

So, I’m not sure as much big stuff, as much grand stuff, would have gotten done if the majority of men had given up their testicles for a few more years of life. Granted, things would be a lot quieter if these castrati, instead of starting conflicts, spent their time knitting cozies and selling them on Etsy, but would it be worth it?

Personally, Ms. Bohannon, I wouldn’t want to live without my balls and the testosterone they secrete. I think I would lose much of my passion and joie de vivre. Please note that in many countries in Europe, they won’t even neuter (or spay) their dogs and cats unless there’s some medical reason for it. They believe it to be an unnecessary cruelty, a “mutilation.” Further, they question why it should be routine to extinguish part of an animal’s breath, its soul, it’s anima.

Ask yourself, would you choose a neutered wolf, bear, or moose to be your spirit animal? Nah, I didn’t think so.

And then there’s the sex thing. I’ve spent a lot of my life looking at women, thinking about women, and wooing women. Even to this day, happily married and all that, I can’t look at every 5^th woman or so that walks by without having the words of that Billy Eilish song spring to mind: “I could eat that girl for lunch, I could buy her so much stuff, it’s a craving not a crush…”

It’s been both an intense pleasure and, at times, a distinct curse.

I capture the conundrum this way:

Were it not for women, I could have been a great man, but were it not for women, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a great a man.

Catch my meaning? Women were a non-stop distraction and stopped me from doing some of the things I wanted to do or try, e.g., write the Great American Novel, play baseball at an elite level, learn a musical instrument, or even break the world land speed record for rocket-powered grocery carts, but if women weren’t part of the potential reward for accomplishing those things, I probably would have lacked the impetus to even think about doing them.

Regardless, I’ll stay the testicular course, thank you. Likewise, I can’t imagine anyone else cutting off their balls on Ms. Bohannon’s say-so. Still, I wanted to put the minds of readers of this article at ease, to not feel anxiety about their “death nuggets” and associate them with the pendulum on a grandfather clock, each swing to-and-fro bringing them closer to their premature expiration date when they might actually be extending our lives (assuming they’re operating on all 8 cylinders).

So, I for one will do the opposite of Ms. Bohannon’s recommendation. I will not only refuse to consider my balls as patient assassins but instead will double down on nurturing them: keep them safe, maybe cover them at night with woolen cozies that I’m absolutely sure someone is selling on Etsy right now and rubbing them with neatsfoot oil so they stay as smooth and supple as a Louis Vuitton’s Crossbody pochette for men.

###