Testosterone Free - Verry Interesting!

I'm the kind of guy who, when they told me my prostate cancer treatment might lead to impotence, said I'd rather be dead than not make love any more. That was before the Testosterone suppressents took hold.

Now, four months later, I find myself in the same situation reversed. I am waiting for the Testosterone to come back with serious trepidation toward its nearly unwanted return. I have been changed by the experience of not having it drive my sexual desires. I have come away understanding better that difference which separates us; men and women.

I was a very male white guy; 53 years old, happily married. I valued friendship as highly as work or family. My women friends were very important to me and were people toward whom I felt love in its dearest form. And at times and for some I felt all of loves physical energy.

My friends differentiated me from others by the intensity of my women frendships.

Some non-friend women had even felt that intensity from some fearful underpinning of their own and had imagined sexual harrassment, though I have tried to be respectfully non-harassing. (I do put my hand on shoulders and touch arms which in the 80's and 90's has been named off limits.)

As part of my x-radiation treatments my doctors recommended two Testosterone suppressents, Lupron and Casodex. Within one month the hot flashes started, My nude photography books held no more interest for me and in general love making which included intercourse and masterbation, two former staples in my weekly diet, no longer were of interest to me. I now had lunches and looked at people with no sexual interest.

The feeling was liberating! In a world where males are imagined constant sex hungry predators I no longer cared! I was pure. This may be the purity celibates and priests seek. Noone could impune my motives for they were now only for friendship.

People, men and women, were interesting or not based solely on mutual connections, conversations, sharing of interests, business. For me in particular this was freeing.

Now I could be self rightous about lust. I could shake my finger at others and say naughty naughty. I could vote to close all sexually explicit magazines and theaters. I didn't care or feel any empathy. I still don't know whether this is how women feel but it is some of that. I only cared about making love as preventative; to prevent my wife from straying.
I still loved holding hands with my wife and touching, hugging, but that demon drive was gone. I found very little difference in my aggression at work or driving. My coworkers said I had not changed in that way at all.

Of course the side effects are not all great, loss of muscle mass, hot flashes, slight increases in anxiety in the work place, eventual permanent loss of sexual function.

I almost feel like everyone should be inverted. To have testosterone and be testosterone free in a 4 month period of your lives. We would all understand each other a lot better. In lieu of such extreme I have written this short not possibly to extend womens and mens understandings of the effects of chemical differences between us. Differences which make it more difficult than one sex would imagine to behave in a way defined by the other sex.


geoff fernald
September 7, 1997
First Lupron shot was May 7, 1997.