What I learned so far...a long posting

[30years++ w/ED]

What I learned…

In 1972 I was a fountain of testosterone with a really cute girlfriend one year younger and astonishingly permissive parents on both sides. At 17 years of age I was good for 5 ‘at bats’ a night. By the age of 19 she no longer found me suitable and I jumped into tobacco, pot, & beer after sitting in a chair for about six months - later I would get comments from friends who said they though I would just stop breathing.

By 1978 I was totally distracted by the above vices, work, books, radios, stereos … toys.
I was favored - maybe rescued - by the ministrations of a gal eight years older, then another one ten years older. I surfaced to find association and activity in community theater and really started drinking. At 23 I found I was not the hard guy I had once been when I fell for another 19 year old who lost interest just before I was 25.

Odd coincidences made it possible for me to travel overseas where I discovered that in Japan I was a hard guy once again. WooHoo! Was it cultural?

In 1983 back in The States the inconsistency returned and I turned to old English sports cars and a burgeoning garage, workaholism, and self medicated with pot and tobacco. I had lost interest in alcohol.

In the background of all these years, socially, I had been accumulating a large collection of what I described as ‘pseudo-sisters’. Today it is known as the Friend-Zone. It seems I had been setting the original surveyor’s monuments defining that place since about 1970. To all who have followed, I apologize.

As I think on it, about 20 years ago I concluded that this collection of pseudo-sisters may have to do with the small town and large extended family I grew up with. In my family affection was applied with a bucket or a hose. Literally could not get to the cookies and snacks without running a gauntlet of elders and great-greats. They had come from large agricultural families with, so far as my cousins and siblings can determine, engendered no weird uncles or molesters.
My mom was a talker because her mother had been a talker. Mom was from an urban setting and had contrasting experiences as a child - so she had cautionary tales.

None of the cold-war-era marriages worked as well as the Depression-era marriages. As my grandmother had, my mother spoke to me from my very early years and tried to explain everything. The extended family continued to ladle on affection. It was pretty close to an idyllic childhood. I grew up almost a perfumed prince - not good preparation for a general society impoverished of affection.

In my later high school years I met and befriended two other dudes (best friends to this day) who had moms with affection buckets. I would learn that families like this are rare.

When I was a drinker at 22 (what is known as an ‘incel’ today) I was surprised that my general purpose chums were seriously interested in going out for beers with me and my dad when he came to town to visit.
It took me quite a while to make a connection with the surprising fact that my dad’s high school chums would often come over to visit my grandparents even if my dad was not present. The affection bucket was administered to all comers.

I have come to know that there a many mechanisms behind a young woman’s initial rejection or a later developing loss of interest in any given young man.

He may have no social status, an incompatible personality, an immune system that smells, sub-consciously, too much like the males in her own family.
It may be that her own childhood (as in my mother’s case) did not support a healthy sense of self-esteem - like abandonment issues when her father disappeared during the Depression, like molestation due to ‘visting-firemen’ as she called them (in this was a plumber around her age of 10 or 11 with busy hands).
Or a father who is preoccupied by career - hence a ‘daddy deficit’, alternatively a step-father with busy hands - way-too-much-daddy.

My pseudo-sisters found that I was a good listener. The open, safe, healthy, and honest women and girls I was related to had all been forthcoming. It was a small town with generally too few secrets anyway.

After my parents divorce we found ourselves in the largest metro center in our state. It seems I was a breath of fresh air - and safe - to these pseudo-sisters. It did make a lot of guys wonder if I was gay. I never wondered, though.

Once I had been repeatedly mauled by the scar tissue and emotional baggage of the general population of girls in my peer-group - and started collecting coping strategies, a great deal of introspection revolved around the question of was it me or was it them.

All the comments I had overheard from all the ladies, aunties, moms, early feminists and long and extended conversations and debates with my not-quite-sisters eliminated any mystery about women their bodies and their issues.

Fifty years later this has all settled into an understanding that few humans agree with; Men are more emotional the Women. Women are more cerebral than Men.
Bullshit! I hear you say.
Consider; how many dudes do you know of who have been totally destroyed by their emotional responses to the crap life sprinkles on each and every one of us humans? How many women do you know of similarly destroyed?
Men, boys, are taught to control their expressions of emotion - largely due to the degree to which the power that unrestrained testosterone can cause damage to those around us. Women are permitted, quite safely, to express their emotions with far less damage to society.

The underlaying Hypothesis:

Granting that the use of words as a communication tool is sweepingly inaccurate and doomed to failure - these are the only tools I have, so check your initial response and keep several grains of salt to hand. I apologize for the sweeping generalizations that follow…


I and all men enjoy the benefit of fifty-thousand years or more of an essentially unbroken chain of at least one grandfather-type in every surviving hunter-gatherer group.
For some tens of thousands of years the mechanism of human propagation has exacted a high cost, the vast majority of which is paid by the female of the species. This has been typically paid in the coin of reduced life expectancy of the very young mothers. Any valid statistical distribution curve will acknowledge individuals who depart significantly from the average and so some few birth children more frequently than average. YMMV.

Not so for females. The tendency for coitarche to be imposed upon very young women since pre-historic times means that childbirth and the complications and infections that can result have pre-maturely removed too many women from so many who might have been grandmothers.

Culturally and even mythically, older women have been rare enough in history, ancient, and prehistoric times that the female archetypes are most frequently categorized as gods, priests, prophets, queens, crones and witches - in the main.
Since the dawn of civilization there have existed descriptors for males of countless specializations and professions that have not been often ascribed to women until quite recently. Most females never lived long enough to become grandmothers, or more than simple crafts and trades persons and mothers, if they were lucky. The exceptions are/were exceptionally glaring examples that still inform our contemporary cultures.

In previous centuries the loss of children to mis-adventure and disease was appalling and nothing less than grotesque. Dirty hands and casual infections killed many mothers during childbirth early on and so thoroughly that it is no surprise to find these female archetypes are historically nearly universal.

The tendency to cloister women inside protective and limiting lifestyles is a logical consequence of watching your wife and bearer of your children die in childbirth.

I will bet you can name the John Wayne Movie where we are introduced to the old father of ten kids and his wife who is about the same age as his oldest child. Evidently not his first wife. This is not even questioned in the storyline.

Having, perhaps, lost one or more women to life’s struggle and still grieving for them many years later, when one encounters a very old woman who is not well known to you in the woods, might you not ask the heavens why this particular old crone has survived while your own lost loves have been taken from you? Might one not irrationally and emotionally conclude that this old crone is in cahoots with some source of evil - justifying her murder?

Little boys as toddlers are given a metaphorical map, compass, and examples such as the butcher, baker, candlestick maker… We are told to sally-forth and to expect that along whatever path we wander along, there will be older dudes out there that guidance can be had from. Grandfathers - tens of thousands of years of them. Mentors, we have a word for this. There is no cognate for a female equivalent.

Until the Napoleanic Wars there was no Germ-Theory that admonished mid-wives and Doctors to wash their hands and to boil their instruments. Women often died during the birth of their first child. The ones who survived were tough!

As to why I believe women are more cerebral than men are, in general? Note that evolution has equipped the female of our species with about 10% more protection for her brain.
Why do women gossip and chatter on so much amongst themselves? Its not really gossip - women are developing consensus, largely due to the lack of available guidance.

There is no metaphorical Map Of Terra Feminina. We have less than a couple hundred years of a significant number - a SIGNIFICANT NUMBER - of grandmothers.
Women are working this out , right now, before our eyes. If you are a ‘Boomer’ you have probably seen several stages of ‘Feminism’. Early on, it was a no-win situation for a young man in the dating game. Sometimes you got a load of crap for opening the door for ‘her’. Sometimes you got a load of crap for NOT opening the door for ‘her’.

Expecting any woman who is not sure what she is, who she is, where she is, or where she wants to go to be able to honestly know that, yes indeed - this is the dude I want to spend the rest of my life with - is not very realistic.

The current state of affairs in this, the 21st Century is just plain confusing as hell!
But this is just a phase. The current attack upon masculinity is a consequence of technology and social structures. The current definition what it is to be female has shifted again.
In the 1950s my mother observed that the hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world. She said,”The only reason men are driving the bus is because women don’t want to do it.”

Now it seems women are choosing to ‘Drive The Bus’.

By 1975 it was, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”In 1980 the idea that men are disposable, in industrial accidents, fell out of favor. By 2000 women pretty much decided that if they were to be objectified - it was to be on their own terms.
Right now, for too many, it is a case of ‘Don’t touch. Don’t look. Be very careful of what you say’.
If, as I was taught, men governed the world by the permission of women, it was also true that men were permitted the illusion that being out front was important. Women built society and men got to stand in front with a big baton and a tall hat.

Just now, men are not permitted such illusions, such white lies to one’s self. We are in a collapse of the industrial male.

The next level of economic production will have little to do with manual or skilled labor.

Men will re-define themselves alined with women’s expectations. I expect this to take a thousand years, unless some calamity throws us all back to a pre-industrial world economy.

The hardest thing in life is to not take it personally.

So then, in the mean time, how the hell can you ravish her in the way she wants to be ravished?
Personally, I am and apparently have always been at least a bit ‘Low-T’. I have hypotension - thats low blood pressure.
My greatest challenge is eroded confidence and rejection issues.

Maintaining a good erection is quite like playing golf - it happens in your head.

There are environmental concerns - the world is not now and never has been friendly to testosterone. The environment is dominated by estrogen. Essentially all the plants we eat are loaded with phyto-estrogens!

After 2008 I found myself in a very blue collar industry. Very well paid and far away from urban concentrations. Riding all over that region in trucks of various sizes moving really heavy things. On the road for as many as 14 hours a day. Trying to maximize physical strength and enjoying an employer-paid full-medical program.
One check-up revealed that my testosterone was very low. I got a prescription for that. The bottle warned that grapefruit was to be avoided. I went online and looked it up. That lead my to more online reading.
All the guys I worked with wanted - needed more muscle mass. We would discuss this, along with many other things as we rode in ‘crew-rides’ for several hours at the start and end of most days.
At 55 at the start of this adventure, I was almost always the oldest dude present. We talked about diet, supplementation, resistance training and just plain heavy weight.

This was about forty dudes with ridiculous disposable income sharing their thoughts and experiences in pursuit of a common goal - more muscle and more sex!

Within a year I was stronger than I had ever been - seriously!
If you wonder, it was what is called a ketogenic diet today. In the winter, outside all day I burned 6000 calories a day - by calculation of the labels.

My reading informed what I would no longer eat… No SOY. No GRAPEFRUIT. No HOPS. No FLAXSEED. No LICORICE. There are other things to keep in moderation. Eat more Sunflower Seeds w/o salt and Mandarin Oranges to help you loose the fat. LOOSE THE FAT!!! Do Not Eat Flour!!!

I ate meat and cheese and fat and bacon and more meat. I ate whole pies - 10 inch pies - before lunch. Sugar and fat and candy and sodas all day and all the protein I could shovel in. It was very cold there. Alaskans complained about the cold. The Texans pretty much just left in the winter.

And yet, my girlfriends attitude and regard for me limited the firmness of my erections. Do not let her get into your head. If she does not think you are just terrific…If she does not have a good relationship with her father…If she is just NUTS…Run!!!

The doctors increased my prescriptions and I started to get acne on my shoulders just like when I was 12. I also though that my balls were shrinking.
Well…THE HELL WITH THAT!!! I quit the testosterone I was smearing on my torso and focused on my diet.

SO……..

Protect and preserve the testosterone you have. Participate or at least watch extremely violent activities i.e., MMA, Rugby or football. Look at boobs or pictures of boobs for 20 minutes a day. Buy a 35 pound kettle and use it. Investigate Butea Supurba Root. Supplement with Zinc -this goes for ALL MALES! I don’t know why they don’t teach us in health class that men need zinc like women need iron. Investigate Horny Goat Weed. Everyone is different so YMMV but there is a supplement combination that will aid almost all of you.