Alcohol is attacking masculinity and we are drunk on it. Many Aussie men believe that heavy alcohol consumption signals toughness and masculinity. I want to break this long-standing absurd cultural myth: men are not tough for being able to drink each other under the table; alcohol actually kills off testosterone in men, so the more excessively drink, the less of a man you are.
It’s quite ironic, isn’t it?
That’s a hard pill to swallow for many Aussie men who pride themselves on the bafoonish belief that the more they drink, the more of a man they are.
We have all heard the phrase everything in moderation, but there’s no moderation in Australian society when it comes to young men drinking alcohol.
The cultural rites of passage says that blokes aretough if they can handle more pints than their mates . If you don’t drink and even if you can’t handle large amounts, your mates look at you as a weakling.
Why is that the case?
There is no correlation between being tough and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. But there is a correlation between drinking copious amounts and killing your own testosterone.
‘Being on the piss’ or getting “sloshed’’ is the height of all the excitment.
A clinical researcher at Murdoch University, Stephen James Smith studied the effects of alcohol on testosterone synthesis.
“Excessive alcohol consumption, or alcohol use disorder, has a significant negative effect on steroidogenesis in men.
“Alcohol affects each level of the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal axis via the mechanisms of increased hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis activity, increased inflammation, and increased oxidative stress.”
But there’s another hangover Australian society and specifically men need to experience, the more heavily you drink the less of a man you become.
If you think I am against alcohol in every form, then you would be right, but I am not advocating for a government ban in any form; I am arguing that young men should think twice about cultural falsehoods that will do the exact opposite of what they claim to do.
Not convinced? A 2022 study found that drinking alcohol in moderate to high amounts at a time can decrease and kill sperm in men.
Our bittersweet relationship with booze
Does Australia have an alcohol problem? From the litany of teenage drink driving-related accidents to one punch knockout deaths to the correlation between alcohol in domestic violence and antisocial behaviors.
Over 5% of Aussies drink daily and 35% drink weekly; this is not an insignificant number. Our relationship with alcohol is one-way traffic. We drink and drink.
A recent government ad campaign ought to change the game and make Australian men rethink our relationship to alcohol. The advertisement claims that alcohol is converted to acid formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and can cause various types of cancer. How effective was this ad campaign in making Australians think? It’s hard to say.
The WHO has a clear stance on the issue.
Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges of the WHO stated:
“We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,”
Masculinity is under attack from alchohol. Drunkedness and a culture of binge drinking is not only killing mens testesterone, its killing our potential.
It’s time to break this patently absurd myth that ‘getting sloshed’ makes you more of a man. If people want to continue down this path, that is their free choice, but they should remember that heavy alcohol consumption will make them more effeminate.
