Balls


Oh, so it seems Testosterone is the new wonder-drug. If I can believe the TV, people are necking it by the bottle and smearing it on their loins and feeding it to the cat, and it makes men really horny and manly and vital and dynamic, and it can make women really horny and vital and frisky too, except they also grow beards, but their menfolk are so horny because they're on Testosterone that they don't care and bang them anyway, and everyone's a winner.

Yes, but before you rush out to buy a vat, ask yourself where it's coming from. Did you ever think of that, hmm? Where is the testosterone coming from? If you think about it for a second you know damn well where it's coming from. They're stealing it. They're stealing it from Latin American slum children. All those slum kids from Rio that keep disappearing and they think death squads are killing them, that's where they go, they're kidnapped and taken to Testosterone Farms to be harvested for their hormones. And it's fine at first, they get to fight bulls and drive racing cars and do macho things like play chicken on motorbikes or throw knives at each other, but then when the testosterone's really pumped up it's all siphoned out of them, and they're left completely gay. And they're released back into the community, but it's not the same, they're skipping around the streets playing patty-cake patty-cake baker's man. All their friends are undergoing tough initiation rituals to prove their manhood, lying down on railway tracks and fighting with bicycle chains and swallowing scorpions, and they're skipping around and singing 'I'm so pretty' from West Side Story. But everyone thinks they must be really hard that they would dare to do that, so they become the leaders of the street gangs, and pretty soon all the street gangs are into macrame and flower-arranging. And the girls are really impressed and throw themselves at them, all these luscious dark-eyed latina chicks offer to show them the ways of love, but they just giggle, these lady-boys, and go, 'Eeeh, I don't like, I'm shy, me,' like George Formby, and it's a big scandal and a shame and it should be stamped out.

But they don't stop there, the Testosterone Gangs, they stalk notoriously macho men and cull them for their hormones. That's what happened to Barry White, he was harpooned, probably, he was the Moby Dick to some Ahab of a testosterone thief. And Russell Crowe, they drugged him one day and stole all his testosterone, he went from Gladiator to playing The Count off Sesame Street in 'A Beautiful Mind', and then it'll be Shakespeare, and then he'll want to direct, and the next thing he'll be launching his own brand of vegetarian quiche. Well look at John Inman, the same with him, no-one remembers how back in the 60s he used to be Britain's answer to Marlon Brando, what was that gritty Northern film he was in where he was a miner and a bare-knuckle boxer and he took Thora Hird violently from behind over the kitchen table while she was peeling spuds? He was a raw animal presence in that film, now look at him.

And Melatonin, that's another one, the miracle hormone to help insomniacs sleep, produced by the human brain in conditions of darkness, how the hell do you think they make it? Children from Wrexham, sold by their parents, kept in darkened cupboards all their lives with tubes in their heads draining it out of them. Never seeing light, never sleeping, the smell of wet raincoats and umbrellas in their nostrils all the time, all so some neurotic rich woman somewhere can sleep through her hairy-backed husband's bull-like testosterone-crazed assaults. So think on.


Index

12th July 2003