It’s not our fault, supposedly. Back in the old days when folks would throw mammoth and sabretooth tiger steaks on the grill, man was built to fight things. We had to hunt. We had to protect our tribes from hungry beasts. We had to have contests to see who could spit the farthest. Those were far simpler, glorious manly times.

Today, a lot of that incentive to be rough and tough is pretty much gone. When I’m hungry, I don’t start giving the dogs on the street nasty looks; I just walk to the kitchen and pop something into the microwave. Wars are fought mostly with button pushes and ridiculous technology, and most of us will be happy never to see combat in our lifetimes.

The problem is, all of that ancient pent-up male energy, which served us so well in the past, has no practical outlets today. In a perfect world, every man in the world would be on a footy or pro wrestling team somewhere, but the numbers just don’t work. So now, we’ve got billions of men itching beneath the skin for something, well, “manly” to do. More often than not, that manly thing ends up being yet another lapse of intelligence.

Welcome to the world of testosterone poisoning, which isn’t a real medical condition, but a term that attempts to explain away the reason men take crazy risks and unconsciously put themselves in situations that dramatically lower their chances of having grandchildren. If you’re a real man, admit it, you’ve done a few things that may have seemed like good ideas at the time, but turned out to be things you’d rather not share in civilized company. Since only men seem to act this way, and testosterone is the predominant male hormone, the theory is that too much of the hormone leads to reckless, aggressive, idiotic behaviour – the kind that gets one injured, or worse. If this is the case, testosterone poisoning is singlehandedly responsible for more fatalities on the planet than all other illnesses combined.

As it turns out, there really is no such thing as testosterone poisoning. Just because a man may have higher testosterone levels does not mean that he is more likely to build a rocket launcher in his backyard than, say, the guy who tosses the remote at the television when his favourite football team loses. This is nice to know, but also a bit disheartening, because now I can’t blame hormones when I come home with bruises from getting shot at by pellet guns after a friendly outdoor game with the guys. Biology has nothing on basic male stupidity.

My wife will concede, however, that between my time boxing at the gym and the occasional pellet gun battle, she can rest easy. There are plenty of outlets available for men who want to release all of that extra maleness bubbling up inside of them. It’s no surprise that the video game industry comes out with a new violent, bloody gun-blazing shooter every 3.5 seconds. It also explains the enduring popularity of sports broadcasts. There are billions of men in the world, and they all need a channel, even if it means screaming for the guys who put in the real work.

And then there’s my neighbour, who wants to install a water slide on his roof. Thank goodness we only make up half of the human population.