The alarming story linking child-rearing with decreasing testosterone in men isn’t a surprise for those of us who have already survived the emasculating trials of parenting. We knew, already, that babies were like Kryptonite.

We learned to be in the other room when the howling began, when the little need-machines began stamping their feet and demanding sustenance. My wife would say to me, “It’s your turn to change the diaper,” and I’d just look at her silently, and then finally say, “You seem to have confused me with someone else.”

I’ve tried to teach other men the magic of maintaining their true manly selves in the face of the feminizing forces of child-rearing. Like, you don’t want to hold a baby unless you do so as if the child were a football.

Obliviousness is a critical tool. When the wife says, “Get the baby,” you need to say, “What baby?”

Also refer to the baby as “it.” That helps establish distance. As in, ”I think it wants its mother.”

When someone asks you, “What’s it like being a dad,” you want to be able to say, in all honesty, with a straight face, “I have no earthly idea.”

The alternative is to be caring, nurturing, fully engaged with your child, and rewarded with the eternal bonds of love more powerful than any other force on the planet, which sounds hunky dory until one day you wake up and realize you can’t remember who won last year’s Super Bowl. Feels like a knife in the gut.

A man wants an edge. It’s the edge that gives him the courage to go all-in when he’s got a low straight and the other guy’s likely holding a flush. So you lose, big deal, you had poker courage, you took a risk, you did the manly thing, and you can feel good about yourself the next day at the hardware store when you buy a power tool that you won’t actually use.

Although babies are the scientifically proven manhood-eroders, the phenomenon surely continues for many years to come. You remain, technically, a parent even as they grow up, and you need to be on guard at all times. Last night, for example, was Back to School Night at the high school, and my plan was to visit only the gym, to just inspect the weight equipment. I wound up in an English class but I swear it was simply because I got lost. My plan was to deny that I had a kid in the school at all. If anyone asked, I’d say I just wandered in here off the street because my monster truck race didn’t start for another hour.

Parenting is the gateway drug to volunteering, to civic engagement, to listening to others, and so on, the kind of thing that’ll really knock you off your game. Do you think the primitive hunters, tracking the wildebeest across the savannah, worried that they weren’t spending enough time back home with the kids? No, what bothered them was that they didn’t really like the taste of wildebeest. Way too gamey. Tastes like musk ox.

The one way to square being a guy, a real guy’s guy, a guy’s guy’s guy, in fact, with parenting is to make sure that you turn the whole thing into a competition. Help your kid get into a good college so that you can show other dads that your kid has opened a can of whup-arse on their kids. At soccer games, scream like it’s World War III; earn that letter of reprimand from the league commissioner.

Before a game, you need to give a young soccer player a pep talk like this:

“Your team is much better than this other team, and you’re going to score a bunch of goals and the other team is going to feel bad and I guarantee you there will be one little girl who starts to cry because her team is losing so terribly. That’s when you need to get really medieval on her. It’s when they’re down like that that you need to show them a universe of pain. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you elicit pitiful lamentation.”

You say that stuff and you feel the surge of the proper hormones. You can feel the testosterone flow through you like 5w-30 through a car engine. And just to yourself, so quietly that no one else can hear, you say:

“Vroom, vroom...”.