The bros are not ok
The gym, or at least my gym, is a bastion of binary gender performance. Without commenting on anyone’s individual workout routines, which are idiosyncratic, variable, and sacred, I can say it appears that almost all the men are there to grow only their chests and arms, and almost all the women are there to grow only their glutes, ideally without ever touching a barbell.
Obviously there are exceptions, of which I am one with my powerlifting-adjacent, barbell-centric Liftoff workouts. Something I’ve always loved about living abroad (or at least, living in Mexico as a white American) is that no one really expects me to know or follow implicit social rules. I could not even begin to tell you how much benefit of the doubt I’ve been granted over the years. Sometimes I know what’s happening and plow forward anyway, and many other times I have no idea. In the gym, I kind of know but choose not to dig into it. I’m perfectly fine being the weird foreigner deadlifting off on her own planet.
That’s all to say I have no idea whether any of the guys at my gym are using steroids; they would never talk about it in my presence either way. But two recent articles suggest it’s not impossible, and perhaps even likely. From GQ:
The use of performance-enhancing drugs, a.k.a. PEDs, remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long…This is an age, we are told, when anyone can have any body they want. Take a pill, stab a shot, try a “cycle.” It’s the age of Ozempic. The age of ordering a latte with a splash of collagen. Body optimization, body modification, whatever you want to call it, is no longer something that other people are doing, but rather something maybe you should be doing. Have you spent any time on social media lately? Have you felt: I’m getting left behind?
The nod to Ozempic is telling, as the piece adopts the same breathless, everyone-is-doing-it tone we saw in so much of the coverage of that drug, even as it dutifully touches on the downsides, including, memorably, testicles “miniaturized to the size of peas, of Raisinets.” More interesting to me was an article in The Guardian, which comes at the subject with more of a science writing lens, focusing not only on men who use the drugs (mostly forms of synthetic testosterone), but also the researchers studying their effects and the clinicians and community workers developing harm reduction methods based around the philosophy and practice of needle exchanges.
The physical effects of steroids are both obvious (bigger muscles) and surprising (the shrunken testicles), the cognitive effects disturbingly unknown, and the emotional effects insidious. From The Guardian piece:
Testosterone also has a potent effect on the mind. On this, I found there was a stark split between novice steroid users and veterans. Younger, or first-time users were often thrilled with the psychological benefits: “You’re the alpha everywhere you go. Confident, dominant and at times intimidating. You feel like you command respect. It’s wild,” the young man from the home counties told me. Older users tended to lament the side-effects. “One of my coaches used to call it ‘the burden’,” said Mike Istraetel, referring to the long-term feelings of deadened emotion, anxiety and the dips in mood that accompany cycles of steroid use.
Both articles point to the increasing mainstream-ification of lifting heavy weights as a driver of the expansion of steroid use. I’m certainly a beneficiary of strength training’s normalization. Five years ago, you never would have caught me in a gym, much less lifting the big plates. But of course, the culture is also normalizing “optimization,” doing-your-own-research, and extremely muscular (male) bodies at the same time. These pressures intersect only marginally with my personal interest and motivations, but they are expressly designed to pierce the souls of the bros around me. I feel like lifting weights has liberated me from expectations in so many ways. But I can see how for the bros, it all might be an increasingly heavy burden.