The Incredible Hulk, the Thing, He-Man, Superman—these cartoon heroes must fulfill some kind of longing. And as yearnings go, it’s an old one: the Hebrew tradition has Samson, the Greek Heracles, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Irish Cú Chulainn. Every culture has its dreams of superhuman strength, often divine, certainly supernatural: Glooscap of the Mi’kmaq and Cabrakan of the Maya are deities capable of tearing down mountains and diverting rivers. From east to west, from Hanuman to Thor, muscle-bound strongmen swagger through mythography as gods reshaping landscapes, slaughtering enemies, and holding up the sky. Their fury is legendary: they kill lions with their bare hands, slay monsters, and accomplish impossible labors that inspire terror but also admiration.
Over the past couple of centuries interest in male muscle development and fitness has peaked during times of economic precarity and conflict. In our economically precarious and conflicted world, that interest is accelerated by social media and the way it speedily identifies each user’s preoccupations and enthusiasms and then doubles down with algorithmic content that offers commercial solutions to scrollers’ anxieties, even as it deepens them. An increase in gym use wouldn’t be a problem, and indeed would almost certainly be a benefit, if it weren’t for the way the Internet also facilitates access to a range of illicit drugs that promise to enhance image and performance. Drugs such as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AASs) have serious short- and long-term consequences for both mental and physical health, and their use has spread outside traditional athletic and bodybuilding communities. I’m a general practitioner in Scotland, and in my clinical work I am seeing great harm caused by these drugs, which are aggressively marketed and erroneously sold as safe. To understand how we got to the spectacle of widespread, steroid-boosted bodybuilding, Conor Heffernan’s When Fitness Went Global and Dimitris Liokaftos’s A Genealogy of Male Bodybuilding: From Classical to Freaky are good places to start.
Heffernan offers a global survey of myths that idealize strength, demonstrates how ubiquitous they are, and shows how regardless of local traditions, fitness practices were gradually standardized throughout the world in the nineteenth century. “Why did exercisers begin using the same movements,” he asks, “and what impact did this have?” The answer begins with colonialism, militarism, and the rise of mass media, as a result of which “information about health, about training and about physical culture became increasingly homogenized.” He explains that one of the first European public gymnasiums opened in 1817 in Paris in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, gymnasiums and athletic societies proliferated across Western Europe.
Throughout this colonial period much Western culture was intensely anxious to affirm the white male body as superior to any other kind of body. At the same time, notions such as Rousseau’s “noble savage” implied that nonwhite races had physical advantages that white men could obtain only with great effort. There were no formal physique or strength contests until the Great Competition, which aimed to find the most perfect male body in Britain, was held at the Royal Albert Hall in 1901, organized by the circus-strongman-turned-impresario Eugen Sandow (the judges were Arthur Conan Doyle and the classical sculptor Charles Lawes). The competition took place against the backdrop of the Boer War, when national anxiety over British military prowess brought new focus on the bodies of men as potential soldiers.
Sandow left Prussia at eighteen and was a Victorian-Edwardian Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Weider combined; Heffernan reminds us that the hero of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, kept in a drawer (between two pornographic postcards and a prospectus for an anorectal salve called Wonderworker)
a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during and after 2 months’ consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley’s pulley exerciser (men’s 15/-, athlete’s 20/-) viz, chest 28 in and 29½ in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8½ in and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in.
Ulysses is set in 1904; Bloom also had on his bookshelves a red cloth copy of Sandow’s Physical Strength and How to Obtain It. Exercises like Sandow’s worked toward the gradual globalization of a physique inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity; Sandow visited museums to measure Greek statues’ muscles, with the aim of emulating them through exercise. Heffernan is interested in how soldiers and fitness enthusiasts gradually systematized their approach to training:
There was an unanimity of movement to the extent that schoolchildren in Germany used the same Turnverein methods as those in the United States. Or, better yet, Japanese soldiers used the same Swedish exercises as those in Britain.
Mail-order courses at the beginning of the twentieth century encouraged men like Bloom to document their journeys of self-improvement. Liokaftos quotes from the 1914 book How to Pose:
The developed young man is also laudably desirous to obtain artificial presentments [pictures] of himself at various stages of his development, either for his own contemplation or for that of others. And he ought to be encouraged thereto; it is but obedience to the impulse of proper self-esteem.
By the 1920s strongman rhetoric had ventured into magazine advertising: in 1922, the year Ulysses was published, the Brooklyn entrepreneur Angelo Siciliano renamed himself Charles Atlas to market a series of dynamic exercises that would “Give You a Body That Men Respect and Women Admire!” In the August 1925 issue of Artists and Models Magazine, Atlas invoked classical ideals of beauty obtainable through his methods: “Who has not been inspired by pictures of statues of these magnificent men and women of Greece and Rome?” The same issue proclaimed that Atlas’s physique was more impressive than that of the Farnese Hercules.
At the Great Competition, Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture reported, “Mr. Sandow fairly went on his hands and knees to examine the nether limbs of the men, and not a point seemed to escape the judges, the audience watching with breathless interest.” That image of Sandow scrutinizing the “nether limbs” of Britain’s most perfectly built men hints at the homoerotic element of bodybuilding culture that swirled around Sandow. Through the next decades rumors persisted that certain bodybuilders were gay, and began to be more explicit by the 1950s. That decade health and fitness magazines such as Strength and Health felt the need to distance themselves from more openly erotic (“beefcake”) magazines such as Adonis, The Young Physique, and Physique Pictorial. The artist Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) honed his hypermasculine homoerotic art while drawing for the last.1 As his biographer, F. Valentine Hooven III, wrote in Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America, 1950–1970, “Well into the 1960s, those little physique magazines were not just an aspect of gay culture in America; they virtually were gay culture.”
Steroids are hormones related to sterols, which are a group of unsaturated fatty compounds essential to life (e.g., cholesterol). Testosterone and estrogen are steroids, as are many image- and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) such as trenbolone, designed to mimic testosterone’s muscle-building, or “anabolic,” potential. The chemical substance of testosterone was first refined from bull testicles in the 1930s, and lab-made versions soon followed. By 1954 members of the Soviet weight lifting team were being dosed with it (winning them a stack of gold and silver medals at the world championships in Vienna), and the Americans took notice. A range of synthetic steroids were developed, each molecular tweak aimed at heightening their anabolic effects while attempting to diminish their androgenic side effects such as hair loss, acne, and infertility.
Through the 1960s and 1970s steroid use was largely limited to professional athletic and bodybuilding circles, and it was only with the unmasking of the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson in 1988—who won gold at the Seoul Olympics and was then stripped of the medal when he was found to have used the IPED stanozolol—that steroid use became normalized. As the head of the International Federation of Body Builders, Wayne DeMilia, said of that moment, “This is gonna affect us seriously, and you’re gonna start seeing the changes of it within the next three to five years, and in ten years we’re gonna have a problem.”
In the early 1990s the psychiatrist Peter Kramer, in Listening to Prozac, coined the term “cosmetic psychopharmacology” to describe the new hopes for fluoxetine’s ability to transform our moods; but men and women of the 2020s are as likely to turn to steroids—testosterone and estrogen, respectively—to try to feel better about themselves. Close readers of myth know that every boon (from a good fairy or otherwise) exacts its duty, and no medical treatment is without side effects. Anabolic-androgenic steroids have widespread consequences for almost every system of the body: they raise blood pressure, dangerously thicken heart muscle, irritate the liver, cause infertility and sometimes impotence, accelerate arterial sclerosis, and disturb mood. In response to them, the brain switches off its own primers for the generation of sex hormones, and in men, testicles shrivel as a result. Reliable numbers are ridiculously difficult to come by, but one study a decade ago estimated that one in sixteen men worldwide would at some time use steroids; a Norwegian review of the global evidence reported that among bodybuilders in Iran that figure could reach as high as 79 percent. This is an epidemic of abuse, evolving into a public health emergency, quickened by digital culture.
The potential effects of unregulated, illegally obtained steroids are such that the UK has set up a network of harm-reduction clinics—nonjudgmental spaces where men can access clean needles, baseline blood tests, and a bit of advice. The idea behind harm reduction is that if you can’t persuade people to stop doing something dangerous, you can at least minimize their self-inflicted damage; the clinicians advise men on the least harmful parts of the body to inject, the optimal ways to come off steroids (“post-cycle therapy”), and how to most effectively restore steroid-shrunken testicles.
Steroid regimes are variously described as “stacking,” “pyramiding,” or “blast-and-cruise” according to dosage and timing—this is the language of impact, power, and speed, notably different from the “combined,” “continuous,” and “sequential” regimes used to describe women’s hormone replacement therapy. Contrary to the claims of online shops for these drugs, there’s no evidence that a particular pattern or regime minimizes risk. Steroid users have a mortality rate three times higher than the average and tend to die in greater numbers than their peers from suicide and heart disease.
Heffernan sets out the nineteenth-century foundations of the rise of physical culture, but Liokaftos’s book is helpful in explaining how health-wrecking steroid habits have become so entrenched in a culture ostensibly focused on health and fitness. In some quarters steroids have become expected, spoken of
not as antithetical but conducive to the authenticity project: by physically and psychologically enabling greater effort, bodybuilding drugs become another, very powerful, tool in the box for achieving masculinity more fully.
Within bodybuilding circles illicit, lab-made substances are reimagined as natural, injectable “maleness,” borrowing both a sci-fi vision of man as part reprogrammable machine and an atavistic vision of man as an animal. Subcutaneous steroid implants are widely used in the Americas and Australia to fatten cattle and accelerate the production of meat, but they are currently banned in the European Union. It’s noteworthy that both “Animal” and “Freak” are trade names for a range of bodybuilding products and nutritional supplements.
Broderick Chow is a self-described scholar, educator, and artist focused on the intersections of theater, performance, and sport. He starts his book Muscle Works with a candid boast and the kind of arithmomania that Leopold Bloom would have recognized:
I can squat 150 kg, deadlift 180, bench 100, snatch 90, and clean and jerk 105. I have a 43-inch chest and 16-inch biceps and 24-inch quads. I can confidently say that I am pound for pound the strongest person in theater and performance studies in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada.
His book concerns the phenomenon of bodybuilding and the “Iron Game” of weight lifting as a legitimate realm of theater studies—and like Liokaftos, Chow believes that the contemporary Internet-fueled spectacle of physical culture has its origins in the theatricality of nineteenth-century strongmen, acrobats, and wrestlers. Muscle Works is packed with personal reminiscence as much as academic inquiry, and it seeks to establish the gym as a place where we might profitably reflect on masculinity, male friendship, masculine role models, and the parallels between bodily and urban regeneration.
Chow thinks of gym culture and weight training not as forms of fitness but as expressive activities. He is interested in how communities abandoned by the modern economy and obliged to live with economic precarity may find focus, purpose, and well-being at the gym and goes so far as to suggest that gym use offers a philosophy by which to live. Bodybuilding terminology is anchored in working-class idioms—bodybuilding, working out, pumping iron—and Chow sees gyms as laboratories for thinking about how the expression of masculinity has changed in postindustrial communities. He asks: “In what way might the labor of self-making (and unmaking) be connected to the social processes of urban regeneration?”
Gyms like the one Chow writes about in the Port Dundas district of Glasgow tend to spring up in areas with cheap real estate and could be criticized as gentrifying forces, but he argues that such locations encourage the “rehearsing” of “forms of community and relation that might exist momentarily outside advanced capitalist labor relations.” Echoing the sociologist Geoffrey Greif, he riffs on the ways male friendship often differs in its essential priorities from female friendship: women talk together; men do things together. Chow sees this “lateral sociality” as something valuable, and it’s certainly recognizable—many of my male friends have noticed how their fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons talk more easily in the car, as if it were necessary for men to avert their gaze in order to loosen their tongues.
Muscle Works isn’t much concerned with steroid abuse; Chow is more interested in the self-mastery necessary for the natural acquisition of strength. But does he think any aspect of physical culture goes too far? He notes that a rise in body anxiety and muscle dysmorphia among men is driving steroid use, and that the commercial approach to fitness tends to heighten individual male insecurities—a process that can undo the valuable community-building and socially restorative work that gyms often do.
All three books are useful for tracing the evolution of the modern muscle scene, but academic prose can’t capture the range and churn of today’s media landscape or the frenzied dialogue between online influencers and men in their neighborhood locker rooms. Liokaftos observed back in 2017 that from the “intensifying social media environment, a new generation of drug-enhanced, freaky built bodies is now being born and celebrated outside the structures of organized bodybuilding competition.” Pity the kids making sense of all this: the harm-reduction clinics in the UK generally won’t admit people under eighteen, though some teens lie about their age to get in, and the info booklet I saw offered to the attendees begins with the statement: “No one under the age of 21 should be taking performance enhancing or body building drugs because they can interfere with development and growth, with serious long lasting effects.”
Heffernan sees exercise as an essential element of being human, but he is also critical of the consumerist side of physical culture. In the nineteenth century, he writes, working out
often meant purchasing products and, as commerce became more widespread, so did predatory practices and half-truths around fitness. These half-truths about perfecting one’s body to perfect one’s life, of miraculous transformations and inconceivable outcomes continue to exist as fragments in the modern-age.
A peek at YouTube and the online manosphere, as well as the anecdotal evidence provided by my teenage son, suggests that these half-truths and predatory practices are rampant today. The sheer volume of information on the Internet is predictably fueling polarization between dominant opinions and generating myriad subcultures. A search online for “Rad140” or “testolone,” a drug that mimics anabolic steroids by activating testosterone receptors in body tissues, will turn up medical case reports of liver injury, heart inflammation, and clinical trials among mice showing that the drug increased frailty and risk of death. A search for the same term in less peer-reviewed corners of the Internet yields posts declaring it to be a “safe” performance-enhancing drug, complete with before-and-after pictures, and claiming it doesn’t affect the hair, skin, liver, or kidneys, or incite the user to rage. Search for it on Amazon and it won’t be available, but the alternatives served up by Amazon’s algorithms offer a window into the size and scope of the male anxiety market. Influencers recommend it as a “step down” from “heavier” drugs like trenbolone, and threads on Looksmax.org testify to its effectiveness. Chat rooms there and on Reddit weigh the pros and cons of different approaches to making you more attractive to girls—whether it be hardmaxxing your body with implants or surgery, or DIY softmaxxing at home by “bone-smashing” (self-harming your jaw and cheekbones with hard objects, ostensibly to make them more prominent), “mewing” (holding your tongue in an unnatural posture to influence jaw and palate shape), or “zygo pulling” (using your thumbs to put pressure on the bones of the midface). Some Gen-Z boys chew on semisolid gum to work their jawlines, and there are whole realms of the Internet dedicated to “voicemaxxing,” to make you sound more attractive.2
Liokaftos cautions that “the growing use of image- and performance-enhancing substances, many of which originate in elite bodybuilding, is now recognized as a public health issue that affects broader recreational exercise populations,” and to steroids are now being added new synthetic peptides. This unregulated gray market promotes unlicensed bespoke chemicals that are purported to offer the anabolic properties of steroids without the acne, hair loss, rage risk, and infertility. Unapproved and largely untestable substances such as CJC-1295, GHK-Cu, and Ipamorelin are promoted online as “safe” alternatives—to evade censorship they’re often listed not as “peptides” but as “p3pt!de$” on TikTok, Snapchat, and Meta platforms. When I send out lab tests on young men who tell me they’re using these drugs, they return with worrying anomalies suggesting disturbances of liver, kidney, and thyroid function. In the future, clinical trials may show that these substances have some benefits, but we aren’t there yet: right now they’re experimental and profoundly unsafe.
Do we want our young men to fatten themselves like cattle? “History is not comprised of faded documents and photographs but is a story of living bodies,” Chow concludes. He hopes that “the gym is, and will be, a place to meet ourselves, and ask who we want to be.” The same could be said of the Internet: Liokaftos observes that drug-free bodybuilding sites are also multiplying, even as “the continuum of the built body continues to expand, manifesting in new kinds of material bodies.” Heffernan writes that his own book is “a professional cry for help. More needs to be done on the nineteenth-century and before” to make sense of the roots of the muscle scene and to better understand how it might develop. He has begun to study the videos of strength and fitness influencers, and I got in touch to ask him for his predictions, as a social scientist, of how the scene might evolve. “Teenage use is off the charts, and in the sport of bodybuilding dozens of competitors die each year from IPED complications without any soul-searching within the sport,” he replied. “I am currently horrified by what is happening.”
