Go to south Wales if you want steroids. In the valleys, Welshmen used to mine coal. In the 21st century they work out. Back in 2006, a survey by Professor Bruce Davies at the University of Glamorgan found as many as seven in ten men using gyms in the region took anabolic steroids — synthetic compounds derived from the male hormone testosterone that promote muscle growth — to boost their training and enhance their bodies.
The finding was supposed to be a cause for alarm. Side-effects of anabolic steroids include everything from baldness and acne to the development of milk-producing breasts. But almost two decades on, there is every sign that steroids are still being abused in the valleys. In 2018 just over half of those using Welsh needle exchanges were reportedly steroid users. In some of the southern valleys the proportion was 75 per cent. Sir Frank Atherton, the chief medical officer for Wales, suggested that men’s magazines such as GQ were to blame.
What touching naivety. Half of my family comes from Pontycymer, a former mining village near Bridgend. The most important word in that sentence is “former”. To grow up between Pontycymer and a London suburb was to understand that there are places that used to be something — Pontycymer used to have a colliery, it used to have a bakery and a butcher, it used to have cinemas — and places, like London, that would always be something because people would always want to live there.
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Copies of GQ were scarce in Pontycymer. But I did see what happens to people when they have been neglected by the rest of the world over several decades. The valleys have some of the lowest employment rates and highest rates of poverty in Britain. Mental illness and poor job prospects are standard. For men with a self-image tied to the mines, these changes were profoundly unsettling.
So your grandfather was a miner: dirty, hard work but not work without a purpose. The best you might get today in Pontycymer is a job in a call centre. Good jobs hardly exist. A perfect body, transformed by steroids, does. Ask yourself what has happened to the rest of Britain since 2006. Is it more like south Wales, or less? Are more men alienated and out of productive work than they were 18 years ago? You know the answer.
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What used to look like a local phenomenon is becoming a national one. More men in Britain appear to be taking steroids than ever before. The number using the drug is hard to pin down but experts say it ranges anywhere from 500,000 to a million.
In a 2020 report Emily Robinson, then director of strategy and education at UK Anti-Doping, said steroid abuse was “now a serious public health issue”. Anabolic steroids are easy to buy online, at gyms and through group chats. While the depressing reality many British men move through might be narrowing all the time, their frames are expanding. This open secret is a cause for shame — though not because these drugs are illegal. Steroid use is probably more controversial among bodybuilders than it is with the public at large. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a seven-time Mr Olympia winner who took testosterone supplements in his prime, fretted about what was happening to bodybuilders. The drugs were warping and bloating their bodies in “unacceptable” ways. “It doesn’t look right,” Schwarzenegger said in 2015.
At a lower level, accusations of steroid use against gym influencers can permanently scar careers. Brian Johnson, an American fitness guru who self-styles as “Liver King”, promoted a get-massive caveman lifestyle based, unsurprisingly, on eating large amounts of raw unprocessed organs. But leaked emails in 2022 revealed Johnson spent $11,000 a month on anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. His fans, who would happily eat an uncooked cow’s brain, were disgusted by the drug use. Johnson made an apologetic YouTube video.
Matt Morsia, aka Legend from the BBC’s Gladiators, has been consistently accused of inflating his body with steroids. Two years ago he underwent blood and polygraph tests to prove he was drug-free. Morsia worried that if boys believed he was taking ’roids they would copy him. “It just sets an extremely low ceiling for teenagers who then think, ‘I need to take drugs if I want to get in good shape’, which obviously couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.
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His concerns echo Atherton’s theory that GQ was corrupting the minds of Welshman. The argument is simple: misguided men take steroids so they can look like other men with jacked bodies. A term that’s thrown around in this context is “male body dysmorphia”. According to the NHS, body dysmorphic disorder “is a mental health condition where a person spends a lot of time worrying about flaws in their appearance”. Like every other mental pathology, they give it an acronym: BDD.
Are one million British men suffering from BDD, and subsequently injecting synthetic testosterone into their veins? We are supposed to pity these poor creatures. They’ve mutilated themselves. They’ve invited serious future health problems for something paltry: in a quest to look like a bloke off Gladiators.
I cannot be alone in feeling the opposite. Imagine how exhilarating it is to be truly strong. Imagine the effort, even with chemical enhancement, it takes to get there. These are monumental commitments in time, effort and money. To become a monster is not a hobby. Your fundamental decision-making has to revolve around the project. What you eat and when you sleep become stringent routines.
I have watched acquaintances go down this path. I am unconvinced that BDD really covers what they are doing to themselves. The language of pathology falls down here. A better language would draw on magic. The old alchemical dream was the desire to turn lead into gold. These men turn themselves into sculptures. The process is more ascetic than anything monks do. Their bodies are their religion.
Taken to an extreme, this is both dangerous and stupid. But find me an era when young men did not do dangerous and stupid things. Rather than asking (yet again) what is wrong with the British male, and throwing medical acronyms at them, we might ask a different question: what is it about life in Britain that leads up to a million men to engage upon this vain, effortful, illegal and potentially dangerous course? For that answer you will have to return to south Wales. Steroid users don’t have a mental illness. They’ve found an escape hatch.
