It’s called the “mass monster.” The anabolic steroid trenbolone—as are other performance enhancers— is increasingly going mainstream thanks to gymbros swapping drug recs between reps and the growing prominence of bodybuilding influencers who are open about using it.
Across social media, extreme images of fitness are platformed—and idolized—online now more than ever before. Many of the “swole” men featured have grown their seven-figure social media followings out of prominence in the powerlifting and bodybuilding worlds; despite the fact that they remain controlled substances under the FDA’s jurisdiction, steroid use is legal in some competitions of the former and socially accepted in both.
The use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancers has long been an open secret in elite gym culture, but today it’s becoming increasingly common among young men, in part due to the new wave of mind-bogglingly muscular fitness content creators. And the craze is expanding the reach of an all-male echo chamber where bodybuilding and weightlifting have been tied into misogynistic, far-right views.
Quade, 28, who asked to be identified by his first name due to concerns of employer retaliation, began weightlifting after he came across bodybuilding discussion threads on 4chan and the controversial, now-defunct Bodybuilding.com blog, considered one of the last relics of Web 1.0. “The bodybuilding community has an oversize impact on internet culture that’s not really appreciated,” he told The Daily Beast.
Bodybuilding.com helped set the tone for today’s manosphere: it was where the slang term “nutting” (referencing ejaculation) was coined, where Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos were first leaked, where a 19-year-old once livestreamed his suicide and where then 28-year-old Australian Gable Tostee, a long-time poster, shared an in-depth testimony defending himself amid a media firestorm over the 2014 death of Warriena Wright, a woman who fell from his apartment’s balcony during a Tinder date. (Tostee was later found not guilty at the conclusion of a murder trial over Warren’s death.)
“Bodybuilding is the first digital radicalizer of the twenty-first century,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College who has had first-hand experience clawing himself out of the right-wing internet fitness wormhole, in an interview with the Daily Beast.
Cohen was radicalized at a time when viral right-wing pieces would make their way around chat rooms and forums, he told the Beast. “But now, instead of one man grooming one man, it’s now one man like Jordan Peterson grooming millions.”
“The timeless part of bodybuilding is that it’s self-care… You can even call it gender-affirming care.”— Jamie Cohen
A hyper-focused fitness space offers community, routine and visually-measurable goals that many millennial and Gen-Z men feel they are lacking in their broader lives. “The disenfranchisement of young men has not been managed well, and we’re living through the reactionary movement,” Cohen said.
“When you start getting healthy, you think about how other people are not,” he continued. “The lifestyle is much more traditional—the world is too chaotic, but you can fix yourself, your body.”
It’s not to say that all men who weightlift end up storming the Capitol, nor that the act of bodybuilding is necessarily dangerous. But its focus on eternal self-improvement (and eternal dissatisfaction) is easily exploited by content creators to peddle edgy, extremist ideology to a captive audience increasingly disillusioned by the mainstream.
“Today, it’s a much easier passage to the alt-right, and it’s much more coded,” Cohen explained. “It’s more of an aesthetic than it is an ideology.”
Ayad Ahmad, 19, began lifting three years ago. He’s in a cutting period right now, eating plain, protein-heavy meals and lifting five days per week. Taking steroids has crossed his mind a few times—a few older men he knows at the gym have told him that they’re juicing, and he’s well aware it’s a “big thing” among his peers—but he’s studying medicine and concerned about the side effects. These can run the gamut of severe acne, ankle swelling, high blood pressure, aggression, delusion, depression, liver damage, risk of stroke and a variety of heart issues, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
While the OG Bodybuilding.com users often used to focus on getting ripped for sex (and lots of it), Ahmad said that’s not really a part of his goals, or motivation for most gymbros today. “When I first started lifting, it was definitely a factor,” he said. “ But I have so many friends who just don’t lift at all and can get more girls…I don’t really think it’s like the number one factor that girls see in guys.”
“Men go to the gym for other men,” said Stephen Lee, 26, who began lifting seven years ago. “Most of the external validation is almost exclusively for other men. People who lift a lot know that having a really just huge physique, or being super lean, is not that attractive to the average woman. But they’re doing it more for their own body image’s sake… or to impress other men. Most people would not understand a really defined back, but if you lift around other men, they would absolutely notice that.”
(It’s considered almost impolite to judge someone for choosing to start juicing, Lee added. Someone taking steroids is likely still putting in hours at the gym, eating clean, and “putting in the work,” he argued. “It’s not like they’re just coasting.”)
In 2023, the National Institute for Health released a study warning dermatologists to identify acne fulminans as a potential indicator for the rising use of anabolic steroids among young men, which they linked to the pressures of social media.
Cohen said that the most concerning development is that minors, in particular, are watching this content without being taught critical thinking or conscious media consumption—they’re simply accepting what they see online as true, and aspirational. “We’re stepping into something that we’re a little deeper… and it’s worth having a conversation about,” he said. “You should ask your son why he’s working out so much.”
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