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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Urge: Naked World
Japanese want baby girls; Indians choose boys
As parents coordinate their babies' sexes ahead of time, the male-female ratio gets even more skewed.
By Hank Hyena
[11/18/99]

Health Urge: Nancy Chan
Totems and taboos
When the IRS strikes, my favorite john wants to kiss me and my boyfriend refuses.
By Tracy Quan
[11/18/99]

Brave new world or future shock?
Medical scientists predict technologies such as animal-to-human organ transplants and toilets that send info to your doctor.
By Jon Bowen
[11/17/99]

Urge: Naked World
Satan makes me view Web porn
A year after Internet porn surfing cost him his tax-department job, David Stein fingers the Prince of Darkness.
By Hank Hyena
[11/17/99]

Column
Playing prostitute
Divorcée Pam takes the leap into the life and learns that besting her johns is a hollow victory.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[11/16/99]

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At her Senate hearing, Williams told what would become a ubiquitous tale of steroid abuse among female track athletes at both the amateur and Olympic levels. The influx of the male sex hormone testosterone in Williams' system had masculinized her features. At the peak of her drug abuse, Williams no longer menstruated. She sprouted facial hair and her clitoris grew to "embarrassing proportions."

Ghastly testimony followed from other athletes and coaches, insinuating that steroid use was rampant among athletes of all levels, male and female. After the hearings, a bill drafted by Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., D-Del., classified anabolic steroids as Schedule III substances. It placed them in the same legal league as amphetamines and made their use subject to radically stricter punishment. The chemicals responsible for some of the most Herculean feats in sports such as track and field, football, bodybuilding, wrestling and cycling were finally outlawed. President George Bush signed the bill, and history was made.

But today, 10 years later, nothing has changed. The drugs have saturated sports and seeped into high school gyms, turning records at all levels of sport synthetic. In the last decade, as many as 80 professional cyclists died from the reckless abuse of the performance-enhancing drug EPO. And as more and more links are established between anabolic steroids and heart and liver diseases, the recent deaths of athletes like Florence Griffith Joyner and Walter Payton have come under suspicion.

Because of the steroid backlash of the late 1980s, there has been an increase in drug testing in most sports. But experts like Terence Todd, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin who was also a champion weight lifter in the mid-'60s, point out that today there are also many more drugs. Drugs that were used by athletes in the '50s and '60s would be considered placebos in today's pharmacy of performance enhancers.

Strength athletes such as offensive linemen and bodybuilders are pumping themselves with dosages up to 20 times greater than what doctors recommend for legitimate steroid candidates such as AIDS and cancer patients and children with growth-dysfunction diseases. Endurance athletes, particularly professional cyclists, use drugs that mask the presence of illegal blood-doping chemicals in their systems, effectively immunizing themselves against the possibility of testing positive.

Most disconcerting of all, however, is the fact that the fastest-growing group of steroid users in the United States is not professional athletes, but everyday body-conscious people looking for the social accolades that come with having a comic-book-hero physique. According to a study conducted by Dr. Charles Yesalis, a professor at Penn State University and an expert on anabolic steroids, 33 percent of steroid users take the drugs solely for cosmetic effects.

This group includes entertainers such as pro wrestlers (Jesse Ventura has a steroid-laden past) and actors like Sylvester Stallone and former Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger, ironically, was nominated to chair President George Bush's Council on Physical Fitness shortly after Bush signed Sen. Biden's crackdown bill on steroids.

Short of a major cultural overhaul, it is very difficult to alter the American perception of the perfect body, says Alan Klein, a sociology professor at Northeastern University. In 1993 Klein authored "Little Big Men," an examination of the bizarre subculture of professional bodybuilding. To research the book he spent years entrenched in the bowels of Los Angeles' most hardcore gyms. He considers bodybuilders to be extremists with a body-image obsession. Psychological dysfunction occurs at the highest levels of bodybuilding, he says, and the same forces are at work in the minds of average steroid users in search of aesthetic perfection.

"Bodybuilding is a social pose," says Klein. "There's nothing athletic about it." The granite physiques of those who strut through prestigious competitions like Mr. America and Mr. Olympia are carved from chemicals. Cycling through various combinations of anabolic steroids results in the grotesque muscle separation and the taut, vein-mapped skin displayed on stage.

Professional bodybuilding is perhaps the only sport in which steroid use is unavoidable. "You'd have to be a fool to go up on stage without [steroids]," says Klein.

Recently, a minor upheaval in the bodybuilding community resulted in a cluster of natural bodybuilding competitions and magazines. But, according to Klein, "Nobody is going to look at the cover of a natural bodybuilding magazine and say, 'Gosh damn, I'd rather look like him than Lee Haney.'" (Haney is a bodybuilding legend who won the Mr. Olympia title eight times.) Whether people are fascinated by its freak-show quality or they legitimately admire its hulking physiques, the world of steroid-manufactured muscle fosters an urge for emulation. "I understand the appeal of the look of power to a pimply-faced post-adolescent teenager," says Klein.

Next page | Would athletes literally die to perform at a world-class level?