Abstract
Ask Vest Christiansen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University in Denmark. In his book Gym Culture, he relies on his extensive experience of research on the use of drugs in sport to solve the enigma of what it is that makes young men use image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs), given that most of them will never take part in any sports competition. Thus, the usual explanations used to explain doping, such as ethical violation, moral disengagement, the lure of money or of celebrity, just does not work to understand their IPED consumption. However, does this book offer a convincing theory that would explain this ordinary athletes' IPED uses? The answer is no. It does not provide a single and comprehensive theory for understanding Gym culture and IPEDs. However, analyzing the diversity of factors that motivate drugs consumption, especially anabolic steroids, among groups of people whose activities include fitness, bodybuilding, and weightlifting, is rather a strength of this book than a weakness.
The book crosses a diversity of scientific literature to understand IPEDs. Combining psychology and biology, and sometimes sociology, provides a multi-disciplinary perspective that is often claimed in research but seldom realized. This disciplinary openness supports three connected assumptions: (1) that the use of IPED should be understood as a resource to young men's identity construction; (2) that the body is used as an important mean to stage personal success in a highly competitive society; (3) that muscles play an important role in shaping masculine identity. This combination of factors frames a context that places the body as a perceived parameter for success in an individual's life. Consequently, the context increases young men's attention to body appearances and drives them to use IPEDs because they place body appearance as a central component of their life. Their experience of body transformations reveals changes in their interactions with their surroundings and reshapes their identity. Most of them have a highly disciplined lifestyle, with training and diet strictly controlled, that contrasts with their psychological vulnerability or insecurity, and certainly is a resource to face it.
Several factors are identified to understand IPEDs in the Gym culture. The role of personal identity formation and its importance during youth and early adulthood is a key factor. The quest for muscle seems embedded in men's insecurity about their masculinity, due to a perceived “feminization of society.” However, the book nuances this hypothesis because this so-called crisis cannot stand alone as an explanation for the high interest in muscular bodies found in countries in which gender inequalities are very important.
Christiansen's informants report that interactions change when they became more muscular and larger. The transformations of the appearances change their “external” identity and, consequently, their interactions with people around them.
The book is convincing when it analyses the diversity of motivations for IPEDs uses and explores the heterogeneous world of the Gym. It overcomes the cliché of fanatics using IPED to make muscle very quickly regardless of risks on health. Gym goers do not share the same ideal body nor do they have the same relation to drugs. Some are willing to look like Olympic athletes, such as swimmers, others are more attracted by body-builders' more visible muscles style. Christiansen well observes their contradictions and the diversity of IPEDs uses. They have a diversity of risk profiles and of how drugs consumption may affect their sex lives. Their feeling of being more attractive, their perceived reinforcement of their masculinity, and their gain in self-confidence are challenged by the risk of feeling less desire or not being able to perform sexually because of their excess in consumption of steroids.
Christiansen identifies four ideal types of steroid users that cover a wide range of practices. Some athletes are experts who take IPEDs as efficiently and safely as possible, relying on knowledge about drug uses, doses, and effects with sometimes the support of physicians. Others would not sacrifice their health for building an attractive body, although they consume IPED, their goal is well-being and consequently they are using small doses of drugs. However, other IPED users are not much focused on risks. Among them, some individuals are mainly motivated by competition and performance as others just want to have big muscles, enjoy life, experience a strong body, and have external recognition.
The book is a significant contribution to the literature on gym culture and on doping. It brings a critical view on the links between anti-doping policies and health promotion. It questions the relevance of doping controls targeting recreational and non-competitive sport instead of implementing specific programs for IPED users that end up with health problems. Further, the author suggests to give up the ideal of a doping-free future to be able to implement a harm reduction policy that is more relevant than testing, at least for this specific population.
However, we may express two regrets. The first is on the analysis relying on an evolutionary psychological approach to investigate the biological and psychological foundations of the quest for a muscular body. Although this perspective is stimulating, well referenced, interesting to read, it raises many questions. The author relies on evolutionary psychology to address critics of social sciences. No doubt that the biological and psychological dimensions of our bodies are of great importance. However, the evolutionary explanations on the supposed convergence in the perception of the “ideal body” and primal biological and psychological appeal to strength training is very debatable. Making the biology and psychology as the basis for the success of fitness marketeers, is very surprising because the author is often more nuanced and recognizes that evolutionary psychology cannot explain how appearances are shaped, used, valorized in a particular culture. Further, evolutionary psychology does not help to understand why sole a small fraction of males are using steroids to shape their body. It hardly explains the huge diversity of appearances valorized in societies that is identified in the anthropological, historical, and sociological literature. Indeed, there are numerous examples of heavy or thin bodies, at the opposite of the gym muscular body that were/are symbols of force, prosperity, or attractiveness.
The second regret is that the understanding of IPEDs in light of the identity construction is not more connected to other social sciences. Focusing on the identity construction is relevant since the experiences and appearances of the body are a resource in the affirmation of identity. However, because identity construction is highlighted as the plastic and mutable process, it places at the second row other approaches, more inspired by sociology, which may also explain how one becomes a drug user through a career or through socializations. Attention to the processes that drive gym goers to change their practices and consumptions, to the interactions that support “deviant” behaviors, could have been articulated to it. Yet, the centrality of the concept of identity does not give much room to the interactionist perspective. Goffman's “body gloss,” used to describe the ways individuals stage their body, Becker's analysis of deviance to analyze the consequences of the reactions of the surroundings in the reinforcement and the legitimization of their identity, or Bourdieu's research on social classes, life-styles and culture, could have certainly been more relevant to explain the diversity of conducts than an evolutionary psychology that tends to biologize behaviors. And preferences cannot just be explained by the inheritance survival patterns. Sociology of taste and lifestyle is certainly more relevant to explain the numerous differences in the perception of the body.
In conclusion, this book is a valuable contribution to the analysis of the Gym culture and to the understanding of IPED uses. It fits well into the existing literature. Klein's seminal study (1993) on competitive bodybuilders on the US West Coast was analyzing the emerging bodybuilding subculture as an hypermasculine, homophobic, and fascist culture in connection to male insecure identities. Monaghan's book (2001) offered to overcome the stereotypical demonization of the bodybuilding subculture and to understand how idealization of muscles is a resource to explore and test identities/masculinity rather than a means to face insecurity. Christiansen acknowledges that the quest for muscle can be influenced by the context of the so-called masculinity crisis but digs Monaghan's idea that being a bodybuilder is a reflected choice in which “ordinary gym users” muscular-body's experiences play an important role.
No doubt that it will be a reference for students and scholar interested in the gym culture and drugs. And finally, the book is also a very good incentive to engage an epistemological debate between scientific disciplines and traditions that do not look at sport and consumer culture through the same lens.
