Problematising anabolic-androgenic steroids in Australian media: Violence,crime and disordered masculinity

Abstract

As anabolic-androgenic steroid use has become more mainstream, so has media reporting on steroid-related problems and harms. The media is a particularly important site in shaping the social meanings of alcohol and other drug use, yet no research to date has focused on media representations of steroids and their effects. Informed by Bacchi’s post-structural method of problematisation analysis, we examine how the Australian news media problematises steroids and significant political effects produced by dominant problematisations. Australian news articles from 37 sources were electronically collected via the Factiva database during 2022, with 151 articles included in the final sample. In this article, we focus on the three most significant themes across the data. First, we analyse how steroid use is problematised in relation to alcohol use in public and men’s ‘natural’inclination to violence. We then explore how steroid supply and distribution is problematised as a matter of organised crime. Lastly, we analyse how steroid using subjects are constituted in relation to disordered masculinity and psychopathology, producing a range of negative material effects for consumers. We conclude by arguing that such media reporting is active in the normalisation of policies and interventions focused on pathologizing or criminalising individuals. As a result, the need for other credible policy responses, such as strategies for addressing steroid-related stigma, harm reduction policies and decriminalisation, tend to be ignored.

Introduction

Media interest in anabolic-androgenic steroids (steroids) is not new. The media has long reported on the suspected extent and implications of ‘doping’in bodybuilding and competitive sport (Seear, 2013) in part because of how issues such as nature, biology, gender and fairness are mobilised and contested in debates around doping and enhancement. The media has also had a long-standing interest in the relationship between steroids and social problems such as violence, organised crime, and ‘toxic’masculinity, which is perhaps unsurprising given that testosterone, widely understood as the male hormone, is proximal to public understandings of steroids. However, as Seear (2013) notes despite extensive media and public interest in steroid use, until recently, consumption was understood to be contained among professional athletes. Since 2010, however, illicit steroid use (i.e. those not prescribed or used for medical purposes) has become more widespread in Australia and internationally (Guerin and White, 2019; Sagoe et al., 2014), especially among young people, recreational gym goers, and specific occupations such as the police and construction workers (Begley et al., 2017; Sagoe et al., 2014). This increase in consumption may be related to the cultural normalisation of body modification and optimisation practices, and the widespread and normalised use of drugs and other pharmaceuticals in the pursuit of ‘looking good’. As steroids have been transformed from a ‘niche’concern to an issue with widespread public health and criminal significance, there has been a marked uptick in media interest in, and reporting on, steroids.

In what follows we explore how recent media reporting frames and problematises steroid use. Drawing on the work of the work of feminist, post-structural scholar Carol Bacchi and her method of problematisation analysis, we analyse how steroids are enacted as social problems – namely in relation to violence, organised crime and masculinity, and the effects of such representations. First, we explore how news media problematises steroid use in relation to men’s ‘natural’inclination towards violence and normative framings of alcohol’s effects. Following this, we explore the enactment of steroids as a problem of organised crime and draw attention to the insufficient criminal intelligence data used to justify this claim. In the final section we investigate how steroid use is problematised as symptomatic of disordered masculinity in the contradictory forms of vanity and body dysmorphia. To conclude, we argue that by primarily representing steroid use (and its supply) as a criminal and psychopathological issue, news media reporting has deleterious, real world effects. Such reporting instantiates dehumanising perceptions of steroid consumers and invites policies and interventions focussing on criminalisation and increasing penalties or psychological treatment. As a result, other credible (arguably more important) policy responses, such as strategies for addressing steroid-related stigma, harm reduction policies and decriminalisation, tend to be ignored.

Literature review: Alcohol and other drugs and the media

The relationship between social media and men’s steroid consumption has received much research attention. For example, there is a notable body of criminological and psychological research on the role of social media in steroid trafficking and the purported impacts of media representations and social media on steroid use. Research shows that social media and other online sources play a growing role in the advertising and supplying of steroids (Cox et al., 2024; van de Ven and Koenraadt, 2017), particularly to young men (Cox et al., 2024). Through the reproduction of unrealistic body and gender norms, social media is thought to increase men’s body dissatisfaction, which may result in greater use of dietary supplements and steroids (Griffiths et al., 2017; Hilkens et al., 2021). However, to date there has been no detailed research focusing on the constructions of steroids in news media, nor how these problematisations produce implications for the governing of steroid use and how steroid consumers are treated.

While there is no research on media representations of steroids specifically, there has been extensive research on how media reporting frames and enacts alcohol and other drug-related ‘problems’and shapes public understanding of related issues, such as regulation and alcohol and other drug responses (e.g. Beckett, 1994; Fraser et al., 2018; Taylor, 2008). Research shows that media reporting around alcohol and other drug use is often heavily distorted towards crime and deviance framings (Ekendahl et al., 2024; Hughes et al., 2011; Taylor, 2008), which has important implications for shaping stigmatizing attitudes around addiction. For example, media portrayals of drug-related crime often presents people who use drugs as monsters, threats or zombies (Gutsche, 2013; Liviu, 2018). As noted by Fraser et al. (2018) such accounts frame consumers as an uncontrollable danger to others. Importantly, by focussing on the drug itself and individual behaviour, other important social, cultural and historical issues that shape patterns of drug harms and outcomes are often silenced in the media such as ongoing systematic racism, criminalisation and inequality (Hartman and Golub, 1999; Kohm and Maier, 2023).

In this sense, the media plays a powerful role in creating and mobilising support for certain public health and crime policies by portraying social problems in specific ways (Hughes et al., 2011; Taylor, 2008). For example, the stigmatisation of people who use drugs reflects and reproduces broader perceptions of who is deserving of social and community support and those who should be subject to criminalisation and/or punishment (Fraser et al., 2018). Negative assumptions and stereotypes about people who use drugs also helps determine support for particular policies, forms of service provision (Lancaster et al., 2015) and harm reduction, such as needle and syringe programs and take-home naloxone. Given these material, political implications, understanding how particular issues such as steroid use become problematised in the news media and mobilised in governing is significant because such representations have material effects in terms of how the public perceives consumers and the kinds of responses and actions that arise as a result (Kohm and Maier, 2023).

One significantly influential framework for explaining the relationship between the media and society is the moral panic framework (Cohen, 1972; Omori, 2013). The concept of ‘moral panic’has historically been used to draw attention to the role of the media in defining and amplifying particular social problems. Typically focused on those deemed ‘deviants’(e.g. drug users) and deviant behaviour, the moral panic framework has been useful for illuminating how media representations inform and legitimise social and political responses to social problems by amplifying public concern and outrage and legitimising governmental responses. The moral panic framework has a long history in the study of alcohol and other drugs, particularly around media-driven moral panics around the use of certain illicit drugs. For example, hyperbolic descriptions of the dangers of cannabis (‘reefer madness’) and crack cocaine (‘crack babies’) are mobilised in uniquely gendered and violent ways to provoke fear and enact punitive responses (Armstrong, 2007; Liviu, 2013; Stringer and Maggard, 2016). While moral panic analyses have been used productively to explore how collective fear is stoked through media reporting and popular culture discourse (Falkof, 2018), as we argue below, in this article we mobilise a different form of critique. Whereas the moral panic framework is interested in the proportionate or disproportionate relationship between ‘real world’problems and media and cultural responses, and thus posits a binary between the two, in this article we understand the media as a site in which the politics and materiality of drugs are made. In this sense, we are not specifically focused on the ‘scale’of the problem, and thus legitimacy of reporting, or how particular reports correlate with legislation and policy development, but how the knowledge practices produced in media reported lend itself to particular forms of governance and rule (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016).

Approach

Our approach to news media reporting in this article is informed by poststructuralist approaches to reality-making, in which social phenomena, such as drugs, crime and drug effects are not understood as pre-given in nature but as material-discursive phenomena constituted through various socio-political processes (Fraser and Moore, 2011). To analyse the media construction of steroid use and its problematisation through links to violence, crime and disordered masculinity, we draw on Bacchi’s (2009) poststructuralist approach to problem-making and problematisation. This approach to policy analysis has been used productively to explore various problematisations in alcohol and other drug policy (Fraser and Moore, 2011; Lancaster et al., 2017), legislature and legal debates (Seear and Fraser, 2014) and clinical encounters (Savic et al., 2018). Bacchi’s approach builds on Foucault’s concept of ‘problematisation’as ‘the set of discursive and non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and the false and constitutes it as an object for thought’(1988, cited in Bacchi, 2012: 4). This approach understands problematisation as the governing practices that produce particular entities and relationships as problems and ‘these problematised phenomena become problematisations, the foci for study’(Bacchi, 2012). More recently, Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) have drawn on science and technology studies to argue that the knowledges produced in policy practices are critical to governing practices and the making of reality. The knowledge and social problems enacted in various kinds of political and public discourse constitute the kinds of solutions that are proposed and implemented (Bacchi, 2009; Seear and Fraser, 2014). In other words, problematising drugs and people who use drugs in certain ways can contribute to a narrow understanding of the problem, poor policy solutions and unintended negative consequences (Klein and Dixon, 2020). Bacchi’s methodological approach comprises six questions (Bacchi, 2009: 2)

1. What is the problem represented to be in a specific policy?

2. What presuppositions (background knowledge) or assumptions (about the world) underlie the representation of this problem?

3. How has this representation of the problem come about?

4. What is left unproblematic in the problem representation? Where are the silences?

5. What effects are produced by this representation of the problem?

6. How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?

These questions provided the basis for our analysis of news media reporting on steroid use. Guided by Bacchi’s questions, we aimed to identify the main problematisations enacted in news media reporting, the ways in which they are constituted (e.g. presuppositions and assumptions), and their political effects. In developing an analysis of the effects of problematisations, we tracked potential oversights and silences in these representations; and alternative ways in which these representations might be framed. Given the changes in media reporting of steroids we identified over the years, we also observe how these problem representations changed over time.

News articles were electronically collected via Factiva database during September and October 2022. The region was restricted to Australia as we are specifically interested in Australian media representations. In 2022 the first author engaged in a search for media articles published between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2021. This time frame was chosen due to reports of performance and image enhancing drugs (incl. steroids) notably increasing from 2010. Reporting may have increased in this period for a few reasons. First, prevalence data shows that people who reported last injecting steroids and other enhancement drugs started to increase from 2010, from 1%–2% to 6%–7% in subsequent years (Heard et al., 2020). Second, it was noted that seizure confiscations of performance and image enhancing drugs at the Australian border increased 106%, from the 2695 in 2009–2010 to 5561 in 2010–2011 (Australian Crime Commission, 2011). Our sample comprised a total of 37 newspapers, including the 10 most circulated and read newspapers in Australia. We have included all Australian news sources to obtain variety in terms rural and metropolitan sources, and local and national sources. In total 33.1% of the articles were reported on a national level, with 66.9% reporting on a regional level. Most articles were from New South Wales (NSW; 53.5%), followed by Queensland (QLD; 22.8%), Victoria (VIC; 11.9%) and Western Australia (WA; 11.9%). That news reporting in these jurisdictions may be higher because they report higher numbers of steroid seizures and/or arrests (Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, 2021).

In total 438 news articles were identified from 37 sources with 151 articles included in our final sample. Before the full analysis of all articles was conducted (KV), a sub-sample of the articles (the first 20 articles) were analysed by both authors (KV and RF) to refine inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the coding of the articles. The main reason articles were excluded were duplicate articles, a focus other than steroids, medical reporting, and a focus on animal doping or testing. The following search terms were used: ‘anabolic-androgenic steroid*’OR ‘anabolic steroid*’OR ‘anabolic agents’OR ‘image enhancing drug*’OR ‘image enhancing substance*’. We did not include the term ‘testosterone’as an initial search revealed that most publications related to the medical use of testosterone. The term ‘steroids’has been removed as an initial search showed that many articles related to corticosteroids and the medical use of steroids (e.g. for cancer treatment), or the metaphor ‘on steroids’(i.e. something being bigger, more intense or amplified than usual). Furthermore, in general media articles would first use the term ‘anabolic steroids’or ‘anabolic-androgenic steroids’before shortening it to steroids, resulting in these articles being picked up in our search anyway. The term ‘doping’has been removed as this is a term specific to the professional sport context.

A thematic analysis of the newspaper articles was conducted following the steps by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2019). Both a deductive and indicative approach were used. Codes were pre-developed based on Bacchi’s six questions of problematization (e.g., what problems are represented in the media articles) and previous research on steroids (e.g. steroids as a body image issue). We then inductively developed new codes and iterated existing codes while analysing. A sub-sample of articles were analysed by both authors (KV and RF) to test the coding framework and to ensure consistency across coding. Any discrepancies were discussed and resolved. All data was analysed in NVivo 12 Plus.

Our analysis identified several significant themes across the media reports, including cheating in sport, the health risks of steroids, the threatening social effects of steroids, and the prevalence of steroids in bodybuilding and fitness cultures. However, in the analysis that follows, we focus on the three most significant themes: (1) steroids, violence and alcohol; (2) steroid supply dominated by organised crime; and (3) steroid use as symptomatic of disordered masculinity (e.g. body image, vanity, childhood vulnerability). The article concludes by considering how these problematisations enact steroids as a particular matter of criminal, psychological and public concern and the kinds of political effects that are enacted and foreclosed as a result.

Analysis

Steroids, violence and alcohol

Many of the media reports reviewed here discussed steroid use in relation to crime, violence and public space. Before 2014, steroids were more likely reported in short articles in relation to the ‘facts’of possession and/or supply. For example, the Townsville Bulletin reported ‘Man fined for illegal steroids’(2009), while The Age reported ‘women arrested over steroid haul’ (2010). It is not until late 2013 that steroid use begins to be reported in more detail, notably in relation to crime, alcohol and violence in the night-time economy. Media reporting begins to use the term ‘roid rage’to describe outbursts of anger or violent behaviour attributed to steroids:

You hear about ‘roid rage’, mood swings which can affect your health and as we’ve said if people are using drugs on [a mining] site that is a danger to themselves and other people they’re working with, Sen Sgt Savage said. (Kalgoorlie Miner, 2013)

Roid rage fuelling violence [headline] (The Gold Coast Bulletin, 2014)

Pumped up and ready for rage [headline] – Steroids are pushing blokes to punch on. (The Courier Mail, 2014)

These headlines and media reports of ‘roid rage’problematise steroids as the causal factor in men’s uncontrollable, violent rage in public spaces. Underpinning this problematisation is the assumption that steroids enhance or amplify men’s natural inclination towards violence – notably with other men. Despite being a focus of much research, little consensus exists on the relationship between steroids and violence (e.g. see Ganson et al., 2023; Lundholm et al., 2015). Even when evidence is suggested for a positive relationship between steroids and violence, there is much debate and uncertainty about the nature of this relationship (Lundholm et al., 2010). For example, a recent meta-analysis of the association between the nonmedical use of steroids and interpersonal violence found it was unclear across most studies whether steroid use occurred before, during or after violent acts. In this sense, the existing research does not definitively support a causal relationship between steroids and violence (van de Ven et al., 2024). Recent research suggests that conversely, many consumers report feelings of wellbeing, strength and vitality rather than aggression or violence (Fomiatti et al., 2019; James and Wynn, 2022). Importantly, what is silenced in these media articles is that the relationship between steroid use and violence is contingent and complex, with there being several mediating factors, including gendered norms, social settings, laws and policing and harm reduction practices. Given that steroid use is now also much more widespread, this causal link is increasingly untenable, given that most consumers are not involved in public violence or subject to criminal attention. Notably, while steroid use is frequently framed as a factor for violence between men in public spaces, the experiences of others who regularly experience harassment or violence in public, such as women or LGBTIQ people are obscured, as well as family and intimate partner violence. In this sense, recent media reporting reinforces a simplified account of the relationship between steroids and violence, potentially leading to a policy focus on ‘spectacular’forms of violence, rather than the pervasive and insidious forms of violence that are less visible (Duncan et al., 2022b).

While these problematisation relies upon this masculine logic of men’s natural inclination towards violence, the propensity towards violence is also constructed through other relations and social actors too. For example, other news media reporting focuses on the ‘violent’combination of steroids and other substances, particularly alcohol:

Alcohol, steroids behind violence outbreak [headline] [. . .] He said the chances of someone displaying a tendency for violence would be heightened if using a combination of anabolic steroids and alcohol, which may explain the recent rise in incidents as more and more young men turn to steroids to achieve their desired physiques. (The Observer, 2014)

Steroid use has become more and more prominent in young Australian males, with local GPs warning of the dangerous combination of young men with ‘roid rage’going out and drinking to excess. (The Observer, 2014)

Steroids, booze and self-loathing: Why men are messed up [headline] [. . .] He is young, fit, works out and likes a drink. Yet he also has low self-esteem, is vain, may take steroids and often comes from a broken home. And he is angry. This dangerous cocktail has a generation of young Australian males in its sights – one that turns a knockabout bloke 1 minute into a knockout killer the next. (The Daily Telegraph, 2014)

These people [people who use steroids] might appear OK in a gymnasium situation, but become more of a challenge for everyone in society when you combine drugs with alcohol at night. (The Gold Coast Bulletin, 2014)

In the above examples, alcohol and steroids are linked together in such a way as to suggest a uniquely violent relationship. Alcohol-related violence is a subject of ongoing public and professional attention and policy intervention in Australia and internationally (Lindsay, 2012; Moore et al., 2020a), with young men identified as specific targets of concern due to concerns around excessive drinking and violence in night-time economies (Lindsay, 2012). Much has been written recently on how the construction of ‘alcohol-related violence’is constituted as a specific policy and research object to obscure men’s contributions to and experiences of violence (Duncan et al., 2022b; Moore et al., 2020a). In other words, alcohol is identified as an independent and anterior agent of violence beyond the gendered relations that are implicated in violent events. In the reports above, the ‘dangerous combination’of steroids and alcohol is problematised in relation to the capacity of steroids to amplify pre-existing normative understandings of alcohol’s violent effects. Further, as we describe in more detail later, the pre-existing identity category of the young man, with ‘low self-esteem’, is mobilised here as uniquely vulnerable to ‘this dangerous cocktail’. However, at the same time as identifying young men who use steroids as vulnerable to this combination, and therefore deserving help, media reports during this period also suggest that they are untrustworthy and prone to transforming into ‘monsters’and ‘killers’. As noted by Keane (2005) in relation to medical and psychological research, steroid use is transformed into a public health threat by framing the steroid consumer as ‘an antisocial, dangerous and excessively masculine subject’(p. 203).

In line with Bacchi’s fifth question about the kinds of political effects produced by this problematisation, we would argue that such reporting instantiates limiting and normative problematisations of men as natural perpetrators of violence. It should be noted that the news media elevates a specific kind of violence: that is, violence between men while neglecting other types of violence such as intimate partner violence and sexual violence. In line with recent research (Duncan et al., 2022a) which has found that policy problematisations of alcohol-related violence ignore the role of masculinity, these media reports simultaneously shore up normative understandings of men’s ‘nature’, while downplaying the role of gender and masculinity by privileging the casual role of substances such as alcohol and steroids in public violence. In this way, alcohol and steroids have become problematised with violence and safety as a particular matter of public concern. Such reporting paves the way for the forms of criminalisation and legislation focused on individual behaviour and drug consumption that became prominent during this period. Indeed, as James and Wynn (2022) note, the 2014 legislative amendment of steroids in NSW (Australia), which rescheduled steroids to a schedule 1 drug, reflected these fears that young men using steroids ‘would be powerless against the drug’s effects and would become antisocial, violent and excessively masculine. The ‘One Punch Laws’[which introduced tougher sentencing periods], sought to symbolically safeguard the public from that threat’(p. 6). In short, this pattern of problematisation in the media produces knowledge production that supports individualised, criminalised responses and governance rather than interventions that address masculinity in different social arrangements.

‘Criminals’and organised crime

During the same time period, reports about the supply of steroids being linked to organised crime also increased. Again, this is not surprising as the reporting aligns with the Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport report released by the Australian Crime Commission in 2013 (Australian Crime Commission, 2013). The report identified that organised crime groups were increasingly involved in the trafficking of performance and image enhancing drugs (with the main substance being steroids). Concerns about doping and criminal involvement in professional sport were also a focus. Media reporting in this period reflects the concerns raised in this report:

And the Australian Crime Commission warned that criminals could become major players in the distribution of peptides and hormones, with ‘steroid abuse’now heavily linked to outlaw bikie gangs. ACC acting chief executive officer Paul Jevtovic said organised crime groups were establishing a greater presence in the profitable and established performance and image enhancing drug (PIED) market. (The Advertiser, 2013)

Officer-in-charge Detective Sen Sgt Greg Savage said organised crime figures were known to traffic in anabolic steroids and the Australian Federal Police had noted an increase in incidents, adding the full extent of the drug problem was unknown. (Kalgoorlie Miner, 2013)

It was also acknowledged that organised crime has a heavy involvement in the importation, manufacture and distribution of steroids as a commodity of high illicit value. (The Chronicle, 2016)

Here, steroids are represented primarily as a law and enforcement issue, with the supply and distribution of steroids by organised crime, particularly bikie gangs, elevated as a significant concern. As a result, the problem of steroid use, becomes one of organised crime, with a focus on implications for policing. Although organised crime is a significant issue, research shows that much moral panic exists around organised crime groups, particularly motorcycle gangs (Katz, 2011). Violent incidents involving motorcycle gangs are often sensationalised by the media producing moral panics and emotionally-charged reactions from governments and publics, leading to the passage of quick legislation (Katz, 2011). By linking bikie gangs to steroid supply and distribution, the media reporting during this period has the potential to provoke fear and privilege knee-jerk legislative reactions. One such political effect that came to pass can be seen in Queensland (Australia), where the purported relationship between motorcycle gangs, gyms and the supply of steroids seemed to form part of the reasoning of the then-Premier to reclassify steroids to a schedule 1 drug as part of the Safe Night Out Legislation Amendment Act 2014 (Queensland Organised Crime Commission of Inquiry, 2015).

When critically engaging with what Bacchi refers to as the ‘background knowledge’(question 3) that underlies this representation, questions can be asked about the veracity of law enforcement and national criminal intelligence data that underpins the Organized Crime and Drugs in Sport report (Hughes et al., 2018). Generally, only a limited amount of information is released to the public, and data sources and methodologies used by these agencies are often unclear. For example, the Organized Crime and Drugs in Sport report mentions that the evidence for the involvement of organized crime is the result of only a 12-month investigation by the Australian Crime Commission, but no supporting evidence is provided (van de Ven et al., 2020). The media reports we have analysed here obscure the complexity in how evidence is assembled, constituted and deployed (Lancaster et al., 2011) through sensationalised problematisations of steroids. Importantly, in line with Bacchi’s fourth question about what is left unproblematic in the problem representation, we argue that the over-emphasis on the ‘organised crime problem’obscures other ways of knowing the problem and the development of credible public health responses. These may include innovative health and harm reduction responses, strategies for addressing steroid-related stigma, and education for primary healthcare providers and decriminalisation.

In addition, by portraying organised crime groups as dominating the illicit market of performance and image enhancing drugs, it ignores a significant body of research that shows that this group may play a limited role and that the supply of these substances is much more nuanced involving a wider variety of actors (Coomber et al., 2014; Hall et al., 2017; Paoli and Donati, 2015; van de Ven and Koenraadt, 2017; van de Ven and Mulrooney, 2017). While the binary distinction between consumers and suppliers governs popular perceptions and responses to steroids, studies have shown that both consumers and suppliers often do not describe suppliers as ‘real dealers’and instead portray them as friends or acquaintances who assist them in reaching their fitness goals (i.e. ‘social suppliers’). In other words, suppliers are often deeply integrated in the bodybuilding subculture (e.g. see van de Ven and Mulrooney, 2017), have diverse and contradictory motivations, and supply these substances for social and cultural reasons (e.g. as a form of harm reduction), in addition to commercial reasons. As a result, this focus on organised crime group not only obscures the development of policy responses outside of the criminal justice system, but also hinders more nuanced understandings of the complex commercial markets, settings and exchanges that shape steroid supply and distribution. There is the risk that this focus on the involvement of organised crime results in (overly) punitive policies including harsh sentencing guidelines. This, for example, hinders the consideration of different penal approaches for different supplier types in the criminal justice system (e.g. the implementation of proportionate sentences for non-commercial suppliers) (Coomber et al., 2018).

Disordered masculinity: Vanity or psychological disorder

Previous social research on performance and image enhancing drug use (including steroids) has identified how steroid use is often enacted in research as ‘a crisis in masculinity’. Men who use steroids are often framed as pathological and disordered in relationship to their own bodies and masculinity (e.g. through the category of body dysmorphia) or as drug abusers (Latham et al., 2019; Monaghan, 2002; Underwood, 2017). These findings are reflected in news media reporting between 2011 and 2017 through the tropes of vanity and psychological pathology. Often referred to as self-obsessed ‘gym junkies’, steroids consumers were often described as ‘vanity-obsessed’and ‘image-driven’:

Why men are dying on the altar of vanity [headline] [. . .] Still, denuding your old fella [related to a soccer player having nude pictures of a teammate] isn’t going to kill you, unlike the more dramatic manifestations of what is becoming a male self-obsession crisis. There was a remarkable story in the UK this week about Oli Cooney, who dropped dead at the grand old age of 20 from steroid abuse. Cooney was so fixated on his physique that, aside from punishing daily gym visits, he turned himself into a human pin cushion. He injected such staggering amounts of anabolic steroids that he had two heart attacks and three strokes before dying from his addiction, barely out of his teens. (The Advertiser, 2014)

Many also believe that the vain and vacuous world of social media and its absurd level of self-absorption contribute significantly to the problem. The he-men of past generations only had a mirror in which to admire themselves however nowadays they find equal minded individuals in cyberspace to which they can boast about physical prowess. (Daily News, 2014)

Steroid-users are collecting hundreds of syringes from non-profit needle exchange groups so they can dish out the drug to gym-junkies looking to bulk up (The Gold Coast Bulletin, 2014)

In many media reports during this period, motivations for steroid use were framed as a problem of narcissism and vanity. As argued by Tanner et al. (2013) in their book-length work on vanity, vanity ‘has been defined, valued and gendered in very different ways, and has manifested in a diverse array of contexts’(p. 2). Ideas of vanity play out in news media reporting on steroid use in relation to men’s purportedly ‘disordered’investments in their appearance and bodies. steroid consumers are problematised as men who display an abnormal investment in their appearance, characterised here as a crisis in ‘self-obsession’with fatal effects.

The representation of this problem is supported through psychological framings of consumers as highly susceptive to social and personal issues. These range from being bullied as children, having low self-esteem, insecure relationships with parents, and poor relationships with women:

Defence solicitor Bill Potts said Mellas had a long history of abusing steroids and had been planning to use all the tablets himself by taking 25 a day as part of his bodybuilding lifestyle that seemed to be ‘tied up with feelings of inadequacy regarding his relationship with his father’. (The Gold Coast Bulletin, 2009)

Doctors have growing concerns about a new generation of image-driven, angry young men. Short on self-esteem, they will seek out short cuts to masculinity – for some it’s steroids, for others bikie affiliations and tattoos. . . They will have rage and their relationships with women will be poor. (The Daily Telegraph, 2014)

In this context, steroid use is driven by dysfunction and psychological deficit, thereby silencing the idea that steroid use can be pleasurable, beneficial and/or functional. Obscured in such framings are the diverse motivations men report for using steroids; for example, personal gain, occupational reasons, muscle development and recovery, increased libido, greater confidence, and increased wellbeing and strength (Begley et al., 2017; Underwood, 2019). Importantly, highlighting that some consumers have pragmatic and thoughtful reasons for using steroids, and positive experiences of consumption and its effects, does also not deny that contemporary cultural norms and pressures around muscularity and masculinity, as well as mass marketing, are changing how men come to understand and work on their bodies. However, in the corpus of news media we analysed, a more nuanced perspective of men’s steroid consumption that acknowledges both agency and its constraints is missing.

While in some instances, an investment in the body through steroid use is characterised as vanity, vanity is sometimes rendered pathological through a growing focus on eating disorders and muscle dysmorphia. Muscle dysmorphia is defined as a type of body dysmorphic disorder characterised by the fixation that one is not sufficiently lean or muscular. Men who experience body image disorders are considered more ‘at risk’of using steroids (Griffiths et al., 2017; Pope et al., 2005). While a growing body of research suggests that men are concerned with body image (Murray et al., 2010), these kinds of narratives in media reports centre a pathological relationship between steroids, consumers and their own bodies:

Dr Murray estimates about 70% of bigorexia sufferers are injecting either steroids, human growth hormones or the horse drug clenbuterol. He has likened the disorder to anorexia, as patients suffer from a severe dissatisfaction with their body and said it stemmed from the rise of men’s magazines purporting images of the ‘perfect body’that ‘isn’t achievable without steroids’. ‘It doesn’t mean that everyone that uses steroids has muscle dysmorphia, but it is getting more common,’he said. (The New Castle Harald, 2013)

The Tweed man, who works as a security guard, said he started injecting steroids 2 years ago because of poor body image and low self-esteem. ‘I started using them to get bigger quicker. . .all the bigger guys in the gym were on them and I wanted to be as big as them’, he said. (The Northern Star, 2013)

The men who have bulked-up too fast, whose passion for fitness has tipped over into obsession. The ones who will never be satisfied no matter how hard they shred or how much body fat they lose. Their muscles are not just physical shows of strength. They are an attempt to forge emotional armour, says Sheather, a veteran personal trainer at Camperdown Fitness. ‘These guys are trying to fix their feelings of inadequacy by building their physiques’, he says. ‘They throw themselves into physical activity to have something to focus on other than those painful thoughts’. Muscle dysmorphia is anorexia’s burly counterpart. It’s the body dysmorphic disorder known as ‘bigorexia’that predominantly affects men. (The Age, 2017).

As we noted above, a very narrow range of resources are selected to explain why men use steroids. In this framing of psychological disorder, the tropes of poor self-esteem, addiction and dependence are privileged, obscuring, for example, the complex socio-political changes and forces that likely make steroid use attractive to many men. While these media accounts sometimes refer to the influence of social media (often via alarmist tropes of social influence and control), social research emphasises that changing social environments, technologies and gendered norms all help reshape preferences and ideals for the size and shape of bodies in any given society (Dowsett et al., 2023). Tanner et al. (2013), for example, argue that for men, ‘changing physical demands in employment and daily life in Western societies have reduced the need for physical strength but have paradoxically intensified the demand for hard, buff masculine bodies that signal health’(p. 60). By omitting other social forces from the purview of the dynamics shaping men’s steroid use, media reports elevate psychologically disordered motivations, in turn enacting the ‘evidence’for ‘crisis’.

In line with Keane (2005: 203), we find that media reporting on steroid use is located within a ‘framework of body image disorder and cultural psychopathology, constituting intense bodybuilding in men as analogous to eating disorders in women’. In line with Bacchi’s focus on subjectification effects, male steroid consumers are invited to relate to themselves as damaged and self-obsessed, and as exemplars of ‘contemporary masculinity in crisis’Keane (2005: 203). This problematisation makes it more likely for further governmental policies and interventions that target the psychology of the steroids consumer, leaving little room for alternative policy or service provision responses that consumers may find more credible.

Conclusion

As we noted earlier, there is a long history of outrage and concern about the role and function of drugs in society. Critical analyses of media reporting on alcohol and other drug-related ‘problems’have emphasised the predominance of crime and deviance framings over more nuanced depictions of the concerns and priorities of those who use drugs, and alternative, health-promoting or harm reduction responses. At the same time, decades of media-driven moral panics about illicit drug use have mobilised tropes of consumers as monsters, threats or zombies to stoke fear and discrimination towards particular substances and those who consume them. In this sense, this article contributes to a longer history of critique about how drugs are mobilised for political ends.

In this article we present findings of a critical analysis of Australian news media framing of illicit steroid use in the period 2009 to 2022. Informed by Bacchi’s (2009) poststructuralist approach to problematisation, we examined the role of the media in problematising steroid consumption and canvassed some of the implications of such framings for ‘how people involved are treated and evoked to think about themselves’(Bacchi, 2009: 1). In line with previous research on how steroid use is enacted in public discourse and research (Keane, 2005; Moore et al., 2020b), our findings show that the media tends to frame steroid use (and its supply) predominantly as a criminal and psychopathological issue. First, by portraying steroid use as causal factor for uncontrollable, violent rage, particularly amongst young men, the media propagates an assumption about men’s natural inclination towards violence. An increasing focus on the ‘dangerous combination’of alcohol and steroids use intensifies popular problematisations of young men as anti-social, dangerous and excessively masculine, making way for crime and order responses. Second, by problematising steroids as a problem of organised crime groups, specifically in relation to bikie gangs, steroids are again problematised as a law and safety issue, requiring tougher criminal and legislative responses. And finally, through its connections to disordered masculinity via the topes of narcissism and vanity, steroid consumers are problematised as having an abnormal investment in their appearance and suffering psychological disorder. In this way, media reporting on steroids reflects and reproduces long held moral panics about ‘contemporary masculinity in crisis’(Keane, 2005).

News media gives shape to problems in particular ways that are much more directly consumed by publics. In this sense then, following Bacchi, how the problem in media is constituted matters because it carries implications for how the issue is thought about and for how people involved are treated and are invited to relate to themselves. These media framings perpetuate the idea that all forms of steroid use are inherently risky and problematic. Indeed, by portraying steroid use as either a form of criminality or within a framework of psychopathology, media reporting encourages public concern about the risk of use, and contributes to support for punitive and criminal intervention and control (Keane, 2005) and knee-jerk legislative reactions (Katz, 2011). While we are not making the argument that media reporting directly results in specific policy decisions and developments, following the approach outlined in this article, we do argue that the media is a significant group which influences the shape of governing knowledges – of discourse – on particular topics.

In the reporting we have analysed here, other ways of knowing and responding to steroid consumption are obscured through these individualised, risk-based problematisations, and along with them, the development and implementation of innovative or considered policy responses. These might include strategies to reduce stigma and improve healthcare, harm reduction policies and decriminalisation, and that foster recognition of the agency of people who use steroids. Instead, the limits imposed by these problematisations buttress and provide support for the more punitive drug policies and responses to steroids that Australia continues to implement. Drawing on Bacchi, this article has taken steps to question the problematisations of steroid consumption presently being enacted in Australian news reporting. Through this critical practice of problem-questioning and thinking otherwise, we hope that by pointing to the limits of such problematisations and their material effects for consumers, the paper contributes to their dismantling and being made other.