The Work of Women on Steroids

Inside the secret world of steroids for female athletes, bodybuilders, influencers, and muscle mommies

The Baffler just dropped Petra Browne's interesting article on the "schmoe economy" underwriting female bodybuilding, which has prompted me to republish my 2018 Mel Magazine¹ investigation into steroid use by women. While Browne's piece maps the institutional forces that created this quagmire, mine gives you something rather different: the unfiltered voice of a woman who's been living it for twenty years.

Browne traces the economic pressures that push female bodybuilders into fetish work — the prize money gap ($50,000 for Ms. Olympia vs. $400,000 for Mr. Olympia), the collapse of sponsorship opportunities after the dot-com bust, the systematic elimination of women's bodybuilding from major competitions. She draws on Alan Klein’s excellent work to show how the Weider empire controlled the sport from the beginning, using women as magazine covers to deflect gay panic while building a quarter-billion-dollar empire.

However, when Jane tells you she switched from Anavar to Masteron because the cost-to-benefit ratio was better, she's giving you information you won't find in any Klein’s book (or almost anywhere else, for that matter). When she explains why women's longer, lower-dose cycles work better than the male approach of short, intense blasts, she's sharing knowledge that could literally prevent someone from getting hurt. When she describes buying fake Anavar that turned out to be Dianabol, she's documenting a harm reduction problem that affects women every day.

Browne's piece focuses on the "schmoe" economy (the men who pay for wrestling sessions and muscle worship) as the dirty secret propping up women's bodybuilding. She's right that it's widespread (both she and my source estimate about half of female pros participate), and she's right that it represents a form of exploitation. But what her analysis misses is how the steroid knowledge gap makes this exploitation worse.

Jane describes a world where women get their drug information from "contest prep gurus" who are basically drug dealers with websites, recommending the most expensive compounds because they generate the highest profits. She talks about women getting advice from boyfriends who think halving a male dose makes sense, or ending up with completely different drugs than what they ordered.

Browne explains how we got to a system where women's achievements get systematically erased, with the gradual elimination of women's bodybuilding from the Olympia and Arnold Classic, the creation of increasingly restrictive categories designed to keep women smaller and more "feminine." But Jane shows you what that erasure feels like from the inside. Her anger about the lack of solidarity from male competitors (such as her fantasy of Phil Heath saying "I'm going to boycott if you cut this because these women are my colleagues") slices deeper than policy analysis because it's so very personal.

When Jane talks about using steroids because she wants to be "more than," not "less than," she's articulating something that goes beyond bodybuilding. She's talking about taking up space in a world that constantly tells women to shrink. At 5'3"² and 150 pounds, she sees her physique as a political act. When strangers on the subway ask if she's trans, when they call her "sir" or "bro," she's experiencing the consequences of refusing to conform to narrow ideals of femininity.

This connects to the dynamics Browne describes. The same discomfort with women who are "too strong" or "too muscular" that drives men to fetishize female bodybuilders also drives the institutional erasure of their achievements. The IFBB's 2014 decision to cancel Ms. Olympia wasn't about money. It was about comfort levels. Bob Cicherillo's comment that "beautiful, sexy and muscular do not make a harmonious package" reveals the aesthetic ideology underlying the economic decisions.

Browne's piece explains how economic pressures push women toward fetish work, but Jane explains why some women make different choices, or at least work the fetish economy in different ways. She tested the waters but found her hardcore patrons "too weird. " Even though she needed to money, she couldn't handle being paid $700 to have someone "squat you and then you come all over my back."

The elimination of women's bodybuilding from major competitions isn't ancient history. It happened less than a decade ago, and the reverberations are still being felt. Jake Wood's Wings of Strength subscription operation and accompanying bodybuilding shows, which Browne correctly describes as funded by fetish subscription revenue before faltering due to competition from free pornography/OnlyFans/Instagram,³ represents a complicated rescue indeed. The sport of women's bodybuilding had been saved, at least for a spell, by the men who sexualize it.

What's particularly noteworthy now is that this economy appears to be exploding on Instagram. As far as I can tell, Browne doesn’t have the space or time to fully capture how social media has become not just the new frontier but an overcrowded hot mess of muscular bodies. Women like veteran strongman athlete Brittany Diamond (see below) are creating Amazon-style content directly on the platform, maintaining their followings by showcasing their size in ways that blur the line between fitness content and fetish material. The accessibility is unprecedented: These women are just a DM away from potential clients/customers, they’ll appear in your algorithm-spawned recommendations the more you look at them, and the ensuing visual feast is constant, free, and decidedly Goon Hand-friendly.

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The male demand Browne analyzes isn't diminishing, either. Supply has created demand, and demand is driving this work right into the mainstream (Rhea Ripley, the WWE’s most popular female wrestler, is billed as a Chyna-lite "muscle mommy"). When muscle worship content appears in your Instagram feed alongside workout tips and meal prep videos — it’ll eventually push out the latter two if you click on the former enough — the fetish is being normalized in ways that would have been impossible in the forum era Jane describes or much of the period about which Browne writes.⁴ The economic pressures are likely intensifying too, as more women enter a market where standing out requires increasingly extreme physiques and increasingly intimate access.

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But we're not getting the "tea, sis" from these women about what this new landscape actually feels like to navigate (and thus cannot construct an adequate "thesis" about the state of their work). Are the safety concerns different when your client acquisition happens through social media? How do you manage boundaries when your entire brand is built on accessibility? What does the steroid knowledge currently gap look like when your main competition is other women posting their physiques daily?

Beyond what Browne and I have done, we desperately need what historians might call "prosopographical" reporting that centers a host of their voices and experiences in a single narrative. In other words, we need to hear from the women themselves. Jane's voice — angry, practical, uncompromising — cuts through decades of institutional bullshit to tell you exactly what's happening and why it matters. Alas, she’s in her late 40s now and more or less retired from the muscle game. Someone somewhere needs to gather all of these women, like the two seen above here, and get them on the record and into the discourse in a thoughtful way. Because it’s one thing for them to tell you stuff via DM so you can write it anonymously; it’s another to let the world know that this is what you, the person named and seen here, have been going through. Of course, I get why we’re not getting it: it’s the same reason Jane didn’t use her real name in the article that follows.

In any event, that article is being republished because more of these conversations need to happen in the open, not in the shadows. Because the silence that Jane documented six years ago hasn't been broken. Because women deserve better than the current system of economic exploitation. Because taking up space, both literally and figuratively, is still a radical act, and the women doing it in 2025 deserve to be heard in a story just as big as they now are.

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Steroid use, while far from normalized or acceptable, has become much more commonplace since the advent of the internet. It’s now easier to learn about steroids, easier to sell steroids, easier to purchase steroids, and thanks to the miracle of social media, easier to showcase steroid-enhanced bodies than ever before. Hell, for people like ex-baseball star Jose Canseco and recently deceased celebrity bodybuilder Rich Piana, it’s become much easier to talk openly about using and abusing these drugs for fun and profit.

Easier for men, anyway. Women who use steroids remain extremely circumspect, often discussing the topic only in the context of public apologies of the sort made by disgraced record-setting sprinter Marion Jones or serving as a source of public ridicule since they’re a “woman who has turned into a man,” as in the case of East German shot-put champion Andreas Krieger (formerly Heidi Krieger).

Of course, women do use steroids, and steroids are often extremely effective for them. Countries that employed systematic state-sponsored steroid doping programs, such as East Germany and the Soviet Union, did extremely well overall in international competition but absolutely cleaned up on the women’s side of the ledger. Today, the People’s Republic of China, which has yet to be exposed in the way the former USSR and GDR have been, is dominating many women’s events in a similar manner. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Jones, a two-sport star at the University of North Carolina, took an already-impressive natural physique, and with the pharmaceutical assistance of her then-husband and star shot-putter C.J. Hunter and the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), became a GOAT on the order of fellow BALCO client and all-time home run king Barry Bonds.

“It’s still verboten for women to talk about their steroid use,” says fitness journalist Anthony Roberts, the author of Anabolic Steroids: Ultimate Research Guide. “Women who use steroids conjure up images of Chyna and Nicole Bass with those messed-up faces from prolonged hormone abuse. Even those women whose careers clearly depend on steroid usage, at least at very low levels, won’t discuss it. Right now, there’s no female bodybuilding star who is open about taking steroids; there’s no outspoken female steroid expert. Women who rely on steroids to sell the sports nutrition products they endorse have to pass themselves off as ‘fake naturals’ in a way that men don’t. And it’s weird, because more women are lifting weights and doing strength-building exercises than ever before. It’s a terrible double-standard that benefits men. Women are forced to stay quiet, or even worse, lie about what they’re doing.”

Over the years, Roberts has advised, consulted with and interviewed hundreds of women involved in professional bodybuilding. “It’s pretty common to hear folks say things like ‘even women’s fitness competitors use a low dose of Anavar or Winstrol here and there, maybe some [of the decongestant and bronchodilator stimulant] Clenbuterol,’” he says. “This is absolute bullshit. Competition level doses I’ve seen for women are much higher than people think, never less than 10 milligrams of Anavar, stacked with an equal amount of Winstrol and a bunch of Clenbuterol. I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a female bodybuilder or fitness girl’s drug program and not seen growth hormone in it.”

“The side effects I’ve seen are manageable, and only temporary,” Roberts continues. “Permanent deepening of the vocal cords and clitoral enlargement are very uncommon, while the most common side effect is the growth of body hair and the loss of hair from the head. As for acne, if you had clear skin your whole life, the addition of steroids won’t likely produce much of it, whereas users who had breakouts during their teen years often see them recur if they use anabolics.”

“To be perfectly frank,” Roberts adds, “most of the drugs that so-called male ‘contest prep gurus,’ also known as drug dealers, recommend for their female clients are steroids that are used in the world of male bodybuilding as cutting agents. This includes Anavar, Primobolan, Proviron and Winstrol. These steroids don’t provide huge weight gains but do provide high-quality gains of muscle and little water retention. Sounds great, right? This is surely why men recommend these drugs to women. Of course, these are also among the most expensive anabolics on the market, and thus provide healthy profits to the male ‘gurus’/drug dealers who recommend them.”

However, Roberts concedes that there is only so much either he or I could say about the use of steroids by women. A conspiracy of silence surrounding this topic made it difficult to get women to talk on the record, understandable given the continuing cultural stigma directed at the practice. That said, one of Roberts’ friends and former clients, a National Physique Committee and Strongman athlete who has been sponsored by various supplement companies throughout her two-decade career, agreed to speak with me under the condition that, owing to the constraints of her full-time job, her identity be kept secret — a regular “Jane Grow.”

The rest of this story is Jane’s, as it should be.

Jane’s Story

I’m from New York City, where steroid use has been mainstream for a long time. I dare you to visit a New York or New Jersey gym and not find some random dudes who are using steroids recreationally — to enhance their beach bods or look good in the mirror. As for me, well, I’ve lifted weights since my late teens.

People at the gym would say, “Wow, what are you training for?” and I had no answer. So I fell into bodybuilding as a form of competition, because how many other sports outlets are there for adults to compete? I competed naturally for a little while, then began dabbling with drugs like Primobolan [a mild steroid with no propensity for producing estrogenic side effects]. I took a break to start a family, and when I returned to the sport in my early 30s, I realized I was competing with other people who were already juicing, although I didn’t talk to them much about it. But I understood I was handicapping by not using performance-enhancing drugs.

In terms of gaining access to steroids in the pre-internet era, you could basically go to any gym in the Tri-State area [New York, New Jersey and Connecticut], strike up a conversation with a meathead, and get what you needed. Of course, most of these bros had some really dumb ideas about steroid dosages for women. They might be taking 50 milligrams of Anavar, and their thinking was, “Okay, take half my dosage.” That’s terrible advice, because it’s too high a dose for a woman to start with.

Therein was the problem: Women were going to men for access to steroids and advice about steroids, not to each other. I actually got to know Anthony [Roberts] in part because one of his earlier books had interesting, useful stuff about dosing that was directed specifically at women and supported by detailed research and investigation.

In terms of how my body reacted to steroids, well, you’re obviously going to do better at the gym. My recovery times were faster, I gained more size and I generally felt healthier and stronger. I would do a cycle for 10 weeks, because with women longer, lower-dose steroid cycles work better, whereas men do better with shorter cycles and higher dosages. Hormonally… well, we’re already hormonally screwed up to begin with.

I went through my second full cycle a few months after my first. At that point, I tried Anavar at the 5-milligram level — since then I’ve gone much higher than that — but I eventually realized this was a bad drug to use, since the cost-to-benefit ratio is low, and unless you’re buying from a trustworthy source, it’s often a faked compound. You’re sold Winstrol or even Dianabol [a potent steroid with many dangerous side effects].

This happens a lot. As I said, women often don’t talk to other women, and the results can be disastrous. Women end up relying on deceitful or dumb trainers, boyfriends and husbands who don’t have the slightest clue. In some ways, we’re going backwards, since in the early 2000s there were some private internet forums where women would gather to discuss side effects and results. The one I remember most clearly was moderated by Chad Nicholls [the husband of four-time Ms. Olympia Kim Chizevsky and the “contest prep guru” for Dallas McCarver, a bodybuilding star who died of a heart attack last year and whose autopsy revealed testosterone levels elevated far beyond anything else on record].

In fact, most of the moderators and administrators of these forums were men, now that I think about it, and sometimes the men butted in more than we would have liked, but they were reasonably safe spaces for discussing these topics. There was a woman-specific forum called “Sioux Country” that had a male admin who became this kind of creepy “white knight” savior. The discourse on there was pretty vibrant, but you always ran the risk of shit like that happening.

Now these forums are long gone. You can’t even find traces of them via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In addition to the posts from people like Anthony, who was a legendary expert on those forums, I remember these amazing, woman-specific posts from someone using the nickname “NPCChica.” I referred to them all the time early in my bodybuilding career, but now they’ve disappeared from the record.

Since the forums dwindled, most of my steroid talk with women hasn’t occurred in real life except for a few competitors in my area. Now that I’m doing Strongman events, most of the women I train with don’t discuss it at all. Certainly some of these women are using, but likely not to the extent women in bodybuilding are. The best people are probably always using, but it’s not for me to determine who is using what, nor do I care. Is [tennis star] Serena Williams doping, or is she just very thick-bodied? Hard to say, because she doesn’t have enough fat-free mass for me to make an accurate judgment.

The same goes for fitness models. If they’re using something like [bronchiodilator / stimulant] Clenbuterol, that’s nothing. A person on Clen is a natural, in my book. But women’s bodybuilding at the highest level did require significant steroid use to achieve that fatless, hypertrophied look.

I loved that look. The decision by the International Federation of Bodybuilding to demonize and then kill the women’s bodybuilding Olympia [in 2015], after years of dominance by [10-time Ms. Olympia] Iris Kyle, was unforgivable in my book. I participated in those shows and attended those shows because I wanted to see freakshows; I wanted to see the best of the best. And Iris Kyle, in terms of symmetry and muscle development, was the best. Nor was she huge, even if the way the media talked about female bodybuilders was that they were these hulking monstrosities. Kyle was 5-foot-7 and weighed 150 to 155 pounds onstage, maybe 175 pounds in the offseason.

It wasn’t a lack of interest that led to women’s bodybuilding disappearing from the Olympia and Arnold Classic stages, the two biggest events of the bodybuilding calendar. The Wings of Strength Phoenix Rising event, which showcases women’s bodybuilding, pays out good prize money and has plenty of sponsors. It’s a big deal. Yet when women’s bodybuilding was removed from these events, it was pushed into its own boutique area. I was astonished at the lack of solidarity shown by male competitors. Can you imagine if even one top male bodybuilder had stood up for us? If one of the big stars, like Phil Heath, had said, “I’m going to boycott if you cut this because these women are my colleagues?” I haven’t gone to an Arnold or an Olympia since women’s bodybuilding was cut.

I’m still angry about that. All our lives, women are told to be “less than.” As a trainer, what do my female clients say to me? “I want to lose my love handles.” Or: “I want to lose this underarm fat.” Whereas a male client will tell you exactly what they want to accomplish: “I want to get real strong.” All our lives, women are shrinking, vanishing, disappearing. Then the IFBB, this organization that should be helping all of us achieve our goals since we’re paying them megabucks in competition fees and membership dues, publishes these memoranda saying women should “downsize” by 20 percent. Bullshit. I use steroids because I want to be “more than,” not “less than.” I want to take up space. I’m only 5-foot-3, but I weigh 150 pounds. I take up space. I want to see other women take up space, too. I want them to spread out across the stage, as big as training and chemistry allow them to become.

I’m talking to you about all this because I desperately want there to be more candor, more honesty. I want to be able to go on the record with the life that I lead. I want women to help each other use steroids, not men holding themselves out as “gurus” who say shit like, “Women can’t take this drug, that’s a man’s drug.” There are a handful of private, secret Facebook groups that function a bit like the forums used to, but there are men on there, too. They’re the ones mansplaining what to take and often selling the women the steroids and other drugs they need. These men consider themselves “experts” and their windbag pronouncements may carry more weight than the opinion of a woman who has used her body as a laboratory and can tell you which drugs work for her and which ones don’t.

Basically, bodybuilding is the sport of steroid chemistry. There’s training and nutrition, too, but at the upper ranks, you must know steroid chemistry. I can tell you right now, having competed on growth hormone, that it’s just way too expensive as a drug, and if you combine it with insulin-like Growth Factor, you can end up with fibroids, tumors and diabetes. But GH really does help out with your skin. Your skin will look great.

Lots of women love Clenbuterol, but I don’t care for it — or need it. My drug of choice is Masteron. It’s a steroid that has mild anti-estrogenic properties and used to be given to women for breast cancer; look at the etymology of that brand name [“mastos” is Greek for breast]. It’s fantastic for retaining strength during a caloric deficit, has few side effects at the low dose I use and pairs well with Winstrol when you’re hardening your body for a major bodybuilding competition.

As much as I like Strongman sports now, I loved bodybuilding. You’re working to create a picture of perfection at a certain point in time. You can create the physique of a superhero, and then, months or years later, you can look back at the pictures and marvel at how cool you looked. And when you’re backstage with all these other female bodybuilders, you fit right in. It’s amazing. All these women who are suddenly “more than,” not “less than.” We’re all the same back there. We’re not competitive at all. We’re checking each other’s wardrobes and makeup. We’re all in it together. There’s such tremendous solidarity. My one real regret is that when you go out there and perform, you’re doing it in front of judges who are primarily male. There aren’t enough female judges, women who understand what a muscular woman’s body should be, just men who bring with them their own biases.

Recently, I almost got in a fight with a guy on a train. “Are you a dude or a girl? Are you trans?” People say that more frequently than could ever imagine. And when they ask me this, I think, You don’t have any muscle, so I guess you’re a girl. Imagine approaching a skinny man and asking him if he’s a crack addict or suffering from wasting sickness associated with AIDS. I’m just a short woman with fake breasts and large muscles walking down the street. I can’t even fathom what bigger women encounter.

But behind the scenes at bodybuilding shows, with other women who look like me, with many women who are using steroids like me, it’s totally different. Everything we’ve done to ourselves is intentional. We wouldn’t trade these skinsuits we’ve made via chemistry and training for anything in the world. Any other sport you’re doing, from NASCAR to baseball, you leave your tools and your gear in the shop. I can’t put my body down and leave the house as anyone but me. That’s why when we go out, ignorant douchebags sometimes refer to us as “sir” or “bro.” Still, we’d never dream of doing anything but treasuring this one spectacular moment when none of that crap matters. Up on that stage, we’re everything we hoped and dreamed we could become.

1. May it RIP.

2. Probably closer to 5’1”.

3. Say it with me: It’s all one thing. If you want to see some interesting material related to all this, check out the obvious (Killer Sally on Netflix, a so-so documentary with good vintage muscle footage) and the obscure (Highway Amazon, which Browne mentions but doesn’t link to because almost no links exist, plus hers is a print piece…but here’s a link anyway, to the trailer at least).

4. Whether professional bodybuilding for women finds a way ton continue existing — Browne’s concern and Jane’s, to an extent — is not mine (although I am, as always, sad that some athletes have lost their performance outlet). However, that ship has sailed. Something else is happening. We fitness journalists and historians must outline the shape of the river.