“Oh my, the bigger and more fuller clit is amazing”: Reclaiming the female body through a women-only forum

Introduction

Historically, muscles and muscular bodies have been connected to men and masculinity. As a consequence, women´s engagement in muscle building has often been considered a threat to the “natural” gender order (e.g., dominant men, deferential women) and met with resistance and attempts to curb their participation. This might be particularly true in relation to women’s pursuits of strengthening, building, and in other ways molding their bodies with the help of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs). Although scholars agree that the majority of IPED users are still male and usually between the ages of 20 and 40 years old, there is also a growing consensus that women’s IPED consumption is increasing among a broader group of women with diverse motivations and bodily goals (Kotzé, et al., 2020). This is no longer the sole province of only bodybuilders. Yet this phenomenon remains relatively under-researched (Henning & Andreasson, 2019).

Online forums are one place where we can gain a view into women’s IPED use and the variety of ways they discuss and experience these substances. One such forum includes the women-only forum on this website. This forum is of particular relevance as it constitutes a rare case of a phenomenon that has been primarily investigated through the lens of men, muscles, and masculinity. We are interested in what happens when we move those factors to the side and women can put themselves and their own views, experiences, and bodies at the center of the discussion.

Advice for (and by) women

Like a lot of male-dominated online communities, a large number of topics introduced on the women-only forum concern use practices; for example, advice regarding which substances to use for what goals or how to deal with side effects. The questions and advice aren’t necessarily limited to women-specific issues and some are quite broad or general in nature. In some threads, however, the focus on women becomes explicit. One member explained her approach to possible side effects with IPEDs:

I’m okay with temporary acne (I used to have heavy breakouts as Teenager, so it might come back) and faster hair grow (but not in the face). I shave anyways daily while I’m in the shower. As for voice deepening and clit enlargement: This is a bit scary to me, so once I feel my voice crack, I’ll lower the dose (if possible) or stop it. As for clit enlargement, I’m not sure how to feel it? (If that makes sense). I mean, e.g. a swelling due to increased blood circulation isn’t the same as a “growing” process.

In contrast to a fanatical obsession with muscular hypertrophy overshadowing potential health costs, that has been found in studies of bodybuilding and powerlifting communities (Smith and Stewart, 2012), a more reflexive approach to drug use emerged here. The anxiety expressed in the excerpt above highlights an ambivalence towards some possible effects. Soon other women also responded to the worries noted by the original poster:

Oh my, the bigger and more fuller clit is amazing. I love it. It’s scary at first but once it happens, it’s the best. It all varies on how much your strength gains can be. If your training and nutrition is on point. You can gain 10-100 pounds in your lifts. The higher dosages you take the higher your lifts can increase. Side effects can happen at any dosage. We all have different body chemistry and muscle goals. When I’m on cycle and I notice negative effects, I keep going and pushing harder as long as I have good strength and energy. Some women will do what I do. Some women will get scared and quickly drop dosages at the first sign of anything negative.

This post reframes the negative (often masculinizing) side effects as indicators that other positive changes are happening at the same time. This post foreground the strength and energy gains while encouraging acceptance of some side effects in order to maximize muscle building. In a way, this is a shift in embodied understandings of femininity that pushes past gender norms to focus on pleasure and potential harm reduction. What is provided as a response to the worries of one woman is an alternative narrative for understanding the physical change occurring. Although there is still some ambivalence around masculinizing side effects, there is a clear shift towards centering positive (muscle growth) and pleasurable (clitoris enlargement) IPED experiences.

Although the discussions are predominantly in favor of IPED use, there are also posts that address less positive experiences, as in this post centering the female body and an unexpected side effect:

Ok, so, I’ve been taking birth control pills FOREVER and now that i am over 50 continue to take them for HRT. I haven’t had a period in years because i started taking them back to back without the placebo pills that constitute the last week of the pack. Well, at 8 weeks out from my show (I’m 4 weeks out now) i stopped taking them all together. to help reduce water retention. And….this morning I was entertaining a gentleman friend (er hmmm) and all of a sudden we both realize there was blood. Like I had started my period. WTF??? It wasn’t real serious, but it was there. I guess I should go back to taking half a pill a day to see if that helps correct this problem? I have avoided this for years! Ugh!!

One benefit of having a women-only space is that the women on the forum are able to discuss and reconceptualize their use in relation to physical conditions based on a normative female body rather than in relation to male biology. Historically, and especially in the history of medicine, male bodies have been set as the norm with women’s bodies understood as variations or deviations. Instead of being drawn into these othering processes, this forum makes it possible for women to use their own bodies as the norm and starting point for discussion of IPEDs. Even though the forum resembles male-dominated forums in some ways, here women don’t have to debate their use, justify subverting gender norms, or explain their aesthetic goals in an environment where criticism is to be expected.

Sis-science

By giving space for women to focus exclusively on their own experiences and bodies, women are also able to support one another by giving each other advice and support in a kind of coaching relationship. Through these ongoing discussions, women members are also contributing to the formation of a solid women-centered understanding of IPED use. Indeed, some women moved beyond just sharing their own experiences or offering encouragement to peers. For example, in response to questions on using and dosing nandrolone phenylpropionate (NPP), two women drew on their own knowledge and experiences in order to make specific recommendations, moving into a type of coaching or advisory role:

Gains are awesome but hard to keep after. Sides I experienced – voice change, facial not go back to normal after btw). Never was able to retain the gains after a cycle. I’ve cycled it 3 times and will never use again. My dose was 10mg every 3 days.
I will stick with Var, gh and primo now. My advice if you decide to run it, if sides are too much, drop that shit. Some sides will become irreversible. Keep that in mind. And good luck!!!

Females, I recommend a dose between 30mg-50mg per week split into doses taken every 3 days. Run it typically 8-12 weeks. Keep your diet super clean.

This type of coaching highlights both (potential) side effects and how use strategies are discussed by women on this forum. Women are offering and receiving support for their goals – developing their expertise and voice within the community – as well as normalizing women’s bodies, muscularity, and IPED use. By looking at this forum and different threads within it, we can see how such a culture of support and coaching was driven by women’s fellowship and how women drew on their own expertise to bolster other women’s ambitions. In doing so, the women-only forum helps not only to challenge conventional and male-centered understandings of IPED use, but also creates a narrative through which women´s experiences and knowledge can be presented and debated “uninterrupted.” As the women are necessarily limited in the utility of applying ethnopharmacological knowledge created in reference to men and male bodies (see Christiansen, 2020; Monaghan, 2012), they instead have broken ground and begun building a women-centered ethnopharmacology. Sex-specific knowledge and experiences of IPEDs and their impacts can then be diffused among the members, introducing a kind of “sis-science” (Sverkersson, Andreasson & Johansson, 2020) to counter the “bro-science” that underpins male-dominated forums.

Conclusions

Narratives and their explanatory logic are powerful, to the point that they may shape our understanding of history and culture, in which power and gender norms reside (Felski, 1995). Gaining some control or ownership of a relevant narrative can have important repercussions for community members. Narratives around IPEDs and muscles have generally revolved around, and been determined by, men. This made some clear sense, as men were and remain the primary consumers of IPEDs. However, as times change and new groups emerge onto the muscle building and IPED scenes, new narratives are required to accommodate diverse experiences.

The women-only forum on ThinkSteroids provides a communicative and narrative space in which women and their views and experiences are centered. This not only allows women to connect with one another directly – avoiding having their voices drowned out by men discourses – but it also enables a new women’s doping subculture to form. First-hand knowledge is created and disseminated by women sharing their own courses, results, and ways of managing effects, all of which contribute a sis-science culture of women’s use. In such an exclusive space, women are no longer interlopers or others. Instead, women are the standard and their bodies and experiences supplant those of men’s as the “unspoken” norm in debates and discussions. Women are further able to legitimize themselves as experts in this realm, asserting their knowledge in the form of direct advice to other women on things like dosing and use practices. By taking up such coaching positions, women are also staking their claims as experts on this topic and empowering other women to redefine and work towards new goals.

More importantly, and in contrast to much existing research (Christiansen, 2020; Henning & Andreasson, 2019), we can see how women are actively creating their own narrative of IPEDs and muscle building. These narratives are also important for what they don’t include, such as a primary focus on maintaining normative femininity or heterosexual attractiveness. Indeed, some women accepted or pushed acceptance of masculinizing side effects as part of being a woman who uses IPEDs. Rather than being a side story in male-centered narratives of IPEDs and muscularity, women on this forum are co-creating narratives in which use and practices are debated in terms of health, harm reduction, identity, and diverse body ideals.

About the author

April Henning

Lecturer at University of Stirling

April Henning is Lecturer of Sport Studies at the University of Stirling in the U.K. and has a PhD in sociology. She has published extensively in the fields of doping, health, and policy in the sport and fitness contexts. Recent books include Performance Cultures and Doped Bodies (with Jesper Andreasson) and Doping: A Sporting History (in press, with Paul Dimeo). She is an Associate Editor at the journal Performance Enhancement & Health and is a Director of the International Network of Doping Researchers.

Jesper Andreasson

Associate Professor at Linnaeus University

Jesper Andreasson holds a PhD in Sociology and is associate professor in sport science at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research can mainly be positioned within health, gender studies and cultural sociology, and he has published extensively about doping and doping use. Recent books are Performance Cultures and Doped Bodies. Challenging categories, gender norms, and policy responses (2021, with April Henning);  Fitness Doping. Trajectories, Gender, Bodies and Health (2020) and Extreme Sports, Extreme Bodies. Gender, Identities and Bodies in Motion (2019, both with Thomas Johansson).