Bro culture has brought body shame to men too

Idon’t need to tell you about the overwhelming pressures young women feel to look good. We’re supposed to have huge butts, skinny waists, massive boobs, tiny thighs, unicorn horns, 11 nipples . . . But you know this. I know this and, despite being a sensible, level-headed, well-educated young woman, I’ve starved myself, binged, thrown up, exercised excessively and cried on the floor for hours because I hate the way I look.

My one consolation in all this madness was that I thought we were getting better at calling out society’s obsession with hating our fleshy parcels. I thought we were slowly improving, encouraging body positivity, combating unrealistic media imagery and calling out Kim Kardashian for advertising diet lollipops.

But it turns out the beast of crippling body insecurity is back. And now it’s eating men up too.

If you’ve been keeping up with medical news over the past few years, or if you’re just under 35 and go to the gym, you’ll know that New Zealand has a spiralling steroid habit.

Customs seized 331 parcels of steroids at immigration borders in 2016, up from 89 parcels in 2009, but the drugs are still notoriously easy to smuggle in. Dealers boast about it, saying you can import the raw ingredients from China disguised as soup ingredients, and make between $30k and $40k a month in sales from them.

And apparently even that doesn’t meet the demand. The medical community has begun to catch on to it, with the massive rise in steroid usage headlining New Zealand medical conferences in recent years.

But the thing is that it’s not the elite athletes who are doping themselves up. It’s normal guys. Dr Emma Lawrey says the people who are using are typically guys in their 20s who go to the gym. ‘‘They’re just ‘gym bunnies’ who want to look good.’’

‘‘We have not found a lot of use among top athletes,’’ agrees head of Drug Free Sport NZ Graeme Steel, ‘‘but the use of steroids, peptides and the like appears to be growing across the community and in gyms. The availability seems to be greater.’’

Basically it’s normal dudes who are feeling the pressure to be constantly buff – and risking heart failure, infertility and strokes to do so. Growing up seeing guys use steroids has just been a normal part of my experiences. Steroids just appeared, alongside Woodys and a 1999 Toyota Corolla, as part of your average 18-year-old guy’s life.

And while the media chalks the steroid use up to rising male vanity, any veteran of the selfloathing game can call body shame when she sees it.

It’s not vanity, it’s insecurity. Young men are being told their bodies aren’t good enough any more. And as a feminist it’s heartbreaking, because it’s exactly the same way women are taught to hate their bodies. Look how well that turned out.

It starts with the rise of social media, which spams your brain with countless gym-rat ‘‘influencers’’ who pretend that the only way to get their perfect body is by clean eating and hard work. It sets the standard of beauty so high as to make you feel inadequate, and eventually you turn to steroids to achieve it.

Just as the average female model, who weighs 23 per cent less than the average woman, promotes unattainable beauty standards to women, now #fitspo figures do the same to men.

But then there’s a deeper problem in that, somewhere in the void of modern masculinity, the bro culture has emerged. Bro culture bellows at our boys that being ripped is the only way to get girls and look attractive.

It’s not vanity, it’s insecurity. Young men are being told their bodies aren’t good enough any more. And asa feminist it’s heartbreaking.

But most importantly it’s the key to being A Real Man. It’s just the same way young women get taught that being size 6 and having a wardrobe in 17 shades of beige is the path to successful womanhood. So you get skinny 17-year-old boys jumping on the juice, convinced it’ll solve the tangle of insecurity, frustration and uncertainty that sums up most of your youth.

The saddest thing about it is at least women have people to turn to in order to help escape this madness. If you’re a chick having a dark day, you can find body-positive role models everywhere from fashion blogs to Bonds adverts. But there’s no such thing as a plus-sized male model.

Dudes can’t even talk about getting a prostate exam. How will they ever deal with being trapped in a cycle of insecurity and self-loathing – complicated by illegal and potentially lethal drug habits?