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Atkinson is with Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK.

Sociology of Sport Journal, 2007, 24, 165-186 2007 Human Kinetics, Inc.

Playing With Fire: Masculinity, Health, and Sports Supplements

Michael AtkinsonLoughborough University

Canadian men flock to gyms to enlarge, reshape, and sculpt their bodies. Fitness centers, health-food stores, muscle magazines, and Internet sites profit by aggres-sively selling sports supplements to a wide range of exercising men. Once associated with only the hardcore factions of male bodybuilders (Klein, 1995), designer protein powders, creatine products, energy bars, ephedrine, amino acids, diuretics, and growth hormones such as androstenedione are generically marketed to men as health and lifestyle-improving aids. This paper explores how a select group of Canadian men connect the consumption of sports supplements to the pursuit of established masculinity. I collected ethnographic data from 57 recre-ational athletes in Canada and interpreted the data through the lens of figurational sociology. Analytic attention is thus given to how contemporary discourses and practices of supplementation are underscored by middle-class understandings of masculine bodies in a time of perceived gender crisis in Canada.

Les hommes canadiens se ruent vers les gymnases pour dvelopper et sculpter leurs corps. Les centres de conditionnement physique, les magasins daliments-sant, les revues de musculation et les sites Internet en profitent en leur vendant agressivement des supplments sportifs . Autrefois associs aux factions dures du culturisme masculin (Klein, 1995), les poudres protines, les produits de la cratine, les barres nergtiques, lphdrine, les acides amins, les diurtiques et les hormones de croissance sont maintenant vendus aux hommes en tant que produits amliorant la sant et le style de vie. Cet article explore comment un groupe slect dhommes lient la consommation de supplments sportifs la qute dune masculinit tablie . Jai collig des donnes ethnographiques auprs de 57 athltes de niveau rcratif au Canada et les ai interprtes la lumire de la sociologie figurative. Analytiquement, je me suis intress la faon dont les discours contemporains et lutilisation des supplments sont associs une comprhension petite bourgeoise des corps masculins au moment dune crise des genres au Canada.

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The Rise of Sports SupplementationThe sports supplementation industry is currently booming in Canada. Estimated

annual sales of sports supplements, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, were approximately $1 billion in 2005 (www.agr.gc.ca). Legal, over-the-counter products like creatine, whey protein, thermogenic fat burners, and human growth hormone enhancers are now ubiquitous across Canadian marketplacessold anywhere from grocery stores to school cafeterias to petrol stations. While some ready to eat products, such as protein bars, are rather inexpensive (ranging from $2 to $5 for a single servingvery similar to price points of other fast foods), others are considerably more expensive (ranging in price from $75 to $100 for a weekly or monthly dosage). Sports supplements were once the esoteric dietary staples of elite-level athletes or competitive bodybuilders but have emerged as accessible for those seeking to lose weight and/or gain muscle or for those simply wishing to look healthier.

The ostensible link between supplementation and the desire to appear outwardly healthy is understandable given contemporary cultural conditions in Canada. The boom in supplementation sales is occurring at a time when more Canadians than in any other historical era are diagnosed as obese, believed to be confronting health crises, and afraid of disease (Pronger, 2002). Monaghan (2002) noted the recent promulgation of physical regimes of control (such as bodybuilding) that have emerged in the middle class as a response to a fear of the epidemics. White, Young, and Gillett (1995) similarly outlined the current moral imperative to appear fit and healthy within a crisis of physical decay in Western cultures. Indeed, the dramaturgical performance of identity remains closely tied to physical discipline, especially as that work pertains to food consumption and the display of healthy, fit, toned, and contained bodies.

The public use of sports supplements is vastly under-studied by academic researchers or food and drug regulators in Canadian sports cultures. A series of media scares and moral panics regarding the presence of high doses of ephedrine in certain sports-supplement products during the early 2000sparticularly follow-ing the mysterious on-field deaths of American football player Corey Stringer and American baseball player Steve Belchercalled sociological and popular cultural attention to the dangers of sports supplements. Despite a momentary concern over the contents of sports-related weight gain or loss supplements, the supplement pro-duction and distribution industries are once again relatively unfettered in Canada. The subject of supplementation has also remained off of the proverbial sociological radar screen despite the ever-expanding literature on drugs, medicine, and cultures of precaution in the literature (Safai, 2003).

Sociologically speaking, very little is known about the noncompetitive, rec-reational athletes consumptive networks of legal supplement use in Canada or how users give dietary or health aids meaning. Social scientists have heretofore overlooked the process of sports supplementation as a legitimate area of inquiry, despite emergent concerns about and research on the popularity of steroids and illegal supplements in exercise cultures (Monaghan, 2002), epidemics of body dysmorphic disorder and pathological eating behaviors among young boys (Pope, Phillips, & Olivardia, 2000), and investigative media analyses of loose regula-tion in the sports supplement industry (Corbett, 2003). A lexicon of kinesiological

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research documenting the impact of sports supplements on athletic performance and highlighting the popularity of supplementation (Pipe & Ayotte, 2002) might also encourage sociologists of sport to study the social aspects of supplementation.

What researchers presently understand about the social dynamics of legal sports supplementation is, for all intents and purposes, rather cursory. The primary consumers of the sports supplements are men, especially young men ages 16 to 30 (estimated as consumers of 80% of supplements sold in North America). We believe the most popular over-the-counter, legal supplements are creatine and whey protein, and that supplementation cuts across class, ethnic, religious, and sexual preference categories (Metzl, Levine, & Gershel, 2001). Yet, as clinical psychologists argued, the primary consumers are young, White males in the middle class (Cafri et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2000). The extant literature on the medical use of sports supplements reveals an overrepresentation of White, middle-class, and urban males as the primary consumers of the legal supplements. However, beyond a litany of preliminary descriptive statistics, social scientists know incredibly little about the sports supplementation process or the meanings attributed to supplementation within athlete cultures (Metzl et al., 2001).

I explore the sports supplementation process within a core group of White, male, middle-class, recreational athletes/bodybuilders in southern Ontario, Canada. Importantly, men who consume illegal supplements are not included in this research. The term supplements is used in this paper, then, in reference to performance enhancers sold commercially and legally in the province of Ontario, Canada. The mens supplementation processes are analytically linked to shifting social construc-tions of masculinity in the Canadian middle class and the degree to which a body modification practice such as supplementation is potentially dialogical with the changing roles, statuses, and identities of White, Canadian, middle-class men. The increased degree to which the men are supplementing is argued to be a product of what Elias (2002) referred to as a psychogenic change in their personality structures. Such psychogenic change is occurring concomitantly with sociogenic change in Canada, including pronounced alterations to work, educational, political, and economic practices that affect broader ideological interpretations of masculin-ity in the middle class.

Theoretical UnderpinningsFigurational sociology (Elias, 2002; Dunning, 1999) serves as the analyti-

cal framework for this article. This enabled me to decode how and why men are performing gender in public via sports-related bodywork and the social contexts within which middle-class, masculine body presentation in performed and negoti-ated as healthy.

First, we may draw on Eliass (2002) notion of a figuration to highlight that sports supplementation occurs as a social process within groups of interdependent actors. Elias described a figuration as a complex web of social relationships based on individual and group interdependencies, such as a family, a school, a workplace, a community, an economy, or a political sphere (p. 208). He used the term in lieu of traditional concepts, such as society, institution, subculture, and other terms connoting human action as statically structured rather than processual. Elias

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suggested that individuals activities are best understood as products of mutual (but not necessarily equal) relationships:

The network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together. Such interdependencies are the nexus of what is here called the figu-ration, a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people. Since people are more or less dependent on each other, first by nature and then by social learning, through education, socialization, and socially generated reciprocal needs, they exist, one might venture to say, only as pluralities, only in figura-tions. (p.214)Eliass (2002) study of long-term civilizing processes consisted of an

extended exposition of sociogenesis and broad-scale figurational dynamics. Sociogenesis refers to the ongoing and fluid structuring of relationships of inter-dependence among groups of people and how social structuring processes are the organizational patterns of social life. Figurational sociologists commence research on forms of body behavior, supplementation for example, by analyzing how body-modification ideologies are formed and transformed through ongoing sociogenic processes (Mennell, 1992; Salumets, 2001).

Analyses of masculinity and the politics of masculine display might include an investigation of how sociogenic change in Canada alters mens sensibilities about modifying their bodies in an athletic manner. Research on the contemporary politics of middle-class masculinity in North America has linked a wide scope of mens body projects to a series of sociogenic changes (Connell, 2002, 2005). Atkinson (2003) argued that middle-class White men in particular have vocalized a perceived sense of doubt regarding their ownership over, or ability to exercise, hegemonic masculinity in Canada. The men Atkinson studied feel as if their posi-tion, for instance, as hegemonically dominant in familial clusters, economic work structures, educational streams, and political offices, has been ostensibly challenged by gender-, race-, and sexual-lifestyle-rights movements. The same men express concerns over legislation securing equality across a range of social contexts and patterns in media representations that objectify male bodies (Nathanson & Young, 2001). Research on sports supplementation among middle-class men might explore if and how perceived fragmentation or fractures in power balances between the sexes; genders; or ethnic, political, work, or religious groups have affected mens corporeal practices as suggested.

Figurational sociologists also underscore how studies of sociogenic change should include the examination of psychogenesis, or the development of personal-ity structures within specific, historically contextualized figurations (Elias, 1991, 1996). A dominant principle running across figurational explanations of social behavior is a belief that individual and collective personality structures are largely products of social interaction within situated environments and reflective of socio-genic trends over long-term historical periods (Dunning, 1999).

Eliass (1978, 2002) analysis of the body as a text of sociogenic and psycho-genic change presented how shifts in cultural orientations toward the body and its display are ultimately products of social interdependencies between people (Kemple, 2001). Integrated analyses of sociogenesis, pyschogenesis, and social interdependence lead to more nuanced understandings of how social, cultural, and biological factors interweave:

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The structures of the human psyche, the structures of human society, and the structures of human history are indissolubly complementary and can only be studied in conjunction with each other. They do not exist and move in reality with the degree of isolation assumed by current research. They form, with other structures, the subject matter of a single human science. (Elias, 1991, p. 36)

Therefore, social scientists should analyze the tissues of interdependency con-necting individuals in social figurations (e.g., family, school, peers, leisure, and work relations) and the anticipated or unanticipated impact of these connections on personality structures. Van Krieken captured the importance of simultaneously studying interdependency, figurations, sociogenesis, and psychogenesis:

The structure of human life could only be understood if human beings were conceptualized as interdependent rather than autonomous, comprising what he [Elias] calls figurations rather than social systems or structures, and as characterized by socially specific forms of habitus, or personality-structure. He emphasized seeing human beings in the plural rather than the singular, as part of collectivities, of groups and networks, and stressed that their very identity as unique individuals only existed within and through those networks of figurations. (1998, p. 55)The process of decoding the current practice of sports supplementation

among the men in the current study, then, commenced by contextualizing supple-ment consumption within sociogenic, psychogenic, and social interdependence frameworks. Simpson (1999), for example, predicted that with the sociogenic queering of urban, male body style and aesthetics, affluent straight men would feel psychogenic pressure to respond by prettying their bodies. Sociologists of the body such as Featherstone (2000) have contended that middle-class men, in particular, are exposed to persistent and diffuse consumer-oriented sensibilities that encourage body commodification and aesthetic refinement. Baumanns (2000) state-ment on the rise of individuality and cultural fragmentation in the West similarly underscored how dominant clusters of consumers (such as White, middle-class, heterosexual males) respond to sociogenic trends of individualization in the marketplace through radical embodiment projects. Niedzviecki (2004) argued that ideologies of individuality among the Canadian middle class form into cultural practices where the pursuit of physical difference becomes an act of avant-garde bourgeois conformity.

Campos (2004) described the sociodemographic shift in North America to an obesity culture and the emergent cultural and moral concerns about health and obesity as an outcome of middle-class consumption guilt. He identified men in the middle class as primary interpreters and definers of contemporary body problems, such as obesity, and maintained that weight-loss strategies among the group reflect a common anxiety about their lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. The increased amount of sports-supplement products sold, one could argue, is an indirect measure of such bourgeois guilt. Sociologists of masculinity, including Connell (2005), also cited blurring definitions of the sexually acceptable, male body style as a precursor to the recent explosion in commercially sold mens products. Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that young generations of middle-class mena veritable new lad culturebring to the cultural table a set of learned attitudes

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about what constitutes established or dominant masculinity in the new millennium (Labre, 2002; Whitehead, 2002). In reflection, the apparent change in some White, middle-class mens perceptions about acceptable bodywork perhaps suggests a shift in their shared cultural habituses.

Elias (1991, 1996) described individual and cultural personality structures as socially learned second natures, or habituses, and suggested that through ongoing sociogenic or socialization processes, individuals learn taken-for-granted ways (i.e., habits) of experiencing, using, and interpreting their bodies. Eliass (1996, 2002) description of the habitus-formation process described how learned conceptions of corporeality are embedded in everyday physical habits such as wearing cloth-ing, eating behaviors, sexual displays, the expression of emotion, and of course, body modification:

The make-up, the social habitus of individuals, forms as it were, the soil from which grow the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his society. In this way something grows out of the common language which the individual shares with others and which is cer-tainly a component of his social habitusa more or less individual style, what might be called an unmistakable individual handwriting that grows out of the social script. (Elias, 1991, p. 63)A central problem structuring my research on sports supplementation among

(a narrow group of) Canadian men is whether their learned habituses prepare them for product consumption and help frame the meaning structures they attribute to both masculine and supplemented bodies.

The use of sports supplements among a sample of White, middle-class men is highlighted in the remainder of this paper as a signifier of both sociogenic and psychogenic change in Canada. I argue that sociogenic and psychogenic shifts in Canadian culture described previously have culminated into a crisis of masculin-ity among the men for whom sports supplementation is one response. The study of these mens narratives about their lived experiences with sports supplements allows for a micrological inspection of what has been termed the North American crisis of masculinity. Critical attention is given to how men included in the sample turn to their bodies as principal sites of identity work, health promotion, and power negotiation during a cultural time wherein they believe established, middle-class, masculine roles and privileges are being challenged in Canada. These men strategically employ sports supplements and attach both classed and gendered ideologies to them.

MethodData for this article were gathered as part of an ethnographic study of

masculinity and exercise supplementation in Canada. Although there exists a rather full literature on the use of steroids in athletic cultures in North America and elsewhere (see Philips, 2004; Spriet & Gibala, 2004), theorists have not empirically addressed nonelite-level athletes embodied interpretations of the sports supplementation process. The current study, by tapping core tenets of figurational sociology as a conceptual frame, is a directed exploration (Stebbins, 1996)

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of masculinity, health, and sports supplementation among nonelite athletes and recreational bodybuilders.

Data collection commenced through my personal involvement as a weight trainer in two local gyms in Hamilton, Ontario: one, a private club with a closed membership, and the other, a pay-per-entry public gym. The study also builds on my personal knowledge of, and experience with, sports supplements as a long-term (12-year) user and as an endurance athlete (i.e., marathon, duathlon, and triathlon).

I encountered a regular supplement user named Jimmy at a private fitness club in 2003. Jimmy divulged his own experimentation with both creatine and whey powders during the middle of a workout one day. Following an extended conversation with him regarding supplement use, he disclosed a history of consistent sports supplementation of nearly 10 years. I had been studying the representation of sports supplements in mens health magazines at the time of our conversation and started to consider an ethnography on supplementation among the gym members. After our talk, I contemplated the possibility of an extended ethnographic project on the subject. I interviewed Jimmy about his experiences with this flesh journey (Atkinson & Young, 1999) in the autumn of 2003 and sought out additional users in the southern Ontario area (i.e., Toronto, Hamilton, Mississauga, and Burlington) for similar exploratory interviews.

The snowball or chain referral technique common in qualitative research became the main method of sampling. Jimmy offered a dozen names of friends in the city of Hamilton at the time of his interview. Each of these respondents provided the names of, on average, 3 other supplement users and the sample progressively expanded. I eventually interviewed 57 supplement users in southern Ontario with the aid of Jimmys sponsorship. I knew that finding men for the study would be straightforward, based on my experience in gym cultures, especially in the south-ern Ontario region. With a population exceeding 4 million and booming fitness industries, the number of supplement users in the southern Ontario regionwhile difficult to calculate with any measure of precisionprovides a readily available pool of subjects.

Among the emergent cadre of supplement users are the men interviewed in the present study. It is important to note that the sample, due to the chain-referral technique employed, formed into a relatively homogeneous group along class, sexual preference, religious, and ethnic lines. Men in this sociodemographic were ideal respondents for the study, however, given the theoretical drivers guiding the research.

The men interviewed range in age from 19 to 45 (a mean of 26), a majority were single (51%), middle-class (75%) with a mean income of approximately CDN$51,000. They share Anglo-Saxon heritages (90%) and heterosexual prefer-ences (80%). Their levels of education varied, with some still in university (46%), but most were completely out of the educational system (54%) at the time of interview. Experience with sports supplementation varied slightly, with most of the men using one or two supplements on a weekly basis (70%), while the others volume of consumption ranged from 5 to 10 supplements daily (30%). The most frequently consumed supplements included creatine, whey protein, thermogenics, human growth hormone, and testosterone enhancers. None of the men actively used anabolic steroids during the time of the study.

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Interviews were conducted in a variety of settings, such as my office at the university, a coffee shop, a local park, or a restaurant. I used a tape recorder during the interviews, and field notes were taken both during and after the interviews. Notes were then (within several hours, or at maximum, one day) transcribed onto computer files and filled in considerably as I conceptually analyzed the texts. Interviewees were given an explanation of informed consent before and after each interview. Interviews ranged in length from 45 minutes to 3 hours. All of the participants were interviewed once and (with the exception of nine) were shown transcripts of the interview sessions at a later date so that they might review their own narratives. Pseudonyms are employed in this paper to protect the participants identities.

I practiced a style of active interviewing (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997) with the men in order to examine the social meaning of supplementation for them. During an active interview, attention is given to how researchers might use specific rhetorical techniques, including semidirected (i.e., open-ended) questioning, to tap into a range of individuals narrative resourcesor simply, their ways of perceiving and describing personal experiences based on the statuses and associated roles they possess (Gubrium & Holstein). As an active solicitation technique, I highlighted my own insider status as a user in order to encourage participation and deeper conversation in interviews. I also emphasized a need of insiders perspectives to help understand how men experience supplementation as a social process of health improvement and gendered bodywork. A detailed analysis of how men in the sample mobilize a combination of class and gender interpretive resources to understand and tell stories about their own supplementation practices is the focus of the remainder of this paper.

Fear, Anxiety, and SupplementationThe extant literature on male athletes evidences how the intensity of and com-

mitment to exercise regimens are collectively linked to an achieved masculinity (see Monaghan, 2002). White and Young (1999) referred to athletes hypercommitment to intense and often unforgiving male body codes in sport as the pursuit of dan-gerous masculinity. Evidence from the current study of supplementation indeed suggests a slightly dangerous masculine mindset among the men interviewed.

From the narratives collected in the research, it is evident that the men engage a series of calculated risks with their bodies through sports supplementation in order to achieve an ideal-type body image. The construction of the ideal-type masculine body is of course historically and contextually contingent, but the men in the cur-rent sample described a desirable masculine body as one which is lean, muscular, powerful, free from blemish yet rugged, and sexually attractive. The supplement users take dietary risksthe ingestion of chemical or natural products intended to radically alter the bodys fat or muscular compositionas one step in the pursuit of the ideal. Their sports supplementation regimens are clearly reflective of a do whatever it takes sensibility for achieving the image. Cliff, a 21-year-old supple-ment user (e.g., creatine, glutamine, and whey protein), suggests:

I dunno, I take what I take because I wasnt born with the right gifts. . . . Im not trying to get jacked [muscular], but I want to look strong and be strong, right. Dieting and hard work gets you so far, and then you need an edge to

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make gains. . . . Thats what its about to me, self-improvement and progress. I spend tons of money on supplements, but its worth it. . . . Ill never be puny again. No one looks at a puny guy, and says, Wow, hes hot; he looks like someone I want to know. I want people to like me for how I look.

Cliff teaches us that his construction of masculine health and vibrancy par-tially revolves around the physical images of strength, risk-taking, and conspicu-ous consumption as Connell (2005) documented. His lifestyle of consumption is indeed congruent with masculine gains in the gym and the work-like lengths and sacrifices he will initiate to be his physical best. He expresses a stereotypical middle-class male mindset, or habitus, evident in most of the narratives about supplementation collected in the current research.

Pope, Phillips, and Olivardias (2000) watershed analysis of the Adonis Complex revealed that young males like Cliff link muscularity, drug use, mascu-linity, and social desirability. Other clinical psychological investigations of body dissatisfaction among bodybuilders in the United States and the United Kingdom equally underscore how the pursuit of a culturally preferred male body shape (i.e., hypertrophic yet lean) is facilitated by steroid and other supplement consumption (Cafri et al., 2005; Grogan, Shepherd, Evans, Wright, & Hunter, 2006). When explaining why they consume supplements, men in the current study described a sense of physical and social lacking; they sought out body modification through supplementation as a remedy. Cliffs narrative, for example, contains expressions of personal doubt, insecurity, and a perceived lack of social power and controla fear of being small and unfit, of not having the right look, or not working hard enough. A central question emerging out of his and others narratives is: Why do men like Cliff fear in these ways? The commonality of expressed fears within the narratives gathered through this research points to both class- and gender-related anxieties among the men.

To explore the fearsupplementationmasculinity link further, I draw on figurational sociology. Brinkgreves (2004) poignant analysis of the gendering of power in Western figurations argued that (White, middle-class) mens panoply of social control source has been challenged along a number of lines, especially mens collective ability to wield overt dominance as cultural practice. She stressed that mens agency for expressing aggressive affect, among other sources of social power, has been curtailed over the course of long-term civilizing processes. In the current study, Peter, a 27-year-old marketing expert who consumes five different types of supplements to recover from his aggressive workouts, noted:

My life is really boring outside of the gym. There, I yell and scream and punch a heavy bag until I drop. No one will see me as a brute or comment about me being a caveman, or charge me for being interpersonally harassing. Its weird to think that a naturally male [big] body in action is not natural any more, or that I have to hide away in a gym and take out my frustrations on a piece of equipment.

Indeed, as Maguire (1999) commented, while expressions of aggression among men have in no way been controlled, the internal compulsion toward and external control of physical/emotional/psychological aggression has both qualitatively and quantitatively morphed for men (especially in the middle-class) through civilizing

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processes. Godenzi (1999) interpreted the Western civilizing attack on aggres-sion as a challenge to the very foundation of established masculinity within social figurations. Labre (2002) examined how groups of middle-class men perceive the (external) restraint of generically male bodies as a critical condemnation of, and control effort against, the very basis of the male psyche. These men perceive that masculinity itself is now threatened diffusely through antiauthoritarian (read antimale) doctrines and politically correct or neoliberal sensitivity policies underwritten in social life. Canadian men in the middle class included in the pres-ent study resultantly feel encouraged to engage in forms of bodywork to shore up their traditionally masculine images in socially nonthreatening ways because their work and family roles prohibit more aggressive responses. Supplementation aids in the process of reclaiming a lost sense of masculinity:

Sure theres an attack on men in our culture. Are you kidding me? Have you paid attention at all to life in the past 30 or so years? Everywhere you go there are guys in anger management or sensitivity training classes at work whore being fucking emasculated. . . . The only thing touchy-feely, corporate culture cant take away from me is my body. Im not stupid, though, and understand that the new guy is one who tones it down a bit and is put together but not ridiculously so. I take supplements that help with building lean muscle and maintaining lower water weight. (Alan, 31)

As Alan and like-minded peers in the sample explained, they locate substantial social power by reclaiming their threatened social roles as men through forms of bodybuilding and weight management. They clearly accept and promote culture preferences for the fit, toned, groomed, and nonaggressive body as a technique of conforming empowerment in a time of anxiety for them.

As the research progress unfolded in this study, I further questioned the sociogenic basis of their expressed anxiety about current cultural conditions for men in their shared social station and its link to supplemented bodywork. Perhaps without much surprise, the mens narratives regularly turned to issues of work, power, and control.

The use of sports supplements as a cure for masculine anxiety in sports and leisure cultures clearly has something to do with what sociologists call the medical-ization of everyday life (Conrad & Schneider, 1981). More pharmaceutical products than ever before are taken by people in Western cultures (Butcher, Schneider, & Hong, 2005). Critser (2002) decoded the contemporary push to medicalize social eating problems, sources of social stratification, and political anxieties as just one instance of how individuals are encouraged to seek scientific solutions to collective cultural problems (such as doubt about what constitutes acceptable masculinity). Consuming pills, drugs, or medicinal remedies has become almost a normal part of daily routines in the West. For males in the present study, consuming designer sports supplements has certainly become a standard form of nutrition in their athletic and social bodybuilding endeavors. The men feel as if they are under an intense cultural pressure to perform as new men, and they come to trust the advice of their doctors and trainers about how to medically build a better male body.

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Masculinity, Power, and Self-ControlElias (1991) outlined a triad of basic controls that frame how social power

in a figuration is meted out. In other terms, by addressing how members of social figurations develop collective solutions to control problems, we become privy to how sociogenic change influences human group behaviors such as sports supple-mentation. For Elias, members of social figurations enact social control: 1. Over nature through technological advancements 2. Over groups through institutional processes and structures 3. Over individuals desires through mechanisms of self-restraint

The Civilizing Process (2002), showcased Eliass contention that the collec-tive histories of Western nations reveal how densely interdependent agents come to rely upon the third source of social control over the long term. Western cultural norms now dictate, Elias argued, that the use of self-restraint is the chief source of social control, and physical violence is less pervasive in social life. The insti-tutional control of productive forces and knowledge dissemination also becomes central over the civilizing process as extensive chains of human interdependence are forged (Elias, 1996). As Brinkgreve (2004) pointed out, these mechanisms of control tend to be dominated (at least historically) by men.

Logically, as traditional forms of masculine control (physical, institutional, and ideological) are either challenged or perceptively subverted through ongoing civilizing processes, standard cultural ways of knowing and acting are disrupted (Faludi, 1999). Such ways of knowing and acting include traditionally gendered ways of enacting physical performance and embodied identity management in everyday life.

The emerging literature on contemporary masculine politics in Western nations such as Canada suggests that the sources of mens social control have indeed been fractured (at a bare minimum, ideologically) by ongoing sociogenic shifts in power balances between the genders (Hise, 2004; Mosse, 1996; Tiger, 2000). Horrocks (1994) showed how movements toward gender equality in families, educational contexts, workplaces, religious institutions, and a full host of other institutional sites call into question the very basis of masculine hegemony and its (corporeal) representation. As an extension of what Elias (2002) referred to as the parlia-mentarization of conflict, gender stratification and related power imbalances are systematically disputed through highly institutionalized, formal, and rationalized rule systems. A variety of cultural commentators call the splintering and redistribu-tion of masculine control across institutional landscapes the crisis of masculinity, in that men (particularly men in the middle class who are being supplanted by women in the workforce) are no longer certain about what constitutes mens roles and statuses, or how to enact properly gendered masculine identities (Whitehead, 2002). The supplement user Dan (26) tells us:

Nowadays you hear many conflicting opinions about what being a man means. Some women want you to be tough; others want sensitive and shy. My boss wants me to be [an office] leader, but my parents want me to follow their lead. When I pick up a magazine theres a new article about what a guy is

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supposed to look or talk like. But then, its like, you have to watch out what you say because you dont want to sound sexist. . . . We cant agree, and men are frustrated with not knowing how to act.

The social psychological crisis of masculinity to which Dan refers sets a socio-genic backdrop for why some middle-class men engage in identity/body work via supplementation as an innovative nexus of social control.

For example, as women penetrate the second major locus of control and power in figurational life, anxious men in the middle class may revert to a more direct method of gaining social stature and presence by literally building stronger bodies. Most of the men in the current sample did not, prior to their later-life weightlift-ing and supplementing regimens, have big bodies because of the nature of their white-collar professions nor did they worry, moreover, about feeling physically masculine in front of women at work. The men did not require, for either func-tional or social reasons, enlarged or meticulously toned masculine bodies. A sales associate named Ken (36) told me, I never thought it would be important to have six-pack abs so I could sit at a desk all day in a suit. But with the new gender war at work that men like Ken deconstruct and the general feminizing of the workplace he feels is underway, bodybuilding and the pursuit of masculinity via supplementation is a new moral imperative for him. The supplemented and mod-erately bulked male body is, for all intents and purposes, an embodied return to a very basic site of social control in a context of cultural uncertainty.

Men like Ken seize manipulative control over their bodies in order to reframe (White, Young, & McTeer, 1994) their masculinity as empowered (i.e., reflexive and invested) and vibrant (i.e., muscularly different and healthy) via rather essentialist masculine images. These men draw on and recalibrate widely disseminated and established/traditional images of the healthy, youthful, and affluent male through the supplementation process, and they present themselves as powerful in social settings wherein their power has been ostensibly dislodged. Chris, a 27-year-old teacher who uses thermogenics and diuretics to shed unwanted water weight, articulated:

Women can say whatever they want about slim being in for men, but a guy who invests in his body and his muscles will always be an attractive and rewarded man. I work in a very feminine environment, right, and the women at our school are very smart and politically aware people. So its the last place where old-school guy crap is tolerated, and thats fine with me. I dont sell my image and my strength that way, you know; I want people to see me as healthy and strong, not just beefy. Body wise, that puts me at the head of the class in front of everyone in the school, and people still respond to the dominant shape in a group as the leader.

Chriss narrative alludes to a psychogenic change among his generation of middle-class men, influenced sharply by ongoing sociogenic processes in the work sphere. Donald (24), who uses more than a dozen supplements, also described:

Everyone who said that only women feel pressure to look a certain ideal way never spoke to a man in their life! Pick up any fitness magazine and youll see. Why would I not want a body like one of those guys; its the shape most

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women want, for sure. Its a powerful thing to be built nowadays; people pay attention to you, and want to listen. Its a like a drug to them. People who are fit and healthy looking get the attention, no question. Its more persuasive than a corporate title you hold.

With diffuse ideological and material pressures to consume, commodify the body, and perform scripted health work through highly rationalized physical displays (see Featherstone, 2000; Crewe, 2003), one understands why Canadian men are finding solutions to gender and class-based status problems (Cohen, 1955) in sports supplementation and bodybuilding.

Magazines including Mens Health, Mens Journal, Muscle and Fitness, and Flex certainly encourage North American men to construct their bodies as social problems and to consume supplements. The supplement user Ken, for example, subscribes to four different mens health or lifestyle magazines, and discussed the prevalence of supplement ads in them:

I love all of the workout and fashion advice in [them], but one out of every three pages has got to be a supplement ad. Most guys get ideas about what products are available from the magazines but are never motivated to use a weight gainer or workout booster after seeing it in a magazine. The drive to supplement is already there in me from hearing guys talk about them in the gym. I only learn who sells what and where [from magazines], and the names of the products to check out at GNC or somewhere else.

Pope et al. (2000) placed heavy emphasis on the role of the media in establishing and promoting supplementation as an integral component in doing masculinity. While men in the current sample are voracious consumers of mens magazines (each man in the sample subscribed to or regularly purchased at least one health-and-fitness magazine per month), almost no one among them cited these media as major influences on either their social construction of masculinity or supplement use.

The more men like Cliff, Ken, and Chris perceive established masculinity to be in crisis, whatever the source, they respond through a basic form of social (self) controlbody management and health-image modification. Sports supplementation is a process of self-medication and inoculation against perceived cultural ills and the fragmentation and perceived loss of masculine hegemony. Brad (25) argued:

Its not like Im intimidated or threatened by the girls who work out in my gym, but I dont know, I dont want to have a girlfriend with bigger muscles than me. Women today are much smarter and fitter and in control, and guys have to step it up [get bigger] . . . thats nature; its the law of the jungle. Guys should be bigger, even if we have to work together and share just about every other social role in the world.

Comments like Brads also point to a common fear among the men in the sample regarding women colonizers in their gyms and in the social realm of athletics. Nearly two-thirds of the men in the study expressed a work-like and competitive desire to stay ahead of women in the gym. Ryan, a 26-year-old auto sales manager, said:

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Women have stepped it up and arent afraid to be big and strong. As a guy you have to respond, right, and stay on pace. If anything, its one of the best motivations for me, because what fit woman wants an out-of-shape guy? Well always have the biological advantage, because guys are born with better genes for working out and athletics. Well go the extra mile too by playing around with drugs to give us that other secret edge.

Men like Brad and Ryan supplement alongside weight training as a curious gesture of gendered empowerment. When cleverly rationalized as part of personal health rejuvenation in a culture replete with discourses about disease and obesity, the men in the sample believed their physical training and supplementation would be lauded as corporeally self-aware and responsible. Tony told me:

I take supplements as straight-up health aids. I can control my macronutrients perfectly and my body benefits. I dont want to look like one of those dudes walking around the park with their goddamn bellies handing to the floor and the shit tits poking out of their shirts. Whos going to respect that, especially when we know so much about what causes obesity and heart disease?

Tonys construction of athletic body training and supplementation rings with a Foucauldian (1981) description of bodywork as a technology of the self. Fou-cault described technologies of the self as ascetic and ethical practices of personal transformation. Ascetic in this context means an exercise of self upon the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being (Foucault, 1997, p. 282). Foucault insisted that technologies of the self could be liberating processes of moral self-realization, in which ethical self-care practices of the body constitute power for the individual and have a transformative capacity in ones life.

The process of self-liberation, in Foucaults model, emancipates the true self from its bondage or repression within conditions of dominant biopower (i.e., the subjugated, self-surveilling, and docile behavior that is ordered and disciplined by dominant social discourses). The self/body is freed to become through a process of unfettered corporeal exploration and representation. If bodybuilding and supplementation is a technology of the self, as Foucault (1981) described one, the men in the sample might be considered conscious social resisters practicing an embodied and creative form of self-care.

But not all of the men in the sample are as positive as Tony about the apparent cultural need to bodybuild and supplement. A group of the men interviewed (16 in the sample) wove stories of masculine vicitimization into their supplementation narratives.

Supplementation as a Response to VictimizationA tactically managed cultural-victim mentality underpins the rationale men

including Timothy, a 32-year-old real estate agent, offer for their supplementation practices. The victim orientation is not overwhelming in the accounts but is never-theless predicted by crisis-of-masculinity researchers. Timothy (32) said:

If I cant be in charge of my work, my life, or even what I say in public because I am a guy [in the fear of being dubbed misogynist], then I can at least be in

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charge of what I look like. No one can take that away from me. . . . Supple-ments help the whole process. They give you strength and energy for your gym work, and it carries over into your personal life. It also allows me to sculpt a muscular physique that no woman can attain. I look stronger and healthier, which is natural for a man.

For men like Timothy, the sports supplementation process helps him (at least symbolically) retain a part of the identity definition process and allows him to feel masculine in everyday social interaction. Other men in the sample talked about being directly victimized as a middle-class, White male in the workplace, among other settings.

Although stark gaps continue to exist between the genders in relation to establishedoutsider power balances (Elias & Scotson, 1965) within institutional settings, 12 of the men interviewed in this study believed their positions as estab-lished authority figures have been especially fractured by womens participation in economic and political spheres. When telling stories about the motivations under-pinning sports supplementation, the men spoke about feeling threatened at work or in other social circles by younger, smarter, and healthier womenespecially within image-oriented business environments where outward appeal is equated with intellectual competency and moral worth. It seems that as women have secured preliminary in-roads to political-economic power sources in Western cultures like Canada, a faction of the men interviewed in this study are increasingly fear oriented in their dispositions (see Sargent, 2000; Schmitt, 2001). The micropolitics of office work, it seems, now include displaying bigger muscles or trimming excess fat through weightlifting and supplementation. These men utilize bodybuilding and supplementation as techniques to regain, literally, a physical presence of distinction in the workplace. Lance (35) recounted:

You go to work and everyone is younger, fitter, and healthier. I cant lie and pretend that it kicks the crap out of your confidence and translates into worries about getting fired sometimes. Girls 10 years younger than me look and perform like buff super women. . . . I used to take care of myself religiously, but let it slide over time like most men used to do. . . . Ive been hitting the gym for about a year, and Ive made huge gains with my body through supplementing. Now when Im at work, the guys, and more women too, they ask me for tips and tricks about getting lean. The ironic thing is also how theyre stopping by to ask me more work-related advice too. No one treats me like an idiot anymore. Ask me if I think the two are connected!

It is important to note that Lances victim orientation encouraged him to consider nutritionally based bodywork as a solution to his perceived gender and work-related inadequacies and self-interpreted social stigmatization. His masculin-ity, partly anchored in his ability to physically appear as competent in the work-place, is reconciled through supplementation as a pseudo medical technique of intervention. Lances ability to look good as a man supersedes concerns about his ability to perform intellectually as a business administrator.

For other men in the sample, their ascribed social positions as established workers within dense chains of interdependency are threatened and identities victimized by subtle implications that their bodies appear powerless. As Connell

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and Wood (2005) documented through the study of business cultures, middle-class mens sense of masculinity is often validated by peers positive comments regarding ones body image and style while on the job. For the men in the sample who had experienced persistent teasing about their bodies (i.e., the fat, unhealthy, powerless body), this manifested into a fear that others viewed them as inadequate socially (see Grogan & Richards, 2002). A man adopting such an interpretive mindset associates his peers lack of public acknowledgment of him as a business expert as an indicator of their collective interpretation of his deficient body. Colin (29), an avid human growth hormone user, described:

The minute you start to pack on muscle, the guys and girls will flock around you like their leader. Nothing is more impressive to most people than someone who is strong. Deep down I think all men have a fear and respect for the big-gest guy on the block. No one ever used to give me respect until I grew bigger. Now I have tons. No word of shit, the HGH gave me the boost in confidence and social respect I wanted.

The threat some middle-class men perceive to exist regarding their masculin-ity in the workplace is of course compounded by the type of labor they perform. The men in the sample used for the current study are predominantly employed in either service or information processing industries. The men are among a genera-tion of white-collar professionals who are perhaps the most stationary workforce in our cultural history (Campos, 2004). With decreasing amounts of spare time, dietary habits often revolving around high-calorie, fast-food choices, and leisure time dominated by consumption and inactivity, the physical tolls on their bodies are evident (Critser, 2002). Work in the postindustrial economy and associated lifestyles are not easily reconciled for them with traditional images of the power-ful, performing, and dominant male (Faludi, 1999; Niva, 1998). Following years of inactivity and work-related physical atrophy, the men needed energy-boosting, muscle-building, and weight-loss-enhancing supplements to help them on the road to physical recovery. The mens workout and dietary efforts needed to be, from their perspectives, fuelled by sports supplements in order to extract maximum gain in the shortest time:

I changed my goals entirely last year. I used to go in for the whole get huge philosophy, and now its about leaning down and shredding up. Thats the body style I want . . . low body fat and total definition. Its a modified lean, mean, metrosexual look. So, you have to take some supplements to build up the muscle quickly and efficient, but others to help lose water and burn fat. Tricky, but you can do it. (Charles, 24) The men interviewed in the present study also expressed a sense of frustration

with the precise form and content of their work responsibilities. For these men, ritually performing disembodied or virtual work (i.e., computer-facilitated) every day encourages a mindbody separation and neglect (see also Potts, 2002). Sams (24) words are emblematic:

I sit on my tail all day at the computer, and its no wonder why my body got fat. As a kid, I could run all day and play sports, but going to college and then

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getting a job turned me into a sloth punching computer keys. I went from a healthy young guy to a beaten down slob doing someone elses work. Thats not the real me, you know; its not the image I want to portray. . . . The energy drinks I take about a half hour before I lift really give me the drive I need to get through my workouts. Its made a huge difference; people respect me again. . . . Im not exactly sure whats in them, but the proof is in the muscle.

Men like Sam refuse to link damaged or atrophied bodies with inner masculine selves. Sams body is objectified and instrumentalized in the sports-supplementation process because he views his physical form as a site of much needed identity management via nutraceutical intervention. His body regimen exacerbates existing fears about his body as socially nonmasculine. Such men believe that sports supplements will provide the most rapid, efficient, and effective ways of alleviating psychological strains and social discomforts.

Narratives about the role of sports supplements in eliminating the unfortunate side effects of sedentary lifestyles and boosting ones overall work energy are thus replete with constructions of the generic masculine body and self as victimized. Men tell stories about new cultural expectations that males should labor long hours to look appealing, healthy, sensitive, and subtly strong. For men like Daniel (34), an investment broker from Toronto, his need for thermogenics results from a need to strip away the fat from his socially marginalized masculine body:

You cant be a modern guy and think women are not looking at you and com-paring your body against someone like Brad Pitt. If theres anything new in this millennium, its that men have to be attractive to succeed in life. . . . So, I take about five different supplements on a regular basis to keep a sleek, clean, and lean look. Some of them are for power and stamina in the gym, and some are for like muscle recovery. The BCAA powder I take now helps me recover, right, and the tribulus builds up the muscles with the right stack of protein and creatine. To take off my crappy weight and strip down, I take thermogenics. I cycle those up pretty regularly because they also give you an awesome rip in the gym right before a workout. Down it with some coffee, and you can feel like you can lift anything. . . . My perspective is that if I am stronger than ever, my bones must be getting the benefit, and my heart is pumping, so Im healthier than the average guy out there sucking back Whoppers and slugging down Cokes.

Daniels sedentary work habits bloated his body for nearly 10 years. The fat loss and muscle-building supplements temporarily remove the trappings of his inactive male form. Like other men, Daniel defines sports supplementation as a symbol of his dedication to looking his best, even in the context of incredible social constraints. This is, for Daniel, a decisively self-restrained but proactive response to the condemning social judgments made about his masculinity in everyday life.

Perhaps true to (hegemonic) masculine form, when confronted about their constructions, masculine victimization, and the remedy of sports supplementation, the men employ a clever set of neutralization techniques. The men worry about being perceived as obsessive about their bodies (a quality typically associated with femininity) or that the use of sports supplements signifies nonmasculine weakness, low self-esteem, and inferiority. The main neutralization technique employed is

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the classic denial of victim narrative. Phil (26) tells us, Why the fuck would someone care if Im on creatine. I mean if Im not hurting anyone, who cares? Leave me alone, and go bug someone on crack or smoking cigarettes. The aggressive posturing Phil adopts in his supplement storytelling might be described as quintes-sentially, or at least traditionally, masculine. Phil refuses to have his body choices or preferences interrogated by others, and when this occurs, he responds from an overtly powerful position of self-control. While men like Phil candidly expressed a sense of being victimized by current gender and work politics in Canada, they did not want to be feminized as complainers. Ron (30) said:

Most of my friends who warn me about supplements have no idea what they are talking about. These people dont eat properly, work out, or anything. How the hell are they going to tell me about getting healthy and staying in decent shape? Dont knock it until you try it, pal. Or, go and do your homework, shithead.

Men like Ron reframe supplement consumption as masculine character building. The courage and discipline associated with consuming supplements are highlighted as a powerful and self-controlled response to their temporary identity and body problems.

DiscussionDespite the boom in academic literature on sports supplementation by com-

petitive athletes and resultant concerns about the degree of fairness in elite-level sport (Miah, 2004), very little attention has been directed toward the social use of supplements in the general public of exercising men. Even though sporadic media reports draw our attention to the overall lack of State regulatory processes in place to control the contents and distribution of dangerous and/or improperly labeled products, we know relatively nothing about how mainstream, over-the-counter sports supplements are consumed and experienced by nonelite athletes.

In gym settings, for example, sports supplements are so heavily advocated that their consumption has become deeply ritualized. Monaghan (2002) illustrated how there is, indeed, an embedded ethnopharmacological culture of supplement consumption in most gym/fitness figurations. Data gathered in this study point to the uncritical use of supplements among the users interviewed. For the most part, the recreational supplement user knows only a marginal amount about the actual contents of the products, has no scientific method for evaluating their impact, and has no long-term plan of use. These men, while realistic about the degree of actual body-composition change created by supplements, choose to continue their con-sumption with an it cant hurt, it can only help mentality. They socially construct the consumption of sports supplements as part of a neoliberal, do-it-yourself method of getting fit or healthy. Their conscious strategies of supplementation may, then, be read not only as a quest for social power and efficacy through masculine bodywork, but as a legitimate health agendahowever informed by science.

Narratives gathered from these men allude to varying degrees of psychological dependence on the supplements for everyday living and body satisfaction. Narratives outlined in this paper also suggest how mens interpretations of moral worth,

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social recognition, and general self-image as males can be deeply affected by their commitment to sports supplementation as part of an overall health lifestyle.

The consumption of sports supplements can, therefore, be an indicator of how some Canadian men in the middle class feel doubt, confusion, and anxiety with regard to how what constitutes acceptable masculinity and how healthy bodies are to be built and represented in the pursuit of masculinity. For these men, sports supplements are, at least partially, predictable solutions to ambiguous cultural problems like the changing roles and statuses of men. They use scien-tifically designed sports-supplement products to solve social and psychological (psychogenic) anxieties, believing they can consume a full range of magic products to achieve their masculine physical goals. The strict control over their bodies and social identities as male replaces a sense of control not perceived by them in other social spheres. The celerity of the process is especially appealing for them because they believe supplements tend to work in a matter of a few weeks. Furthermore, since the products are easily accessible and widely promoted and discussed as part of the new ethnopharmacology in fitness cultures, it is not surprising that these men experiment with one supplement or another.

Yet as an insider to sports training cultures and supplementation processes, and as a White, middle-class, male sociologist interviewing other males, my own social status in the research process undoubtedly influenced the form and content of narratives assembled in the study and certainly my theoretical reading of the mens narratives. Indeed, part of the active interviewing process is to draw out common interpretive resources shared between individuals as a technique of fostering inter-personal trust and narrative development. The open sharing of crisis perspectives by the men in the interview process is potentially an artifact of respondents seeing themselves across the table and feeling comfortable enough to share anxiety or status-loss stories with one of their own (Goffman, 1963). Further still, my open-probing and conceptual-focusing processes on segments of the mens narratives highlighting anxieties, power differentials, and crisis experiences became privileged over others as the interviews progressed. Unquestionably, there are other ways of reading mens experiences with sports supplements, then, and myriad other ways of knowing the sports-supplement process as lived experience.

In sum, the figurational understanding of sociogenic and psychogenic sym-biosis explored in this study calls attention to how processes like masculine body anxiety, sports supplementation, and ethnopharmacology do not develop as strictly subcultural logics shared within esoteric social groups. The men interviewed in this research commonly narrated perceptions of a dismantled masculine social authority in Canada and linked their bodies practices to such sociogenic change. Whether one grants empirical (i.e., structural) legitimacy to these middle-class mens fears about the crisis is secondary. Elias (1996, 2002) noted, of course, that both objective and subjective understandings of sociogenic change affect cultural habituses over the course of time.

Critics of the men interviewed for the current study might suggest the perceived crisis of masculinity is merely mythologized and collectively lamented by the men. Others might argue the crisis narrative is more than inconsequential storytelling; it is a strategic backlash against the modest gains Canadian women (at least in the middle class) have secured in workplace and other institutional settings. The

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men studied in this paper have clearly appropriated and reworked victimization discourses of subjugated groups in the country as a tactical power play, or discur-sive truth game, as part of their crisis management. Elias and Scotson (1965) have shown how established groups frequently poach and reframe the expressed social problems of outsiders (e.g., racism, sexism, poverty, or intolerance) in order to ideologically negate the very foundations of social inequality. While White males in the Canadian middle class do by no means have unfettered power chances across the social landscapeand, inasmuch, their hegemonic positions have been legiti-mately disruptedtheir relative power chances, as compared with women in similar sociodemographic categories or others, remain titled in their favor. But the men who supplement with sports products genuinely express fear, doubt, and anxiety about what constitutes masculinity in Canada, and their embodied performances of gender and class are evidently affected.

AcknowledgmentThe author would like to thank Annelies Knoppers and the reviewers for their helpful

comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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