Thank you for alerting us all to this creeping menace to public and pubic health. Also, for explaining yet another cause and excuse / justification for the continuing collapse of public decency and courtesy. After reading your illuminating prose: So many things now make sense!

It used to bewilder me how ‘upset’ supposedly Adult Men get about driving cars or simply queuing for products and services:

Now I know it’s not ‘Road Rage’ but ‘Roid Rage‘.

I had assumed the rude motorists who cruise, I mean, curse me on a daily basis, had simply been watching too many episodes of ‘Top Gear’!
All that blaring of horns and flashing (of lights) just because I happen to ‘look ‘ at them, smile and ‘wink’, whilst licking my lips after recently masticating some salty nuts. I’m only trying to be friendly!

I have also experienced it in the supermarket as some moron with 600 cans of beer in his trolley can’t wait to get to the till to get home and ‘off his trolley’: So simply barges into me! Using the metallic shopping basket on wheels as weapon of choice.

I hope Flight Attendants are into ‘this kind of thing’! I don’t want any unpleasant Mid-Atlantic Trolley Dolly hissy-fit outrages: Just because Airlines expect their Young Male Employees to conform to ‘customer expectations’ regarding minimum pectoral requirements, pert butts, etc.

Often I’m innocently waiting at the Night Bus Stop eating some chips: Only to be targeted by some specimen as the ‘outlet’ for all their pent up frustrations and steroidal derangements. Simply because they have not been given instantaneous genital gratification after buying some young lady 10 Brandy and Babychams at the ‘Discothèque’ – as I think ‘dancehalls’ are called by young people today.

I always try to reason with them, subtly suggesting various ways that might relieve them of their disturbed passions: In a way that doesn’t involve slashing me with their Stanley Knife! Sometimes I succeed: But often I have to flee in terror, which isn’t a very nice way to end the night. Is it?

Now I realise they are probably ‘victims’ of this cult-like usage of ‘steroids’, I will be more circumspect in offering assistance in future!

I also have suspicions that certain Alpha-Females in their Hummer-type S.U.V’s may be using something more than just HRT patches to get that Madonna-esque, don’t mess with me- Amazonian lady look.

Your article has alarming implications! Please make sure you send a copy to The Home Secretary.

Of course, as with so many other problems in Modern Society: It is the ‘homosexual-ists’ and their irresponsible propaganda for ‘party’ lifestyles who are responsible for this reprehensible phenomenon.

An acquaintance of mine gave me a book to read called ‘My Downfall’ by some unfortunate soul called ‘Aiden Shaw’. It was a work of unusual honesty and self-examination concerning his ‘cinematic career’. He took steroids too. He seemed to realise: They make you big, but they don’t make you clever. And really, it’s all a bit ‘high-maintenance’, this whole ‘gay’ thing. From what I can see.

Disgusted of Malvern Wells, England.

I’m one also. I did row for my school, but that never got anyone laid.

Clinically, ’steroid’ refers to a broad class of cholesterol-based hormones, which in addition to testosterone and other androgens (DHEA, etc.) includes all the estrogens, progesterone, cortisol, and the various vitamin Ds.

Obviously the androgens are the sub-set of steroids to which you are referring. However, these days most juicers use them in consort with non-steroid (protein) hormones like Growth Hormone (GH), insulin-derived growth factor, and even insulin itself, as in addition to mediating the uptake of simple sugars in fat does it the same for amino acids in muscle.

Therefor it should come as no surprise that boys who do not excel in sports should feel compelled to reinforce their masculine self image by taking measures to enhance their secondary sex characteristics as manifested in their habitus.

I happen to be one of them (to some extent, at least.) The caveats regarding exogenous androgen notwithstanding, I will never be ‘huge’ because I could never rationalise consuming the huge amounts of protein required (4+ g/kg) to ‘build’ in a world where at least a billion children still go to bed hungry. I know, how quaint of me.

U.S military recruiters — or rather the advertising agencies they retain — are canny, and place their expensive ads during televised sports events as a way of suggesting to those sempiternal bench-warmers another avenue in which they may prove their masculinity. I suspect that their are more than a few potential Muscle Marys in this sad-sack cohort, which may account for the somewhat higher incidence of homosexuals (i.e. ‘Friends of Freddy’) in the military.