With the Australian sun baring down for the most part of the year, outdoor music festivals in this part of the world are rife. It seems as if there’s a something-palooza or a Blah-Blah-Fest every weekend, and equally prevalent are the amount of nipples on show, and I’m not speaking of the female variety…
The Coachella festival in the US seems to have undergone a similar fate, with the festival becoming less and less about the music – renamed by some as “Brochella” and known for it’s fashion-conscious and famous attendees. But as Coachella attendees are dressing up, Aussies are dressing down but bulking up.
Men’s festival fashions have evolved over the past decade from baggy t-shirts to those horrible, thin strapped singlets that allow the wearers nip to make a cameo every now and then, to the current day, when a lot of guys are wearing no shirt at all. This isn’t great for the chubsters who have probably stopped attending festivals altogether for fear of being the only clothed man there, or for those of us who simply don’t like douchebags.
An alarming number of those who do attend are now bulking up in preparation for their semi-nude debut with the help of steroids. If timing your course of steroids in time for a festival isn’t vain then I don’t know what is. Needless to say, there are more than likely girls who are purging their food for a week prior to the same events in an effort to be as small as possible for those iddy-biddy shorts and midriff tops.
The problem doesn’t solely lie in the fact that fashion is dictating drug use, but that those drugs come with a mixed bag of side effects, including aggression, mood changes, baldness, development of breasts and shrinking testicles, just to name a few. Heart, liver and kidney damage all deserve a mention too but all anyone ever remembers is testicles akin to shriveled quail eggs.
The possession, use and supply of steroids are illegal in Australia but like most drugs that doesn’t seem to matter. What used to be an underground drug, hard to find and spoken of with candor is now easily accessible and openly talked about. Someone’s even gone as far as to coin the term “bigorexia” in which males are suffering a sort of muscle dysmorphia and feeling insatiable when it comes to building defined mass.
The directors behind one particularly large festival, Stereosonic, have even introduced a “tops on” policy in an effort to curb any of the knock on affects of roided up young males attending like packs of tanned and tattooed dogs.
We can only hope that there aren’t too many steroid related deaths before this walnuts-in-a-condom look is out of fashion again and maybe festivals will return to a place of chilled out fun rather than Roid-Rage fuelled “gun shows”.
