From Abject to Object: Women’s Bodybuilding

Marcia Ian

Rutgers University

 

Do muscles have gender, or are they, on the contrary, ungendered human meat? Other than the few muscles associated with their sexual organs, men and women have the same muscles. Does this make muscles neuter, or perhaps neutral? Is there some “difference” between the biceps of a male and those of a female other than, possibly, that of size? If a woman’s biceps, or quadriceps, are bigger than a man’s, are hers more masculine than his? In the eyes of most beholders, the more muscle a woman has, the more “masculine” she is. The same, of course, is true for men: the more muscle a man has, the more masculine he is too. Bodybuilding in a sense is a sport dedicated to wiping out “femininity,” insofar as femininity has for centuries connoted softness, passivity, non-aggressivity, and physical weakness. Eradicating femininity just may be the purpose of both male and female bodybuilders. Even so, for men to wage war on femininity, whether their own or somebody else’s, is nothing new. For women, however, it is. Insofar as women have for centuries obliged cultural expectations by em-bodying femininity as immanent, bodybuilding affords women the opportunity to embody instead a refusal of this embodiment, to cease somewhat to represent man’s complementary (and complimentary) other.

 

At least this is how it seems to this author, who is: a forty-year old, divorced, atheistic Jewish mother of two teenaged girls; an assistant professor of British and American Literature at a the state univerity of New Jersey; a specialist in modernism, psychoanalysis and gender; and a dedicated “gym rat” who has trained hard and heavy without cease (knock on wood) for about eight years now and during graduate school even entered bodybuilding competitions. As such, I confess, I obviously have various axes to grind (pun intended) which intersect “around” the body as uniquely over-determined site of ambivalent psychosocial signification. From this point of view women’s bodybuilding appears to be roughly equal parts gender vanguardism and exhibitionistic masochism; men’s bodybuilding could in theory be the same, but I have seen no evidence that this is so. Male bodybuilders, on the contrary, seem mainly out to prove that they are conventionally masculine– hyperbolically, FEROCIOUSLY so.

 

Furthermore, the sport of bodybuilding, as marketed and represented by those enterprises founded by Joe and Ben Weider, including magazines like Flex and Muscle and Fitness (published by “I, Brute Enterprises, Inc.”) and contests like the Mr. and Ms. Olympia, as well as various less powerful rival organizations, reproduces ad nauseam all the cliches of masculinism from the barbarous to the sublime. This remains true despite the fact that in recent years the top female competitors have displayed increasing amounts of hard striated muscle. I had hoped to find in the gym a communal laboratory for experimental gender-bending, perhaps a haven for the gender-bent, or at the least a democratic republic biologically based on the universality of human musculature. This laboratory, this haven, this republic, however, remains a utopic and private space, a delusion in effect, because what goes on in the gym, as in bodybuilding competition, remains the violent re-inscription of gender binarism, of difference even where there is none. As Jane Gallop pointed out, in Western culture gender is no “true” binary or antithesis but rather an algorithm of one and zero. Bodybuilding expands the equivalence “male is to female as one is to zero” to include the specious antithesis of muscle and femininity.

 

Spurious gender difference is maintained and rewarded in bodybuilding through the discriminatory valorization of certain aesthetic categories. Indeed bodybuilding tries to limit the achievements of female physique athletes by adding “femininity” to the list of aesthetic categories they are expected to fulfill. The film Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985) dramatically documents this sexism by recording a conflict which erupts in a sequestered conference room among those judging the 1983 “Miss Olympia” (now the “Ms. Olympia”), America’s most prestigious bodybuilding competition for women. A man apparently serving his first stint as judge is puzzled and angry to find that he is supposed to judge the women on the basis of their “femininity.” He points out to the other, more experienced judges that, while the men are ranked on the basis of their muscle density, definition, over-all symmetry and proportionality, as well as for the style, skill and fluidity of their posing, the women are in addition judged for a quality called “femininity” which surreptitiously but effectively limits all the others. How, this judge queries, is anyone supposed to determine how muscular a woman’s body can be before it ceases to be feminine? Furthermore, in what other sport could a female competitor be expected to limit her achievement for fear of losing her proper gender?

 

Would anyone advise a runner–Florence Griffith-Joyner, for example–that to run too fast would be unladylike? Would anyone warn a female long jumper not to jump too far, or a swimmer not to swim too fast? Why, then, presume to tell a bodybuilder that she may be only so muscular, but no more muscular than that, at the risk of losing both her femininity and her contest? This sensible judge argued in vain; the panel of judges elected Rachel McLish, then at her cheesiest, as Miss Olympia, while penalizing Bev Francis, by far the most muscular and impressive of the competitors, for being what they considered “too masculine.” McLish was subsequently disqualified when someone discovered she had padded her bikini top to look more buxom. McLish, however, was merely trying to win the approval of the judges who, she thought, might have been repelled by her if they had viewed her as masculine, although it is hard to imagine how they could have. Subsequently McLish became more interested in the opinion of a higher judge when she became “born again” and began pumping iron for Jesus. Even with McLish disqualified, however, Francis placed pathetically low.

 

Many viewers have been amused by McLish’s antics but missed the nature and extent of the sexism the movie documents. Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide (1991), for example, which does not usually dwell upon the physical attractiveness of the men and women appearing in the films under review, informs its readers that Pumping Iron II offers a “funny, if suspiciously stagy” look at a “Vegas non-event” in which “pouty-lipped sexpot Rachel McLish, manlike Australian Bev Francis, and two-dozen more female bodybuilders compete.” But while the Guide thus dismisses the women’s competition as a stagy non-encounter between a sexpot and an Australian she-man, it describes the first Pumping Iron (1977) about the men, which, like Pumping Iron II, received three stars from the Guide, as a “fascinating documentary” in which Schwarzenegger “exudes charm and . . . strong screen presence” (Schwarzenegger’s stage name in his early movie “Stay Hungry” was “Arnold Strong”).

 

The arduousness of physique competition is the same for male and female. Like the male, the female must diet away as much subcutaneous and even intra-musculuar bodyfat as possible when preparing for competition. And, whereas she may typically start out with twice as much bodyfat as the male, she must try to be as “ripped” as he, as close, that is, to that impossible ideal of 0% bodyfat on the day of the contest. In the process, she inevitably, if temporarily, loses most of her breast tissue, as well as that soft adiposity which typifies the conventionally feminine, proto-maternal figure. Many female bodybuilders opt for surgical breast implants to try to salvage the “femininity” they lost in the eyes of their beholders as they gained in muscularity. My own experience in two bodybuilding competitions during the summer of 1986 (the summer after hitting the MLA job market and accepting my present position) typifies the ambivalent attitudes judges have toward muscular female bodies. In July I won the “Miss Neptune” championship at a fairly well-established contest in Virginia Beach because my physique was the biggest, hardest, and veiniest of the group. In August, having remained during the intervening month in as close to “peak” condition as possible, I lost a newly established contest to an anorexic and a cupcake for the same reason. In this case the judges, I was told later, assumed that the relatively beefy hardness of my physique meant I was “juiced,” and they deducted points accordingly from my score. I have never used drugs or even supplements, but since they did no testing or even asking, I had no way to persuade them to the contrary; nor did the audience, which roundly booed the judges’s decision.

 

That the first contest had been run for years while the second was newly established is significant; the “establishment” in women’s bodybuilding is changing somewhat. Lenda Murray, the winner of the November, 1990 “Ms. Olympia” is phenomenally, finely, and hugely muscular. She redefines women’s bodybuilding, if not women, and must be seen to be believed. Nevertheless, here it is June, 1991 and, as one irate reader points out, Muscle and Fitness still has not seen fit to do a layout on the new Ms. O. The reader asks, “Don’t you think you should have stopped the presses to get Lenda in?” In reply the editor points out that there is “plenty of Lenda in this” issue. By “plenty of Lenda” the editors apparently mean a feature piece entitled “OOOOHHH, Ms. O!” in which Murray tells readers how she trains her legs, and a brief interview of Murray and another impressive champion, Anja Schreiner, entitled, “Let’s Talk About Women’s Bodybuilding.” This interview, not surprisingly, is advertised in letters which say “Women Talk About Building Sexy MUSCLES” down at the bottom of the red-white-and-blue magazine cover of an issue which highlights iron-pumping in Operation Desert Storm, for which the editors did manage to stop the presses. The cover shows a photo of a huge smiling blonde male flexing in his Starred-and-Striped shorts, with two skinny blonde women in red and blue bikinis clinging to his shoulders (one of the women holds a little American flag at her breast). This trio, in turn, is framed by the title of the month’s “Superfeature”: “USA MILITARY MUSCLE: How the Navy Seals, Combat Pilots, Ground Forces Toughen Up Thru Bodybuiding.”

 

This superfeature publishes a barrage of photos which were sent to the magazine by its many fans in every branch of Operation Desert Storm (all of whom, except one, were men) who managed to lift, press, and squat weights made of concrete, sand, and iron when not otherwise engaged. In the midst of all this macho hype, however, Bill Dobbins, longtime muscle writer, sounds a sane note or two, one of which reminds us that, while men’s bodybuilding continues to reflect those patriarchal values we assume to have prevailed among cavemen, women’s bodybuilding continues quietly to evolve. On the last page of the issue, entitled “The Champ: Bev Francis,” Dobbins reminds us of the controversy “regarding the muscles-versus-femininity question in bodybuilding for women” which greeted the appearance on the bodybuilding stage of this former professional dancer and world-champion powerlifter. Dobbins, writing for the Weider organization, cannot criticize the 1983 decision filmed in Pumping Iron II–after all, “for ultimate power and excellence, she [Francis] uses the Weider Principles”–but he does claim that her finally winning the World Pro title in 1987 was a milestone in the sport. That was the day, Dobbins writes, when “the controversy ended” and the principle “‘may the best bodybuilder win’ became the rule of the day, rather than ‘we can’t let the sport go in this direction'” (toward the “manlike” woman Bev Francis), “when the judges clearly opted for the aesthetics of bodybuilding over other and often irrelevant standards of female beauty.”

 

Lenda Murray is evidence that, at least at the highest levels, Dobbins may begin to be right. In the prefatory remarks to his account of Murray’s leg-training methods, Dobbins, clearly awestruck, can’t help but point out that– given her tiny waist, her “exaggerated V-shape” and “shockingly wide, well-developed lats,” the dramatic sweep of her thighs as curved “as a pair of parentheses” with hamstrings to match–Murray resembles no less an athlete than Sergio Oliva, Mr. Olympia 1967-69 and Arnold’s “legendary adversary.” This comparison would be high praise for anyone, but is astonishing–a first–for a woman. Okay, so women are twenty years behind the men; but who cares, when they are closing the gap? Surely the men cannot continue to increase in mass from year to year at the accustomed rate now that drug testing is becoming more routine. True, as “everyone knows,” steroids are still used widely by both men and women, and both know how to clean up their bloodstreams shortly before a contest in order to avoid detection. Nevertheless, methods of detection are improving. Two years ago drug-testing of women began at the Miss Olympia competition, and this year the men were tested for the first time. Officials claim that in the near future they will initiate random drug testing throughout the year in order to bar users from competition. But because men have relied on drugs far longer and far more than women, and have used them to widen the gap between the genders rather than narrow it, the differences between serious male and female competitors will likely continue to shrink.

 

This will be the case, though, only if women manage to free themselves from the judgemental category of “femininity” which, Dobbins’s sanguine prognostications to the contrary, competitors and judges continue to invoke. In his article on Schreiner and Murray, Jerry Brainum mentions that both women continue to notice that others’ reactions to their physiques range from “curiosity to admiration to disgust.” “You can’t expect to extract the idea of femininity from the judging process in a women’s bodybuilding contest,” says Lenda; Anja agrees that “old stereotypes die hard.” What do they think of these stereotypes? They don’t say. Neither wants to appear freaky, but both thrive on the herculean effort and spartan self-discipline the sport requires of both men and women. Perhaps in the future physiological differences between individuals will figure more prominently than aesthetic differences between the genders.

 

Different blood levels of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone, for example, do cause individuals’ rates and ratios of muscle growth and fat reduction to vary– hormonal variations which, like the quantity and location of an individual’s “fast-twitch muscle fibres,” figure among the physiological factors vaguely designated by the term “genetics.” In the gym someone will inevitably and reverentially say, for instance, that Arnold Schwarzenegger has “great genetics” or, self-deprecatingly, that one’s own back won’t grow because of inferior “genetics.” “Genetics,” like hormone levels and willpower, vary within the sexes as well as between them, however, so that there is no reason to assume that we have yet seen the “ultimate” physique, whatever that might be. Still, this fantasy of, and reverence for, superior “genetics” is certainly one of bodybuilding’s several Nazi-esque qualities. Others include a kind of superrace (not just superhero) mentality which, especially if the builder in question is stoked on steroids or crazed by radical dieting, can provoke snickering sneering snarling growling or worse directed at anyone whose existence could in any way be construed as coming between him and his rightful greatness, let alone between him and his image in the mirror. (I once heard “Mr. Virginia” bark at a woman who sauntered across his line of vision: “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY MIRROR.”)

 

Beneath the superrace mentality, with its need to believe in absolute difference between the one and the zero, there lurks, as one might expect, the fetishist’s fearful wish that there may finally be no difference after all between the sexes. Without question, relative to the cultural norms of masculine and feminine bodies, the female builder masculinizes herself. But why does no one ever mention that the muscular male physique athlete feminizes himself to a degree? Consider the curvaceous pectoral mounds of the well-developed male chest; the round “muscle bellies” of powerful male biceps; the firm meaty thighs and spherical buttocks of the man who can squat heavy. And how about the hairless, well-lubricated flesh some of the men sport year-round, but with which all male competitors must emerge on contest day? Above all, what about the devotion with which the male bodybuilder strives to embody a set of ideal categories–symmetry, proportion, muscularity–for the acknowledgement of which he offers himself to a panel who objectify him in just those terms? Does he not feel feminized in the process?

 

Over the years I’ve asked various male builders these questions, and I’ve never received an answer more direct than a narrowed gaze and a “How the FUCK should I know?” Sam Fussell, who is in a sense my younger, WASP, Ivy League, analog, answers this question in his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, when at the end of Chapter 10 he shares with his readers the most humiliating moment in his career in iron. This moment comes when he fails to “Explode!” on cue at the Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza, and thereby takes last place in his 242-lb. weight class, an over-subscribed class for which the contest promoters quickly run out of trophies. When Fussell walks to the podium to receive his last-place men’s trophy, what he gets is much worse: a sympathetic pat on the rump, and “a plaque on which were inscribed in gold plate the words: “Women 148 lbs: First Place.” “At last,” writes Fussell pathetically, “I had a trophy to tell me just who and what I was.” A woman! For shame! And after all that work too. (Poor baby.)

 

On the other hand one of Fussell’s best moments occurs at a bodybuilding contest when he walks offstage after performing his posing routine, to be welcomed by his friend Vinnie: “Oh, Sam. . . You looked like a human fucking penis! Veins were poppin’ every which way!” In all fairness, I should add here that I spoke the very same words to my own mirrored reflection in about 1985, which may indicate that this fantasy of sexual indifferentiation is a two-way street. What is not a two-way street is the manner in which bodybuilding conceals the fantasy of sexual indifferentiation behind a whole vocabulary of aesthetic discriminations applied only to men, discriminations which recast difference as a repertory of typecast cliches, while women are still dealing with that single over-determined choice between “femininity” and freakiness. Men, on the other hand, to take examples again from this month’s Muscle and Fitness, train like animals (from a piece on powerbuilding), re-invent nature (from Weider’s editorial), and exceed the classical ideals of the Greeks themselves (from a piece on free weights vs. machines).

 

Typically, the discourse of male bodybuilding grinds these axes together in the most simpleminded way, in the hope simultaneously of doing, out-doing, and re-doing each, separately, and together: nature, technology, classicism. To take a consummate example, in an article called “The Art of Arm Training,” by Frenchman Francis Benfatto, as told to Julian Schmidt, Benfatto claims that “hardwired into the genes of every Frenchman” is an artistic sense which “influences [their] perceptions of everything from Hellenistic art to bodybuilding.” These artistic genes were set off in him, he claims, when he rode horses in his youth and fell in love with their “sweeping muscularity,” a love Flaubert’s words explain best: “‘In art there is nothing without form.'” Whether he is contemplating his whole physique or only his arms, Benfatto explains, he always applies his Flaubertian love of form to every aspect of bodybuilding because, as Voltaire said, bodybuilding is as much an art as the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo. (Well, actually, I left out a line or two here in between Voltaire and the Mona Lisa, but I swear I did not add a word.)

 

The judging of bodybuilding competitions, unlike powerflifting or Olympic lifting, depends on categorical aesthetic evaluations. In a powerlifting or Olympic meet, the winner is determined either by how much weight he or she lifts relative to other competitors in the same weight class, or by means of a fixed formula which shows how much weight he or she moved relative to his or her body weight. In a bodybuilding meet there are still no such objective standards, leaving room for the kinds of psychological and aesthetic bias I’ve been discussing. Bodybuilding promoters are increasingly aware of how arbitrary this makes their sport look, and how this subjective bias undermines their claims that bodybuilding is a sport and not just an art. For all their hifalutin language about the art of bodybuilding, promoters still harbor a wish for bodybuilding to be included among the Olympic sports. This hardly seems possible, however, as long as competitors are judged qualitatively rather than quantitatively and subjectively rather than objectively. Accordingly, the Weider people now offer what they call an “Ideal Proportion Chart” with instructions–based on one’s bodyweight per inch of height, and on the measurement in inches of one’s neck, biceps, forearm, chest, waist, hips, thigh, and calf–on how to set one’s training goals. How did they come up with these measurements? They don’t let on; they don’t say whether these “ideal proportions” are derived from Praxiteles, da Vinci, or Bob Paris, whose photo graces this feature article. It is probably safe to assume, however, that the measurements were not derived from Lenda Murray. A note above the chart comments that “women bodybuilders may have to adjust measurements in the area of the hips, waist and chest, depending on build.” The Ideal Proportions, in other words (surprise, surprise) are merely those of some man or other. I can’t help thinking, however, that, as brutal, cruel, cryptic and comical as this Chart seems, by implementing it, bodybuilding, despite itself, might be doing women a favor.