********** Important Reading For Everyone ***********

[~con~]

FROM ABJECT TO OBJECT: WOMEN'S BODYBUILDING

by

MARCIA IAN
Rutgers University

_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991)

Copyright (c) 1991 by Marcia Ian, all rights reserved.
This text may be freely shared among individuals, but
it may not be republished in any medium without express
written consent from the author and advance
notification of the editors.

[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[4] 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?
[5] 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.
[6] 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").
[7] 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.
[8] 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."
[9] 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."
[10] 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.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.")
[13] 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?
[14] 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.)
[15] 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).
[16] 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.)
[17] 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.