I came across this excerpt from a journal article published in 1991: From Abject to Object: Women's Bodybuilding By: Marcia Ian. Read it and see if you agree, in the context of today's woman. I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment that women's bodybuilding marginalizes women's femininity. I'm not an object, and it does not seem abject, or vulgar, as described below.
When I'm lifting heavy with my straps or belt, building muscles, competing for "bragging rights" about my muscles, I feel just as feminine as when I'm at an afternoon tea in a frilly dress with girlfriends from church. I feel different in each setting, but that's part of the majesty of the female brain: we are adaptable self-preservers.
When we are emotionally healthy, we feel comfortable expressing ourselves, regardless of the perception of others (unless it is a harmful form of self-expression). We embrace our femininity to suit our surroundings without compromising who we are -- we aren't pandering, just enjoying different settings in different ways, according to our "style" and bent.
Why can't big biceps, traps and shoulders (as well as shapely glutes, quads and hamstrings) appeal to a woman's sense of self-worth and beauty without detracting from her femininity? In 2014, most women I've interacted with in any context comment, "I'd kill for your arms (or glutes)". Maybe I'm less bulky than some female bodybuilders, so I appear more fit than huge, but I'm still a bodybuilder. AND I love wearing sparkles, heels and makeup when I'm in a muscle contest, the now-required uniform for women's bodybuilding competitors.
Popular Culture: From Abject to Object: Women's Bodybuilding
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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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.
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