Bodybuilding is a very specialized sport, a specialized look. It’s not for everyone, but no sport or look or body type or activity is for everyone. What else is new? The new understanding that women can build muscle and info on how to do it has lead to fitness and figure competition, where women have muscle but are not so extreme. It has allowed athletes, actors, models and everyone else to gain muscle, depending on their commitment and genetics. The fact that working out to build muscle and watching your diet to get leaner is also good for your health is a bonus.

There are also comments from people about steroids. But most people don’t even know what steroids are, what they do, how much difference they make and are unaware of how little danger is involved if they are used correctly. But this is all about to become moot since genetic engineering will allow us to all gain a lot of muscle easily in the future and steroids, GH and other anabolics will be obsolete.

But it seems to be that being “offended” by female bodybuilders is like being offended by the fact that pro basketball players are so tall or track athletes run so fast. Women bodybuilders look as they do because they are bodybuilders. Simple as that.

My advice to people is enjoy what you enjoy but don’t feel compelled to make judgements about things you don’t like – and probably don’t understand.

A friend of mine is a bodybuilder (non-steroid-using), and he told me that part of what is involved in getting those “every muscle clearly delineated” shots, or getting into competition form, is a very delicately-balanced and timed dosing of diuretics to dump out as much water from the subcutaneous fat layer as possible, resulting in that “skin stretched super-tight over nothing but muscle and bone” look in those pictures. If you catch bodybuilders away from the cameras or competitions, they’d still have the same ginormous muscles, but they’d be smoothed-out and wouldn’t look as super-gaunt and grotesque.

The beauty standards of a niche, however, are always in tension with the rest of society, which has beauty standards that are far more pervasive, broadcast, uncritically accepted, and institutionalized. This is what you absolutely cannot forget if you are going to comment about a small subculture’s ideas of beauty — especially if you have a closer personal relationship to more conventional norms than to those you’re commenting on. I may not be traditionally gendered myself, but I’m far more conventional and unremarkable looking than most of these women, even if we were all wearing the same dress.

If I were to criticize or evince disgust, without really understanding or being part of the formulation of this alternative idea of beauty, without really being qualified to opine on the medical issues at hand (which I’m not) then what I end up doing, regardless of whether it’s just my “personal, private, aesthetic opinion,” is to reinforce the larger societal beauty standards that this subculture is tension with. Sure, go ahead, have your own opinion about whether you find these women attractive. I certainly have my own opinion, but I don’t find it necessary to publicize it in a political forum about feminism like this one.

Here’s another way to look at it. What if this thread were about butch lesbians? There are certainly plenty of scenes across the world in which you can find group opinions of what is and isn’t acceptable for butch women to look like. Although it’s loose and slippery and often resisted, there are definitions out there of “what’s butch” and “what’s not butch.” There are social rules, although many butch women are conscious of them, dislike the idea, bend or break them. At the same time, obviously butch women don’t have gender expressions that are socially approved. Butch women are discriminated against and targeted fir harassment specifically for non-standard gender expressions.

If this had been a post with images from a book like Female Masculinity would you all be saying “ugh, these women look disgusting to me” if butch ladies are not to your taste? “Wow, it’s so unnatural and grotesque for women to try to make their bodies look that way.” You’d be duplicating homophobic internet trolls. I doubt any of you would comment like that, because it’s clearer in this particular milieu that gender-transgressions of a different sort, involving clothing and hairstyles and attitudes, are a protected species. Bodybuilding isn’t associated with a politics of oppression. Heck, the way these women are treated is probably quite different than other flavors of gender non-conforming people, but it’s still quite clear that they are on the outside of beauty standards, and to me that means I watch my tongue when publicly commenting about their appearance.

All the comments about steroids are shots in the dark. How about people who are elsewhere on the so-called “trans-masculine spectrum?” If you see a group of genderqueers, do you speculate about who’s taking hormones? Comment about how trans guys who are taking testosterone are damaging their bodies? Again, you don’t, because we’ve developed a politics here around that, to explain why you don’t. But seriously, think a little bit more about the underlying ethics of local vs. global beauty standards and your own position in the system vs. outsider subcultures.

How is that different or better than the pressure that female models and actresses are under to look a certain way?

Really? Well, first off the top of my head is that bodybuilders don’t really make money body building unless they’re at the absolute highest levels of competition. Even then the costs of spending that much time in the gym, the incredible caloric intake required to maintain that kind of mass, and the price of jetting around to competitions is rarely covered by whatever winnings might be available. Actresses and models have to look a certain way in order to be successful in their careers and in order to continue to have jobs. Being an actress or a model is a profession. Bodybuilders don’t really profit monetarily from being body builders, nor do they have the social incentives to conform to a societal beauty norm. In fact, being a female bodybuilder actually carries significant social disincentives. In the face of all that some women choose to develop their bodies in a manner they know others will find disgusting. They know that significant portions of society will seem them as unnatural or unwomanly. They just don’t care.

Thats the difference. Models and actresses force themselves to conform to beauty standards in order to survive. Female bodybuilders ignore those standards because their vision of beauty is different.

Why is it okay to make that criticism about the modeling industry and the acting industry, but not about the bodybuilding industry?

Because it isn’t an industry and it isn’t the same thing. Vogue doesn’t have a “Really Ripped Women” edition, Playboy doesn’t do “Women who could bench you” spreads, Maxim doesn’t feature bulging female biceps, and society in general does not point to female body builders and say “this is what you need to look like if you want to be loved and accepted.”

Too often, and this thread as been as good an example as any, the criticisms leveled at female bodybuilders are rooted in the disgust of the person making the criticism. Female bodybuilders are not a major facet of society or pop culture, no one is inundated with their images day in and day out. The criticisms of modeling and acting are about concern for the messages that are sent and the effects those messages have on society as a whole. You can’t make the same argument about bodybuilding because bodybuilding doesn’t really have much of an effect on society. That leaves either a belief that you know better for others (which is, you know, generally horseshit), or a smoke screen to allow you to voice your disgust in an “acceptable” manner.

And just because someone says “the bodybuilding look is not my thing” does not make them a sexist jerk.

Agreed. The thing is, no one has actually, you know, said that. No one is arguing that you have to find these women beautiful if they do not fit your perception of beauty, just that no one has a right to suggest that these women ought to look different.

I do think it’s jerky to criticize anyone who doesn’t agree 100% with the person who posted the photos,

Well, I never claimed to be a saint. Would it be jerky of me to point out that you can tell a lot about what a person is thinking by how they defend against criticisms that aren’t being leveled? Yeah, probably is kinda jerky. ;)

Why is it okay to make that criticism about the modeling industry and the acting industry, but not about the bodybuilding industry?

And just because someone says “the bodybuilding look is not my thing” does not make them a sexist jerk. I do think it’s jerky to criticize anyone who doesn’t agree 100% with the person who posted the photos, regardless of how nicely they express their difference of opinion.

Один из самых успешных фотографов-портретистов в мире Мартин Шоллер (Martin Schoeller) в сотрудничестве с издательством Pond Press Books представил книгу-фотоальбом под названием «Female Bodybuilders». Фотоальбом представляет собой коллекцию портретов женщин, которые занимаются профессиональным бодибилдингом. Каждая фотография сопровождена небольшим автобиографическим рассказом женщины-бодибилдера.

One of the most successful photographers and portrait artists in the world, Martin Schoeller, in collaboration with the publisher Pond Press Books, presented a photo album book under the title “Female Bodybuilders.” The album presents a collection of portraits of women engaged in professional bodybuilding. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief autobiographical sketch by the female bodybuilder.

As has repeatedly been stated above, the oiled, cut and tightly defined muscular look in promotional images is mainly produced by very strict regimes, emphasized with fake tan, applied lotions to the skin and other techniques, and isn’t something that is visible everyday- just compare Arnie’s bodybuilding pics to his nude image in Terminator- still big, still defined, but very very different.

But you know what? I feel so angry that it is even necessary on a FEMINIST blog to qualify the above image by even saying that. “Oh don’t worry, she looks much more acceptable usually!”

I’m a short, stocky, fat person myself, and I naturally gain muscle pretty easily. Repeating back problems are currently stopping me from taking weightlifting to the level I want to, but if I ever manage to fix that I dream one day of looking like Ross Campbell’s Mountain Girl. Not physically possible to that extent, I don’t think, but that sort of broad, stocky, solid physique is probably what my body would tend towards. And anyone who wants to call me grotesque, inhuman, unfeminine… meh, people call me that now for having a gut.