“When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing—
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?”
Prologue
In 1878, a group of archaeologists made a discovery in Birka, Sweden. It was a tomb from the 10th century, containing the remains of a Viking warrior. The tomb also held an assortment of weapons and the bones of two horses that had been interred with their deceased rider.
Fast forward to 2017, and you have a study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that reveals our Viking warrior to be not a ‘he’, but a ‘she’.
Of course, there was a storm of scepticism. Charlotte Hedenstierna‐Jonson and her team, i.e. the authors of the original paper, backed up their conclusions with support from genomics. They also addressed the difficulty of understanding gender roles as they may have been in a community from a thousand years ago.
But our point of interest is the scepticism that we’ve mentioned in the last paragraph. There were academics questioning Hedenstierna‐Jonson and her team about their competence and caution, asking them if they looked at the right bones; if they didn’t mix up the bones with another person’s bones from the same grave; and if they had thought about the fact that the warrior in question could have been a transgender man.
The straightforward idea of a female Viking warrior, apparently, was the least believable of all possible scenarios.
A 2019 essay by the original researchers took a closer look at the case. The authors wrote, “It is important to remember that when Bj.581 was recorded, male biological sex was not only conflated with a man’s gendered identity, but also that warriorhood was presumed to be an exclusively masculine pursuit; the same interpretation would undoubtedly have been made had no human bone survived at all.”
‘A New Hope’
In the year 1977, a documentary was released that would change the scene of Hollywood entertainment forever. A brainchild of Charles Gaines and George Butler, it was titled Pumping Iron, and it focused on the sport of bodybuilding. Today, of course, we know it as the first successful film appearance of Arnold Schwarzenegger. When it was released, however, the drama was still in the first scene of its first act.
Back then, bodybuilding was not a glamourous sport. It was more of a subculture that drew attention and derision in equal measure, seen as something akin to the freak shows that were popular in the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Pumping Iron capitalized on Arnold’s success as the youngest Mr. Olympia in history, and created a docudrama-style narrative where Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger competed for the big title. The film was successful. And then came the aftershock. The very next year, Lou Ferrigno got the offer to play the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk TV series, and five years later, Conan the Barbarian was in the theaters.
Bodybuilding, at last, was out of the basement and on the front yard for everyone to see — and take part in.
The pitch went that bodybuilding is not just a sport, but a form of art. The Whitney Museum of American Art held exhibitions where bodybuilders (including Arnold) posed on rotating platforms for experts and art critics, who compared the ‘living sculptures’ to Greek aesthetic models. It was a renaissance of the athletic masculine ideal. Hercules, at last, had come to New York.
But even as the popularity of the muscular physique gradually spilled over to Hollywood, there was one thing about it that was omnipresent to the point of being inconspicuous. This renaissance of classical athletic aestheticism wasn’t an universal phenomenon – it was almost exclusively male.
Not that female bodybuilding wasn’t around. Pumping Iron II released in 1985, focusing specifically on the world of women’s bodybuilding. The structure of the narrative was similar – Bev Francis was the underdog, Rachel McLish was the star athlete who was portrayed as the charismatic but sinister ‘villain’, just like Arnold was in the previous film. However, there was something different this time. The caption on the posters read – “A Story of Strength, Desire, Courage… and a New Definition of Woman.” Rachel McLish posed just beneath, dressed in leopard print, looking like Lorna the Jungle Queen in the flesh.
As it happened, the word ‘desire’ in the caption was pregnant with dual meaning. In a 1987 interview, Carla Dunlap put it squarely – “It’s not just muscles anymore, it’s changed. It’s beauty and muscles now.” Sure enough, the selling point of bodybuilding had shifted when it came to female athletes. Wane Demilia, IFBB director of the pro competition, struggled with raising funds, and eventually came up with the idea. “I know what the regular sports fan likes, I know what he wants. To appeal to the public on TV, you’ve got to look a certain way. A man wants to see something sexually attractive, something stimulating. And so does his wife.”
As a result of this compromise, there was a breach between the interests of aesthetics and those of athletics. Women were held back by the popular demand of the male audience, and muscularity was only rewarded when it was successfully coupled with ‘appropriate’ feminine allure. McLish was dubbed ‘DeLish McLish’ by the media, and when she published her fitness book in 1984, she had to give it the tell-tale title of ‘Flex Appeal‘. Female bodybuilding had arrived, no doubt, but it still was a daughter of patriarchy.
This overt double standard was making its influence felt in Hollywood, too. In 1982, the same year as Conan the Barbarian released, Rachel worked alongside Arnold in a fitness instructional video called Shape Up. Two years later, Arnold’s fate found him on the set of The Terminator, while Rachel had an appearance ‘as herself’ in a forgettable movie called Getting Physical. The contrast is telling. Over the next three decades, Arnold became an action movie icon. Rachel worked in two more films in the 90s (she was also in a Herb Alpert music video called ‘Red Hot’), but no one remembers her as an actor.
More ambitious — and hence, more frustrating in its failure — was the film career of Cory Everson, the most iconic female bodybuilder of all time. As Arnold was rocking the silver screen in one hit after another, Corinna Everson was on her six-year winning streak in Ms. Olympia — an unprecedented record. Cory was a born athlete; even as a student, she had become the first multi-sport champion in her school’s history, breaking almost every sporting record. Now she had taken over the bodybuilding scene, beating Rachel McLish with her first victory in 1984. She, too, made a foray into Hollywood, but the results were mediocre, though memorable in a nostalgic, ’90s way.
In 1991, She played a vamp/ henchwoman in the Jean-Claude Van Damme starrer Double Impact; in 1994, she had a small role in the crime film Natural Born Killers; in ’95 and ’96 she played tough-girl roles in two films we no longer care to remember. In television, she cut a striking figure as Atalanta in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. In terms of physique, Cory’s Atalanta easily eclipsed Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules. But the writers had other ideas. Cory was used primarily as eye candy in the show (the old notion that bodybuilders were just ‘bodies’ held fast when it came to women), and though she was brought back on two more episodes as a guest star, Atalanta never joined Hercules in the limelight.
Granted, Cory Everson was no actress; her performances were amateur, and the scripts she had to work with were even worse. But neither was Arnold an actor when he started. Still, he could look forward to a career that rewarded strong, muscular actors with major action roles. Cory didn’t have the same prospect. Female muscle had carved a niche in the arena of sports, but when it came to mainstream entertainment, it was still nothing more than a subculture.
‘The Empire Strikes Back’
In 2019, fitness model Michelle Gavin posted a message on her Instagram stories. “I’m sick of people asking to post muscle photos,” she wrote, “Don’t ask me to post pictures of my biceps or my muscles. I deleted my other account for a reason. I’m not posting muscle pictures to feed into anyone’s muscle fetish. I’m posting what I want, when I want. So feel free to hit the unfollow button if that’s what you’re expecting.”
Two decades into the new millennium, the scene has drastically changed since the ’90s. Women’s fitness is now part of mainstream social media (social media itself a post-nineties phenomenon), and there’s a slew of fitness ‘influencers’ on the web, posting photos and videos of their bodies on a daily basis. But don’t mistake this for emancipation from patriarchy. This proliferation has come with its own problems. Just like Wane Demilia forty years back, many new fitness people realized that ‘flex appeal’ is something more easily sold than fitness, and they wasted no time in strategizing accordingly. Michelle Gavin’s post is an inevitable fallout of this phenomenon.
If you go on Instagram today and browse the posts made by (most) fitness models for a few minutes, a sharp irony will catch your eye. These posts are generally photos of hard-earned physiques posing and flexing to heighten the sensual effect; and yet, the captions are something spiritual or philosophical, some line of new-age wisdom, some egalitarian, idealistic quote that is supposed to go with the photo. “True beauty is within,” a model would write, while sharing pictures from a professionally done photo-shoot that displays her painstakingly sculpted body. There is nothing to be explained here; it is an ironical farce.
It would make complete sense if the accompanying quotes glorified physicality and athleticism; it would be appropriate if they applauded physical beauty and sensuality. But they don’t. These quotes are almost apologetic in nature, as if the models are secretly embarrassed about making such a big deal of their bodies. It is this sneaking double standard that robs the posts of their honesty and power.
Gym culture is not something new. In Book III of Plato’s The Republic, there is a lengthy dialogue between Socrates and Adeimantus where the virtues of physical exercise are discussed at length, and the spiritual aspect of athleticism is explored quite deeply. “Not that the good body by any bodily excellence improves the soul,” a line goes, “But, on the contrary, that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be possible.” To take an example from Eastern culture, verse 3.2.4. of Mundaka Upanishad says: “This Atman cannot he attained by one devoid of strength or by excitement or by tapas devoid of linga. But of the knower who strives with these aids, the Atman enters into the Brahman.”
The point is, fitness models do not need to be apologetic about showing off their bodies; nor do they need to use captions that do not fit their content.
So why do they do it?
You can find a clue in Michelle Gavin’s message — I’m not posting muscle pictures to feed into anyone’s muscle fetish.
That’s the proverbial fly in the ointment. Female muscle has been extensively fetishized in current times, and women feel the need to put up a disclaimer, like an anti-fetish ‘firewall’ that would (hopefully) keep away sex-starved fans. The difficulty with Michelle Gavin’s post is elsewhere. After she posted her message, many disgruntled fans pointed out that she herself used to have a Patreon page where she directly fed into the muscle fetish industry, making money off of it. That’s the problem. With this context, Gavin’s post is bound to sound highly hypocritical.
Doesn’t it somewhat resemble those cases of abused #metoo? — Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the sexualization problem doesn’t exist.
In 2012, a team led by director Gala Goliani and actress Dallas Malloy made a short film called Worship. The film takes us behind the scenes of the bodybuilding/ modelling stage, and we have a glimpse of the harrowing experience a female bodybuilder goes through as she is cornered by circumstances. Dallas Malloy carries the main role, being herself a bodybuilder. The title of the film is heavy with meaning. It evokes the subculture of sthenolagnia, which is a formal name for muscle worship. To borrow directly from Wikipedia, it ‘…is a form of body worship in which one participant, the worshiper, touches the muscles of another participant, the dominant, in a sexually arousing manner.’ The film makes it clear how athletes can unknowingly be objects of ‘worship’ for certain fans; throw social media into the mix and the problem aggravates a hundredfold.
It can definitely be argued that subverting the conventional picture of women swooning over muscular, male alphas is a win for feminism. True, the “desirable = delicate” formula of female beauty badly wanted dismantling. But as always, working revolution with a guilty air defeats the purpose of the work. Muscular women did not gain currency as mainstream standards of beauty, partly because they were seen as idols of a subculture. And kept off the mainstream channels, a subculture it remains.
In a subtler way, Worship highlights another issue that plagues not only female athletes but the sport as a whole — the stereotype of the bodybuilder as a brainless meathead. Apart from being a bodybuilder, Dallas Malloy is also a pianist, — a duality that Socrates would have commended highly. The film shows her character on the piano, reminding the viewer that they are looking at a person, not a type. It’s a giant step towards de-objectifying muscular women.
Two remarkable women who break the ‘meathead’ stereotype are Oksana Grishina and Julie Bell.
I have written about Oksana in the past. A 4-time Ms Fitness Olympia winner, her accomplishment as a bodybuilder is overshadowed by her historic performances as a dancer. Her choreography is distinctive in the way it pays tribute to great cultural icons — the Joker in 2013, Black Swan in 2015, Michael Jackson in 2016, Queen in 2017, and Bumblebee when she returned to the stage in 2020. Her 2018 performance at the NPC Mother Lode, Nevada, was given a standing ovation by the audience; the same year, she brought to the Olympia a new brand of fitness named OG Pole Fitness Championship. Her name has become a byword for creativity and talent to millions of fans worldwide (though her YouTube channel has few followers — a mock-regret she expressed recently on Instagram.)
Julie Bell is a less-known name among fitness fans today, partly because she left the stage many, many years ago. The world has known her as one of the leading artists working in the Fantasy and Science Fiction genre, her artwork appearing on hundreds of comic books, magazines, book covers, trading cards, and other collectables. In the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci, Julie’s knowledge of human anatomy goes a long way in her excellence as a painter. My personal favourites are her wildlife paintings, which are out-of-the-world in their beauty and passion. She has been named a Living Master by the Art Renewal Center (ARC). Once you explore her work, you can see why. And photos from her bodybuilding days serves equally well to show how she treated her body, too, as a work of art.
In the seething sea of fitness divas on social networks, names like Julie Bell and Oksana Grishina are hardly visible among the froth. It appears that the old hegemony abides; even when women try to be empowered, it’s patriarchy that tells them how.
‘The Return of the Jedi’
As the second season of The Mandalorian ended, there was a rumour on the internet that Cara Dune, the kickass mercenary played by Gina Carano, is going to get her own spinoff series.
This is highly unexpected. Cara Dune was a hit character — fans loved it, critics lauded it; but giving her her own spinoff series will still be a pleasant surprise for fans like me. The big production houses had, until now, fought shy of casting women with athletic backgrounds in major roles, even if the characters demanded such a casting. Recently, the only memorable female character who both kicked butt and looked the part while doing it was Lara Croft played by Alicia Vikander. Gina Carano did play big roles in Haywire and Fast & Furious 6, but it still didn’t spark a trend in the superhero circuit (Deadpool gave her the role of an unimportant grunt, no points for that). Disney owns both Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm, so a Cara Dune series might really be the beginning of something.
Well, one can hope. Change finds a way, even in the face of considerable odds, even under the guise of unobtrusive compliance. A memorable example is a cover that Adam Hughes painted for the 1995 Vampirella Pin-Up Special #1. It is immediately plain that Hughes was redefining female cheesecake with this piece, rewiring the brains of teenagers all over the world. This was in the tradition of pioneers like Frank Frazetta and Tim Sale, and has since been upheld by younger artists like Frank Cho.
Audiences around the world have definitely evolved, if big media houses, in the most part, have not. When Lynda Carter was cast as Wonder Woman in 1975, no one raised an objection about her lack of an Amazonian physique. But in 2013, when Zack Snyder chose Gal Gadot for the same role, there was a clear chorus of dismay from many fans who felt she didn’t quite look like an Amazon princess who has spent her entire life on an island training to be an all-rounder fighter. As expected, the filmmakers made little of this feedback. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman was a raging success, and everyone overlooked how Batman and Superman looked absolutely jacked while Wonder Woman razzled and dazzled with naught but her beauty.
The double-standard is clearer when you take a look at the cast of Wonder Woman, which released in 2017. When choosing actors for the Amazon warriors of Themyscira, director Patty Jenkins made a point of picking real amazons from diverse backgrounds — you have CrossFit athletes, stuntpersons, martial arts champions, yoga trainers and even Olympians among the women who brought the warrior tribe to life on the screen.
Stories from the shooting days put things into perspective. Swedish fighter Madeleine Vall Beijner had 12 years of training that taught her not to show pain even if she got hurt. During filming, when she was asked to ‘show that it hurts’, she responded, ‘No, I don’t get hurt! I’m a fighter!‘ CrossFit champion Brooke Ence described the training environment as ‘women wrestling other women, kickboxing, doing pull-ups and practising with spears – just a lot of stuff that in the real world is very male-dominated.’
But as one would expect, these efforts on the part of directors are often hamstrung by serious compromises in production. In Justice League, the costumes of some of the Amazon warriors were modified to show off their muscular arms and midriffs. But after all the edits and cuts, almost none of it got across to the audience. Every time these characters appear on the screen, they are too distant, too out of focus, or the scene is so fast and abrupt that the Amazonian physiques don’t even register in the viewer’s mind. The biggest double-standard is of course in the fact that Diana is supposed to be the princess of the Amazons — the strongest and most skilled of them all in every form of fighting — and yet the person playing that role and enjoying abundant screen-prominence has been one of the least athletic among all the actors on set.
The issue persists in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie is delightful as Harley Quinn, but Harley is more than a deranged maniac. She is a highly skilled and experienced gymnast and fighter in top physical condition, capable of knocking down men twice her size and breaking human bones, carrying large weights with uncanny ease, and using both firearms and melee weapons with surprising mastery. All of this was abundantly showcased in the film, but unlike Ben Affleck, Will Smith or even Jared Leto, Margot wasn’t allowed to build up her body to look the part. Even Cara Delevingne had a slim build in the movie, but her character was Enchantress, whose powers are not based on physicality but magic.
The case of MCU’s Black Widow is interesting. While Scarlett Johansson did not get ripped for her role, it doesn’t hurt the verisimilitude of the films because she never dons a costume that gives us a glimpse of her body. She is a dangerous fighter — the best agent in the history of S.H.I.E.L.D. — but like Captain America, her physique is fully covered when suited up. So when she takes on multiple mercenaries and beats them all up, the scenes don’t look contrived. The other best agent in the history of S.H.I.E.L.D., Hawkeye, is duly ripped — which is readily given away by his sleeveless costume.
Van Damme is himself a martial artist, while Portugues is an elite bodybuilder. Van Damme didn’t share the prejudices of his time when he starred alongside Cory Everson in Double Impact.
Even when strong women are cast in films, patriarchal norms determine what we get to see on the screen. As happened with Cory Everson in Double Impact and Gina Carano in Deadpool, actresses with a visibly muscular build are handed negative roles, as if to ward off audience sympathy that could lead to a rise in their popularity. Many male actors refuse to share scenes with a woman who might ‘upstage’ them in the muscles department. Jean-Claude Van Damme did not have problems getting beaten up by the statuesque Cory Everson, but consider GoldenEye, a film that came out four years later. In it, Xenia Onatopp is an assassin who kills her victims by literally crushing their torsos between her thighs. Freakish killers are a recurring trope in Bond movies, so this in itself wasn’t unusual. But the role was played by Famke Janssen, an actress with the build of a fashion supermodel. One could just as well cast Robert Pattinson as Mr. Hinx, or Edward Norton as Mr. Stamper. The sight of the slender Janssen laughing as big, combat-trained men struggle to escape her thighs is unintended magic realism at its finest.
Meanwhile, cosplayers and digital artists are consoling you (or fanning your frustration) by showing us exactly what we needed to see on the screen. Quite a few athletes have cosplayed as Wonder Woman, with very interesting results. Off the top of my head, the ones by fitness trainer Brigitte Goudz, powerlifter Jessica Buettner, and MMA champion Jinh Yu Frey come to mind.
Did I mention digital artists?
With the advent of deepfake editing, digital morphing has been taken to new heights. It is only law and logistics that are keeping these artists from producing entire movies, actually.
So, where do we go from here?
From the rise of women’s bodybuilding to the emergence of digital muscle, from complex Socratic ideals to simple concupiscent hedonism, from Cory Everson to Cara Dune — we have covered a pretty wide ground. Is there a final remark I have to make?
I guess there isn’t. There are too many strands we have to untangle here, too many complexes we have to resolve. I have left a lot of things untouched in this conversation, as you can surely sense, patient reader. I haven’t talked about the differences and overlaps between powerlifting, bodybuilding, and strength-training programs like CrossFit; I have steered clear of the intricacies of divisions in female bodybuilding and the sexism latent in it; I have avoided analyzing the psychology of female muscle fetish, not least because of the fact that it would take a dedicated, full-length article to do justice to that mystery.
No, there isn’t a conclusive opinion I have to offer, nor any final summing-up or judgement. All I do is repeat the old Chinese prayer:
May we live in interesting times.