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BIG DAVE
08-16-2001, 09:22 PM
AN INTERESTING READ.-DAVE

Images of Muscular Women

One reason, among others, that some female bodybuilders are unjustly accused of using steroids or other growth drugs is that many people are so deeply invested in their common belief that a woman simply cannot get so muscular without artificial aid.

It's a psychological and social tactic by which someone can reject very muscular women as unnatural or freakish. Such a rejection, in turn, allows one to maintain her or his faith in essential images of what a woman should look like and what a woman should be: maybe Cindy Crawford, maybe Mom, maybe the girl-next-door, but definitely not Bev Francis or Paula Birkenshaw.

>From my cultural psychoanalytic perspective, such images maintain a certain normative cultural system of sexual difference. And most people's basic understandings of themselves--their egos, their sexual identities, their sexual orientations, their sense of themselves as attractive, desirable, or lovable, their status as functioning members of a social group or class--depend heavily upon that system.

In other words, because their very (social) psyches are at stake, many people are extremely reluctant, at conscious and unconscious levels, to accept very muscular female bodybuilders as "real" women. Bill Dobbins, in the introduction to his book, THE WOMEN, tells a revealing anecdote about the clerk at his local framing shot, who felt compelled to tell him that she was disgusted by the pictures of female bodybuilders he had given her to be mounted, even though she very much wanted to keep him as a customer. Such rejection bespeaks a deep and very forceful motivation to resist the bodybuilding body. Labelling bodybuilders as drug-users is a popular and convenient way to reject that body.

Of course, normative images of exemplary womanhood (Crawford, Mom, etc.) and the system of sexual difference are neither natural nor God-given. They are instead the historical accumulation of custom, prejudice, precedent, and power.

Female bodybuilders are therefore very important figures in a socio-political sense--even though few would likely articulate themselves as such. They provide images and exemplars of a powerful new image of possible womanhood, that can both unhinge and transform a culture's vision and understanding of what sex and gender and selfhood are all about.

Accusations of steroid abuse are just evidence of how this culture is dimly aware that fundamental aspects of itself are on the verge of critical change, and that female bodybuilders are crucial agents of that change.

sasha
08-18-2001, 05:26 PM
why do people react that way.. i have not to figure that out yet.. ever wonder if they are just intimadated by a strong (physically and mentally) i was asked a long time ago if i used.. and i had never touched the stuff. it is common to think that a woman cannot gain size with out use.. well go back to the old picture gallery.. the first pic(the one in undies)  was just a basic, cardio & light weights... the second pic(black shirt)  was 2 months of killer lifting... nothing extra.... it is all how you diet sometimes....
plus it depends on the womans body chemisty.. woman naturally produce some test... but far from the levels that men do.. and it fluctuates from woman to woman also.. but that is what makes some more aggressive (be it personally, professionally, etc...) and some more docile.. that little bit that one may naturally have can help her to develop some muscle mass on her own with out the help of outside source ...


now if they would just make jeans to fit us right... they make them for stick legged women...  and then they are too loose in the ass and waist,,,,  lol...

Auriflex
08-24-2001, 04:10 PM
Some women take it to the same extremes as their male counterparts do - and why not?  They are probably motivated by taking their muscularture to the highest level possible.  I have nothing but respect for the years of dedication and hard work they (male/female) put themselves through.

Now, do I find that asthetically pleasing?  Not really.  Just as many women don't find extreme male bodybuilders asthetically pleasing.

Did I miss the meaning of the original post?  Probably.
I'm just trying to get a third ball.