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Kevin Bruno Professor Doris Cacoilo Media 384.00 30 November 2011

Women in Bodybuilding

Today, the media has been the ultimate factor in establishing the gender role that we as a society are expected to abide by. Men are expected to be aggressive, dominating, and emotionless, while women are to be feminine, fragile, and docile. These are the values that we have been taught to become and live by for so long which are rarely challenged, but when they are, society seems to react in such a way that the heteronormative way of life established by patriarchy is being threatened. Women especially are discouraged from crossing that gender role, particularly in sports. One sport that really challenges this role to an extreme level is Female Bodybuilding. Due to societys lack of acceptance, the popularity of the sport has gone down and even prize money is much lower than those of male bodybuilders. As a result, officials and other authorities of the sport have changed the rules of judging the competition. Therefore, the women of the sport are pushed in some cases to extreme measures in order to appease society in an already extreme mental and physical sport. The most controversial factor within in this issue is defining the sport of Bodybuilding and what the sports objective really is. One of the main problems today is this definition varies amongst many people and therefore can have a strong impact on the competition and preparation itself. According to the IFBB (International Federation of Body Building), their general definition of Bodybuilding states Athletes train to develop all body parts and muscles to

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maximum size but in balance and harmony. There should be no "weak points" or underdeveloped muscles. Moreover, they should follow a special pre-competition training cycle, to decrease the body fat level as low as possible and remove the underskin water to show the quality of muscles: density, separation and definition. Who can display more muscle details is scoring higher at the contest... However, just below, as part of this definition is a section specifically directed toward women which states: In womens bodybuilding less attention is paid to muscle hardness, details and definition. More emphasis is placed on general view of the physique, muscle shape, bodyfat level (adequately low for women, not so low like in mens bodybuilding) and attractive individual stage presentation. This idea of a woman having to be attractive in order to succeed has been engrained in our society with the system of patriarchy and society has learned this through the media and its portrayal of gender roles. According to Helen Lenskyj and Patricia Vertinsky in an article by Anne Balsamo, being strong and female does not coexist within social norms. Historically the feminine body was considered to be constitutionally weak and pathological. To be both female and strong explicitly violates traditional codes of feminine identity (Women, Sport, and Culture 343). However, when femininity is applied to a sport as unique as bodybuilding, things can become very complex. In a sport where the original objective was to build as much muscle while keeping balanced proportions, the idea of femininity completely contradicts that objective; for the very reason that masculinity is almost always associated with strength and muscularity while femininity is associated with attractiveness, and fragileness. Not only does womens bodybuilding pose a threat toward gender, but sexuality and specifically lesbianism which is discussed in Danae Clarks Commodity Lesbianism, As Annette Kuhn puts it, Muscles are rather like drag. Lesbian styles, too, tends toward drag, masquerade and the confusion of

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gender. Thus, both are subjected to various forms of control that either refuse to accept their physical or sexual excesses or otherwise attempt to domesticate their threat and fit them into the dominant constructions of feminine appearances and roles (Popular Culture: Production and Consumption 149). Womens bodybuilding really only began to make its mark during the 1970s when womens physiques were not as extreme as they are today. They had much less muscle mass and it was known as the classic physique. Lisa Lyon is one of the best examples of the first wave of womens bodybuilding: Aesthetically balanced, muscular in a smooth way, communicating not so much a transgression of gender but its developmentLarger bodybuilders of the first waveLaura Combes, Kay Baxter, Lori Bowen, and perhaps especially Bev Francis-paved the way for the body that would become widely accepted by the end of the eighties (Heywood 28). Today both of these types of physiques play an important role when being judged. When it comes down to judging a womans physique based on both of the ideas of muscularity intertwined with femininity, people tend to favor one over the other or fall somewhere in the middle. In Maria R. Lowes book Women of Steel, Lowe analyzes the different aspects of the sport that make it so complex when judging women based on their physique. Lowe categories IFBB officials, judges, and bodybuilders into three different groups based on their opinions on how a female bodybuilder should look. Some believe that female bodybuilders should be judged like male bodybuilders-on the size of their muscles; others contend that female bodybuilders are women first and should therefore emphasize their femininity and deemphasize extreme muscularity; and still others position falls in between the two. The power to determine which look is appropriate is unequally distributed between these groups (81).

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The much larger bodybuilder like the physique of Bev Francis is the ideal body for those who believe that building muscle is the name of the game and have no principles based on gender. The classic physique that was described earlier is usually the preferred ideal body of those who are more conservative and believe that femininity plays a key role in female bodybuilders. This is because the womens classic physique holds much less muscle than most female bodybuilders today while still having a soft appearance to maintain femininity. However most would not say that of the many female bodybuilders today who have the large freakish physique due to modern training methods, dietary supplements, and in some cases performance enhancing drugs. Female bodybuilders today have physiques that women could never achieve naturally before (National Geographic). This is ultimately the main reason that popularity of the sport has gone down drastically and has forced officials to add a femininity factor to the sport. The arrangement of power in bodybuilding gives officials, who create and maintain the laws of governing bodies, the most control in the negotiation process of the appropriate relationship between muscularity and femininity for female bodybuilders. They are the upper-level social gate-keepers of the sport. Judges, on the other hand, because they enforce the rules and regulations set by officials, are relegated to a lower-level social gatekeeping position (Lowe 81). As for the bodybuilders themselves, they have no choice but to comply as they are at the bottom of this system of power. In the end all of this pressure that originally has to do with lack of financial support from fans because of the decrease in popularity, female bodybuilders will do the best they can to maintain femininity. One extreme example is the women undergoing plastic surgery to augment their breasts. During the day of and the few weeks leading up to the competition, bodybuilders will try to lower their fat levels as much as humanly possible (usually around 3-6 percent) in

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order to achieve maximum definition of each muscle. With the loss of fat, womens breasts will decrease in size because breasts are essentially fat, which is the reason that women will make the decision to have artificial breasts. Some officials and judges have argued that breasts will help with recognition of femininity. However, those that are against this idea argue that low levels of body fat and breasts are not compatible and visually just do not look right. This is a physical example of the contradictions and consequences that affect this sport and make it so complex. The main issue above all is that in the eyes of much of society, these women do not look attractive and thats why they think it is wrong for female bodybuilders to look the way they do. However, that in itself is what I think the problem is because this goes back to objectifying women and using them as a visual pleasure for men. Bodybuilding is not about being attractive or being sexy, its about building up the human body to its full potential. Although steroids and performance enhancing drugs are another issue of bodybuilding and all sports in terms of health concerns, they dont change the idea that women should be judged in the same way as men in the sport of bodybuilding. Financially its a problem as well because the lack support from fans directly affects prize money and awards for competitors and these women deserve the same amount of money that men do for their hard work and dedication to this sport. As far as the future goes for womens bodybuilding, I feel that there should be more awareness about the unequal playing field that is put on these women and in the end everything leads up to the media and world of advertising that influences societys beliefs about men and women. Influence from the media is where the problem originally has to be solved, therefore many other social issue that affect women would be solved as well.

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Works Cited

Abraham, Morris, dir. "Taboo: "Gender Benders"" Taboo. National Geographic. 1 Sept. 2009. Television. Birrell, Susan, and Cheryl L. Cole. Women, Sport, and Culture. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994. Print. Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise D. Bielby. Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Print. Heywood, Leslie. Bodymakers: a Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998. Print. Lowe, Maria R. Women of Steel: Female Bodybuilders and the Struggle for Self-definition. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print. "Welcome to IFBB -- Our Disciplines." Welcome to IFBB - Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.3). Web. 03 Dec. 2011. <http://www.ifbb.com/page.php?id=12>.