Something New under the Sun
Excerpt from the book 'Modern Amazons' by Bill Dobbins
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Ironically, people have a very different opinion of female bodybuilding when they actually see an attractive female bodybuilder walking through a shopping mall or along the street, wearing a tight skirt and high heels. Women like this stop traffic. Hollywood and the world of advertising are increasingly casting "hardbodies" for movies and television commercials because they know these women have a powerful impact on audiences.
This ambivalent attitude toward the "hyper-muscular" female physique may well be a holdover from the Victorian view of women as weak and helpless creatures whose survival depended entirely on finding a strong man to protect them. But that view is a cultural fiction. Most human beings throughout history have been peasant farmers, and a farmer's wife can't be helpless. Women had to be strong in order to survive - and carry and give birth to babies. They certainly weren't inclined to faint when faced with physical hard work. But the celebration of the muscular body is part of a different tradition. It arose as the idea of athletic competition resulted in a class of professionally competitive athletes who were free to build harder, leaner and stronger bodies. These pro athletes competed in contests such as the ancient Olympic Games, and developed bodies that were both highly aesthetic and capable of superior performance. Their bodies became the subject of art, so that the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece show lean, muscular male physiques unequaled until the time of Michelangelo and the Renaissance.
Of course, the idealized athletic physiques of Greece and subsequent eras were always male. The female body was depicted as soft and yielding, symbolic for the most part of concepts such as love, sex and motherhood. Even female warrior goddesses didn't have lean and muscular athletic bodies. Muscular women would have been considered unfeminine or even unnatural. In the original myth of the Amazons, these warrior women were depicted as cutting off a breast in order to improve their skill with a bow, a very clear metaphor for the idea that exercising skills appropriate to the male robbed a woman of her feminine identity.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Ironically, people have a very different opinion of female bodybuilding when they actually see an attractive female bodybuilder walking through a shopping mall or along the street, wearing a tight skirt and high heels. Women like this stop traffic. Hollywood and the world of advertising are increasingly casting "hardbodies" for movies and television commercials because they know these women have a powerful impact on audiences.
This ambivalent attitude toward the "hyper-muscular" female physique may well be a holdover from the Victorian view of women as weak and helpless creatures whose survival depended entirely on finding a strong man to protect them. But that view is a cultural fiction. Most human beings throughout history have been peasant farmers, and a farmer's wife can't be helpless. Women had to be strong in order to survive - and carry and give birth to babies. They certainly weren't inclined to faint when faced with physical hard work. But the celebration of the muscular body is part of a different tradition. It arose as the idea of athletic competition resulted in a class of professionally competitive athletes who were free to build harder, leaner and stronger bodies. These pro athletes competed in contests such as the ancient Olympic Games, and developed bodies that were both highly aesthetic and capable of superior performance. Their bodies became the subject of art, so that the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece show lean, muscular male physiques unequaled until the time of Michelangelo and the Renaissance.
Of course, the idealized athletic physiques of Greece and subsequent eras were always male. The female body was depicted as soft and yielding, symbolic for the most part of concepts such as love, sex and motherhood. Even female warrior goddesses didn't have lean and muscular athletic bodies. Muscular women would have been considered unfeminine or even unnatural. In the original myth of the Amazons, these warrior women were depicted as cutting off a breast in order to improve their skill with a bow, a very clear metaphor for the idea that exercising skills appropriate to the male robbed a woman of her feminine identity.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Bill Dobbins, Modern Amazons
Hardcover, 26 x 28.8 cm (10.2 x 11.3 in.), 168 pages
$ 39.99
$ 39.99
The talented Bill Dobbins and his amazing bodybuilding babes
Andrulla Blanchette, England. Photo: Bill Dobbins