Feminized and Sexualized: Female Bodybuilders’ Transient Feminist Resistance

In female bodybuilding, the interconnection between femininity and muscularity often arises as a conflict

due to its bifurcation from a sport which is essentially men’s. Initially, women’s involvement in this

men’s sphere was believed to empower women to resist femininity; however female bodybuilding has

been overtly sexualized in recent times where they are now required to embody the ideals of femininity to

actively compete and flaunt their bodybuilding musculature. Female bodybuilding now is simply a sport

for women to train to fit into feminine stereotypes that they initially had wished to elude as their bodies

are excessively sexualized and their stances are unduly feminized in order to promote them in this sport

and these have diminished female bodybuilders from achieving any real power in the patriarchal society.

Muscularity is mostly associated exclusively to men that many women in many cultures are

discouraged from delving into physical exertion that promotes muscularity such as this which enhances

their physical capacities to builds that mirror their male counterparts. This is believed to effectively

diminish their womanliness and heterosexual allure as shared by Tajrobehkar, “…visible muscularity

diminishes a woman’s (hetero)sexual appeal, and that the ultimate goal of bodybuilding for women is to

achieve heterosexual desirability” (296). This motive appears rather incongruous with the sport’s aim

which actually encourages the competitors to display “the most developed and best defined muscle mass”

(Ian 151). Evidently, women’s extreme physiques are not celebrated in this sport and through “the

inclusion of femininity as a judging criterion and the erasure of serious reporting on women's

bodybuilding competitions in the bodybuilding media” (Boyle 134), it further accentuates the sport’s

desire to host female bodybuilders who are sexually more appealing and its unappreciative stance over

their physical strength, power and aesthetics as emphasized in men’s category. This inclusion, according

to Wayne DeMilla, vice president of the International Federation of Bodybuilding (IFBB), was necessary

when the extreme physiques of women were not marketable (qtd. in Boyle 134). Hence, many of Niall

Richardson’s arguments in his article, “Flex-rated! Female bodybuilding: feminist resistance or erotic

spectacle?” (2008) that dismisses the idea of the built female body as feminist resistance are attested
because of the evident intolerance by the sport’s governing body, IFBB itself, towards the presentation of

women’s physique devoid of any womanly embellishments (291-296). The sport now essentially tries to

feminize female bodybuilders as Tajrobehkar informs (296) or manipulate female bodybuilders’ physique

to be eroticized for fetishistic pleasure by muscle worshippers as Richardson argues (291-296).

In both occasions, women are condescended with intolerance for their hyper-muscularity and this

signifies a widespread cultural aversion for female strength and power and cultural insistence to sexualize

women. Therefore, in a patriarchal sport such as this, female bodybuilders can be deduced as victims of

“…a cultural effort to protect normative sex, gender, and heterosexual identity paradigms” (Boyle 135)

due to their dissuaded position from showcasing a musculature without any womanly voluptuousness.

However, Richardson does put forward that some scholars feel that female bodybuilders challenge “the

assumed stable sex/gender continuum” (290) and this is a show of resistance to traditional ideas of

femininity. Female bodybuilders may feel empowered because they are redefining the conservative ideals

of a feminine body from small, weak and fragile to big, strong and burly. However, this unconvincing

notion of empowerment arises to be debatable after the realization of IFBB’s biased stance on female

bodybuilding which presses for femininity. Therefore, even if female bodybuilders defy sexist stereotypes

of womanhood by being at odds with the idea of incapability, dependency and frailness, they still seem to

contradict and “counteract the empowerment derived from bodybuilding” (Heywood 24) due to their

forced admission to hyper-femininity such as wearing heels, makeup and jewelry while competing as

expected by IFBB. This belief is repeated by Susan Bordo in “Unbearable Weight” (1993) where she

illustrated her concept of “backlash phenomenon” in which gender nonconformity practiced by female

bodybuilders is used against themselves to submit to gender norms through adorning feminine ideals to

receive opportunities to participate in the sport. This indeed ensures the prevalence of femininity in a

sport where women are trying to denounce traditional feminine ideals, therefore, the views of scholars

whom Richardson cites to be in support of bodybuilding as an undertaking which empowers women to

position of IFBB who have a distaste for unladylike showings in women’s bodybuilding category.

In regards to the manly physique that female bodybuilders adorn, Richardson to defend the

contention that they distress patriarchal gender paradigms by looking large, powerful and strong, quotes

Laurie Schulze who shares, “female bodybuilding is a direct, threatening resistance to patriarchy at its

most biological foundations” (291). Here she stresses how built female body emphasizes the plasticity of

the body where the molding of a female body is fluid and one that “challenges the concept of an

essentially masculine or essentially feminine body” (Richardson 291). It may be true then that this

physical showing encourages the society to critically appreciate the flexible female physique and its

capabilities by allowing women to contend against and sidestep from the general condescending

perception that women are weak and delicate. However, even if they challenge to rethink the physical

faculty of women, further probing into the female bodybuilders’ mindset reveals motivations that do not

quite ascertain their patriarchal resistance. Female bodybuilders are visibly more muscular than the usual

standards of toned ideal feminine body but according to Grogan et al., “…none of the bodybuilders

mentioned being large or highly muscled as part of their ideal that they defined as athletic, toned, and

healthy. These competitors further emphasized that this athletic shape had to be feminine: a good/nice

shape with a visible waist, breasts, and less muscular than a male bodybuilder” (50). Ian in “The Primitive

Subject of Female Bodybuilding” (2001) further confirms this where she shares, “the most important

aspect is shape…in regard to muscular development, it must not be carried to excess where it resembles

the massive muscularity of the male physique” (78). Even if female bodybuilders aspire to build massive

musculature like their male counterparts, they would be deterred upon the pressure placed by the sport on

women to observe less muscle mass. McGrath and Chananie-Hill inform in “Big Freaky-Looking

Women” (2009), that IFBB in 2005 deemphasized women’s muscle size by introducing ‘the 20% rule’

according to which the female athletes had to decrease the amount of their muscularity by 20%

for health and aesthetic reasons (240). This move indeed sprouts as an effort to erode muscularity among
female bodybuilders and a bodybuilder in McGrath and Chananie-Hill’s study herself testified that the

poses women are required to perform during bodybuilding competitions must not be done deliberately to

accentuate their bulk and muscle range as how it is required in men’s category (248). Therefore,

Richardson’s consideration that perhaps female bodybuilding is a resistance towards patriarchal

foundation comes to be conflicting as female bodybuilders are reminded even in bodybuilding

competitions that they can delve in the realm of men by displaying just the right amount of muscularity

but due to the vehemence with which women are oriented to be more womanly than manly, the

resounding message that transpires is that “a woman has little to no business or place” (Tajrobehkar 301)

in the male sphere of bodybuilding.

Unfortunately, female bodybuilders are not only subjected to double standards in the sport where

they are pressured to adorn a feminine appeal when there is no apparent masculinity requirement for the

male bodybuilders; they are also sexualized as Richardson informs that they unknowingly instigate male

fetishism where they provide erotic pleasure by flexing their muscle to muscle worshippers. To drive in

this argument, Richardson cites Joanna Frueh who says, “female bodybuilders, oiled when they pose, flex

like lovemaking vaginas and exhibit the slickness of aroused female sexual organs’ (291). This elaborated

simile, Richardson feels is unmistakably apt as he shares when female bodybuilders flex their body, it

“…may indeed be read as an extremely sexual image” (292) and pointedly cites Doug Aoki who like

Richardson explains female bodybuilders are in felicitous position to ornament the image of dominatrix

which intrinsically eroticizes female bodybuilders (295). With their highly sexualized physique, it is little

surprise that the flexing female bodybuilder are appreciated by muscle worshippers who express sexual

interest in muscular women and Richardson restates that by sharing, “the female bodybuilder in muscle-

worship porn does not simply look like the supreme dominatrix but also performs ‘acts’ or ‘fixes’ with a

distinct S&M flavor” (296). With further prodding, it is found that, “many female bodybuilders earn a

living by posting photos and videos to sites that require viewers to pay to access sexually explicit photos

and videos of muscular women (Hunter 7). Their entanglement in this is reasoned by Shea in “The
Paradox of Pumping Iron” (2001) who says, “female bodybuilders rarely get sponsored to endorse

products, often succumbing to…private posing, ‘muscle worship,’ or wrestling sessions” (45). Female

bodybuilders sexualizing burgeoned when, according to Ian, “world-class female physique athletes have

had to acknowledge that the bodybuilding establishment wants them, in effect, dead” (73). Therefore, it is

understood that female bodybuilders resorted to such sexualizing due to IFBB itself which was too keen

to restrict female bodybuilding because it doesn’t sell and attract paying audiences which highlights

women’s compromised position in this field.

As Richardson’s research article both supports and dismisses the idea of the built female body as

feminist resistance, his neutral conclusion that the feminist images of female bodybuilders is indeed

dependent on the perception and perspective of the context coded within the representation seems fitting.

However, by probing for and understanding the reasons behind female bodybuilders feminized and

sexualized orientation in the sport, Richardson’s final affirmation that female bodybuilders indeed

“struggle to achieve recognition in a male-dominated subculture” (297) complements the idea that their

participation may had had been an initial form of resistance to patriarchy but their declining reception in

the sport has sent them whirling back to square one, feminized and sexualized altogether.
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Normative Femininity in Competitive Bodybuilding.” Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no.

1/2, 2005, pp. 134-149.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. U of California P, 1993.

Grogan, Sarah, et al. “Femininity and Muscularity: Accounts of Seven Women Bodybuilders.” Journal of

Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, pp. 49-61.

Heywood, Leslie. Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding. Rutgers UP, 1998.

Hunter, Sheena A. “Not Simply Women’s Bodybuilding: Gender and the Female Competition

Categories.” Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2013.

Ian, Marcia. “The Primitive Subject of Female Bodybuilding: Transgression and Other Postmodern

Myths.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2001, pp. 69-100.

McGrath, Shelly A, and Ruth A. Chananie-Hill. “Big Freaky-Looking Women: Normalizing Gender

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354.

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Gender Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 289–301.

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Women & Language, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 42–46.

Tajrobehkar, Bahar. “Flirting with the Judges: Bikini Fitness Competitors’ Negotiations of Femininity in

Bodybuilding Competitions.” Sociology of Sport Journal, vol. 22, no. 4, 2016, pp. 294-304.