Swell Digs: Strong and Hard Women

Last summer, I was contacted by Dr. Tanya Bunsell of the University of St. Mary’s University College London. As a result, British FMS readers were invited to take part in a research project about female muscle fans here in the UK, and several of you regular readers accepted the invitation. The results of that research have now been incorporated into Dr. Bunsell’s book: Strong and Hard Women.

One of the reasons I was so keen to help Dr. Bunsell with her research was that for a long time I’d felt frustrated at the portrayal of female muscle fans in the media “as weedy, nerdy, pathetic, ‘living with their mothers at 40 and saving every penny for sessions’, repressed homosexuals, lacking in social skills and having something mentally defective about them.” I hoped that her research might be the first step in dispelling that myth. Unfortunately, the study group of muscle worshippers the author was able to contact through the blog was extremely small, so more research will be necessary. However, more pleasingly, none of us matched the stereotypical profile.

We are, apparently, “middle-class, university-educated, and aged late 20s - late 40s. The majority… heterosexual and… active gym members.” Anecdotal evidence from interviews the author conducted with female bodybuilders who offer muscle worship sessions supports the idea that the stereotype was way off the mark. One female bodybuilder saying “they are of all ages (20–80 years old), ethnicities, classes and appearances”.

Phew!

But it would be misleading of me to only focus on the chapter (half a chapter, in fact) that deals with the phenomenon of female muscle worship. The book, after all, is about the “Strong and Hard Women”, not about us men who love them, and even that half-chapter is mainly about their attitudes to muscle worship, not ours. Subtitled “An Ethnography of Female Bodybuilders”, it is, without doubt, the most comprehensive and detailed study of the lives of female bodybuilders ever undertaken, and a fascinating look inside their world and their “lived experiences”.

Since I first read the book soon after its publication in April, I’ve been wanting to post a review of it here. The writing of the review, however, has proved to be quite beyond me. Instead, what I think I can do is to describe something about the effect that reading and re-reading this book has had on me.

I’ve been a fan of female muscle for getting on twenty-five years, and during those twenty-five years, I have picked up a thing or two about female bodybuilding. Or so I thought. In the time it took for me to read Strong and Hard Women, I learned more than I had in all of those twenty-five years, and unlearned a great deal of what I thought I knew besides. Reading it has been a life-changing experience in that respect, and that is perhaps the highest praise that any book can receive.

To be honest, I was slightly nervous on first reading. I wondered if I might learn too much about female bodybuilders from the book, that I’d learn things that I didn’t want to know, and that my love of muscle women would be tarnished by that.

It’s true there is a lot of detail here. As much detail as you could want. The author has quite literally got inside the world of the female bodybuilder by, to all intents and purposes, becoming one herself. Only by walking the walk was she able to get the women to talk the talk to her.

On one occasion a potential interviewee asks a male bodybuilder to put Dr. Bunsell through a punishing training session as a test of her credentials before granting her an interview. In another section the author shares a diary entry in which she describes her exhausted muscles: “My forearm hurts just picking up a cup of tea. My hand hurts, my shoulders, biceps and lats – all of which were pumped with blood and endorphins not so long ago.”

But having proved herself, having made her body one of the tools of her research, Dr. Bunsell is able to gain acceptance, and consequently unprecedented access to the world of the female bodybuilder. She’s so trusted by one of the women that steroids are stored in her kitchen while an interview is conducted. In many cases women who started out as subjects become the author’s friends.

It’s this level of intimacy that sets the study apart. From steroids to sexuality, from contests to coping with the ultra-masculine world of the weights room, from friendships to family relationships, every aspect of the life of a female bodybuilder is here. And throughout the book there is the author’s own journey through this world that she (and we) are so fascinated by, as well as the benefit of her academic knowledge, as she explains the feminist issues surrounding the sport.

Quite simply, there is absolutely nothing comparable on the subject to this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough, despite its wallet-busting retail price (Amazon have the book available for less than £70 at the time of writing, and that's as good as it gets right now), I would urge you to buy it.

I feared I would learn too much from reading Dr. Bunsell's book, but while I certainly have learned more than I ever imagined I could, it has only served to increase my admiration for these truly heroic women.