Abs Week: Abs of Yesteryear

or THE ABS THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH ABS

Anja Langer



My first Abs Queen. Soon after I first got turned-on to female muscle, I saw an issue of Muscle & Fitness in my local newsagent with Anja on the cover in contest shape in a black bikini (very similar to the image on the right if that is not the image itself). I couldn’t have stopped myself buying it even if I’d wanted to. And of course the reason I bought it was so that I could masturbate while looking at her, but while I did plenty of that, I also remember spending a lot of time just looking at her, following the contours of her muscles with my eyes and thinking how perfect her body was. And thinking the most perfect part of her body was her stomach (I doubt I even knew they were called abs then).


Tonya Knight



I’m pretty sure that the reason for my reaction to Anja’s, Tonya’s, and countless other female bodybuilders’ abs in those first few years was that I had never seen anything like them before, and they were so different from the norm. This must have been the reason for the intensity of my physical response to them. Sure, I’d seen athletes, but they weren’t wearing bikinis and deliberately flexing. This was a completely new concept to me, and these were a completely new kind of woman.


Sharon Bruneau



A female muscle Etna, Sharon smoulders in the kind of abs-revealing swimsuit that seems to have gone right out of vogue. And I think that is a crying shame, because once upon a time, there was a teenage female muscle fan who used to jump for joy when he found one of his pin-ups in a magazine who was wearing one.

Sandy Riddell and Valerie Scott model two more examples.



Whether these swimsuits revealed as much of the pec area as they did the abs (like Sharon’s above) or revealed just about everything else (like Valerie’s) didn’t (and still doesn’t) matter to me. There just needs to be a space where the abs go. For what it’s worth, I reckon the abs-revealing swimsuit (there is probably a proper name but I don’t care what it is) died because there are simply not enough women in the world who look good in them to make it economically viable. Or something.


Juliette Bergmann and Marjo Selin




MAJOR teenage crushes. While my classmates pasted the lead singer of The Bangles (whatever her name was) to the inside of their locker doors, and I pretended to like her too, of course, back at home I was drooling over the likes of Juliette and Marjo. Not only did they have the sexy sexy abs (as well as other muscles) that I desired, they were just so EXOTIC. I still find the young Juliette’s unique beauty absolutely mouth-watering, and as for Marjo, I didn’t even know how to pronounce her name (Mar-Joe? Mar-Yo?) and it doesn’t get any more exotic than that.


Alphie Newman



To a boy from the suburbs of London, Alphie seemed to be the epitome of the all-American girl. An all-American girl with a six-pack and muscles everywhere else too. And what’s more she was more or less the same age as me, leading to all sorts of fantasies. Unfortunately, in the suburbs of London in the late 1980s, girls like Alphie were in short supply. My imagination, though, was limitless.


Tara Dodane and Marie Mahabir



Issues of muscle magazines with contest reports of female bodybuilding shows were always must-buys. These days female bodybuilding is a footnote in the general muscle media, but once upon a time there were full page pictures of all the top placing contestants and their big hair and ripped abs.


WPW Covers



Whether there were abs on the cover or not, WPW was always a must-buy, but here’s two examples of covers that would have got me even hotter under the collar than usual, from issues that were over ten years apart. On the left, female muscle pioneer Kay Baxter, and on the right an image of Karen Netterstrom that I reckon has become one of the iconic shots of female muscle fandom.


Christa Bauch and Charla Sedacca



And inside the covers of those WPW magazines, physiques the likes of which I had never imagined. They were so different from mainstream portrayals of ideal beauty, they were so lean, their muscles so defined, and for me they were so exciting to behold. In those days, you thought you might be the only one who found these women beautiful and sexy, leading to all kinds of confusion. It’s a better world for female muscle fans now that I can share my love of images like the ones of Christa and Charla with you.


Laura Creavalle and Negrita Jayde: Unforgettable



And to finish, back to the mainstream muscle media. Two images that I would have first come across in the mainstream muscle mags as a teenage boy and then rediscovered through the internet many many years later thanks to the efforts of the lovely people who scan. These images of Laura and Negrita were so familiar after so many years that I could almost smell the magazine when I saw them again. The kind of images from my youth that made me the female muscle fan I remain to this day.

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to vote for your favourite abs!