Yesterday, FMS brought you some of the comments made by fans and female bodybuilders who have signed the petition organised by Real Female Bodybuilding against the scrapping of the Ms International from the IFBB calendar. Many of them were heart-breaking pleas from female bodybuilders themselves, devastated that IFBB seems to be turning its back on them after they have given so many years of hard work to their sport. There are rumours that there are even plans afoot to end the Ms Olympia contest, effectively killing off professional female bodybuilding as we know it.
Dark days indeed. Or are they? I’ll whisper it, because even to my own ears it sounds like heresy, but in my (ill-informed) opinion, it’s entirely possible that this could be the best thing that has ever happened to female bodybuilding.
By the 1970s the pay differential had increased. Promoters were making more money. Male players were making more money. Everybody was making more money except the women. In 1969, ratios of 5:1 in terms of pay between men and women were common at smaller tournaments. By 1970 these figures ballooned to 8:1 and even 12:1.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If you throw in the fact that the organisers of the tournaments were deliberately paying the women much much less in an attempt to deter them from turning up at all and you have a fair description of how professional female bodybuilding has been going in recent years. But in fact the above paragraph isn’t about bodybuilding at all, but tennis. Specifically it relates the motivation for the creation of the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) in 1973.
In many sports, the world governing body actively promotes the female game. FIFA is now beginning to reap the benefits of its investment in women’s football over a period of decades, and similar results are being seen in cricket and rugby, to name but two. Whether these governing bodies are doing it in the name of gender equality or purely to increase revenues is neither here nor there. The important thing is that in some sports it hasn’t been necessary for the women to take over the governance of their own sport.
But that was not the case in tennis, and the success of the WTA in transforming the fortunes of its members has made it not only the inspiration, but also the blueprint for other sportswomen wishing to take control of their own and their sport’s future.
Easier said than done? I don’t disagree, and particularly so because bodybuilding does not have nearly the same mass appeal as tennis, neither as a spectator sport nor in terms of participation. But that does not mean that female bodybuilders should not aim to follow the same path.
And amid the howls of protest against the IFBB, there have been statements made by female bodybuilders that prove that some of them are thinking along these lines, and maybe have been for some time.
Pamela Hannam, for one, is an advocate of female bodybuilders doing it for themselves: Going to the NPC, the IFBB and to Arnold with our hats in our hands and our heads down begging to ‘please keep us’ isn't going to cut any ice with them. THEY HATE US!!!
Are we so incapable of taking care of our own sport that we as women can't band together and make this the best damn thing that has ever happened to us? I see all these people writing in on this and the passion is clearly there!
How damn hard would it be to rent a damn hall in Columbus the same damn weekend [as the Arnolds] and have our own show? Raise some REAL prize money and kick these assholes in the balls and say ‘SCREW YOU!’ It is time for the women who have been in this sport, the women who are currently competing, and the people who love how we look to band together and form a league of our own.
Fighting Talk: Pamela Hannam (left) and Iris Swatuk (right)
Iris Swatuk agrees the time for change may have come. Maybe it's just time to start a new federation… And the prizes and rewards would be based on the work put in by the women and not the show's biggest sponsors. Not ‘Hawaiian Tropic shows’. They can have their own venue in the IFBB.
There is already precedent for female muscle business becoming involved. Muscle Girlz Live provided sponsorship for female bodybuilding at the Toronto Pro recently. Last year, Wings of Strength did the same in Chicago last year and will do so again in 2013. I know that in the UK there are plans to use funds raised from an online female muscle magazine to provide prize money for women at shows here. The creation of an all-female bodybuilding federation seems to me to be simply the next logical step.
It’s true, as colt13 pointed out this week (see Did You Know...?), that there needs to be more professional shows for the women. More shows means more new talent coming through, not the same women winning again and again. I also agree with a point that other readers have made – fans can play a major part in providing funding for these shows. But if the renaissance of female bodybuilding that we would all like to see is going to happen, then I believe it must start with the creation of an all-new female-run federation.
Fans could then support the federation or the women themselves directly, or indeed the websites or other sponsors that were funding the shows. The shows would be exclusively female, allowing them the time to have different weight or age classes, amateur and pro contests at the same show, three-minute routines, and even added attractions like strength shows. In short, all the good stuff can follow.
So perhaps there will be a silver lining to the cloud hanging over the sport. Perhaps in the future female bodybuilding historians will look back at the cancellation of the Ms International and see it as the point when the women took control and started doing it for themselves. I sincerely hope so anyway.
What female bodybuilding needs now is it’s own Billie-Jean King to step up…
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