On Beauty

Given the subjects of the last three days here at FMS, it's hardly surprising that I've been thinking about the beauty of muscular women rather a lot this week, but the ever-excellent Ryan Takahashi's excellent recent essay on The "Alternate Femininity" of Female Bodybuilders has also served as a source of today's musings.



Mr Takahashi's essay neatly debunks the myth that female bodybuilders are "masculine" just because their own particular brand of femininity is unconventional before turning more specifically to the concept of "beauty". They [muscular and non-muscular women] are all beautiful... The only difference is how universally regarded their beauty is, he writes. Most of us can agree that Bar Rafaeli is super gorgeous. But not everyone can agree that Monica Martin is equally gorgeous.



Now I'm not about to disagree with the man, but I guess it's indicative of just how far I have immersed myself in the world of female muscle that I had to look Bar Rafaeli up. I had heard the name - I'm not completely out of touch(!) - but I'd never, as far as I knew, seen her before. There she was, in all her conventional beauty. And it turned out that yes, most men do apparently agree that she is, as Mr Takahashi puts it, "super gorgeous". But not, it seems, me. Quite honestly, she left me cold.

I'll give you another example. At the place I've been working recently there's a young French female lawyer. The entirety of the male staff at the firm (well, the straight ones, anyway) are utterly smitten with her, and not just because she earns lawyer money! She's a looker, as they say. But her beauty is a Bar Rafaeli kind of conventional beauty. I'd rather spend some quality time with the girl from the post room who does Muay Thai and who arrives at work all sweaty from her cycle in. I'm a minority of one.

The days when I would worry about this sort of thing are long gone. Why am I different? or What's wrong with me? are not questions I ask any more. But I am asking myself another question: Suppose I'd never seen Bar Rafaeli or Monica before and you showed me a picture of just their faces. Suppose you did the same with the French lawyer and the post room girl. Suppose I knew nothing about them, that I just had their face to go on. Would I find Monica and Ms Muay Thai more beautiful?



Is there something identifiably different about the faces of female bodybuilders and fit, muscular women more generally? Do they have (for want of a better word) "stronger" features, perhaps? Or is it more about their inner strength and confidence, and comfort in their own skin revealing itself somehow? Shining through their eyes or something? These are obviously not questions that I'm about to give a definitive answer to, but I will say that if you look at any before & after transformation picture you can see that it's not just that the newly-muscular woman's body has changed. The face has changed too. Leaner, yes, of course, but isn't there something else as well?



I haven't always been so exclusive about associating facial beauty with physical beauty. Seven years ago I fell in love with my wife, and that was, at least initially, to do with how beautiful I thought she was. But since she's got into working out (see FMS passim), I'd say that yes, her face has changed. She's happier within herself, and that inner contentment is, I think, what's making her even more beautiful to me.



I could well be over-analysing. It may be as simple as the fact that fit women have the healthy glow that comes from regular exercise and a clean diet. After all, isn't the pilates teacher always better-looking than her students?! Nevertheless, I've always thought it would be interesting to reverse the experiment mentioned above. Does it work the other way around? Can men whose taste in women is more conventional tell when they're looking at a muscular woman? If you show a non-female muscle head a picture of just the face of a muscular woman, would he find her beautiful?



What exactly it would prove if he did I'm not exactly sure, maybe just that the muscle woman you chose was, as well as being unconventionally beautiful, also conventionally beautiful in many ways. And that's not really the point, is it?! But at least it gave me an excuse to feature the undeniably gorgeous Mavi and Shannon (it's back to Courtney again now, apparently), which is no bad thing.

So, what is my point?

I didn't promise one, but I feel I should try to come up with one nevertheless...

While checking out Georgina McConnell's Instagram the other day I came across this: The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet. It's a quote attributed to London-based political writer Mohadesa Najumi (and you can search for more on her if you dare). Now, I doubt Ms Najumi had muscular women in mind when she came up with this little nugget, but she'd probably agree their utter lack of regard for the role society would have them play qualifies them as the "feared individual" type.



When female muscle fans like me write about the Beauty of the Muscular Woman or whatever, are we not guilty of deluding ourselves that our words, our arguments, in some way "validate" their beauty? If so, I imagine Georgina McConnell and Mohadesa Najumi would accuse us of missing the point entirely. We flatter ourselves that they care what we think. They neither want nor need defending.

And I suspect it is this that I, you, and the rest of the brethren are really responding to. It's not so much that the muscular woman offers an alternative concept of beauty, and more that she offers no invitation whatsoever for you to judge her beauty at all.



I started this post yesterday, and today, while having lunch with a colleague, the pretty young French lawyer came up. I confessed she didn't do it for me. "Is it an 'I'm married so I don't talk about how hot some chicks are' thing?" he wondered. Not at all, I said, and then I confessed I found the post room girl much more exciting. "Oh," said my colleague, "You like chicks with the fuck-you attitude." Shit, I said to myself. I've been blabbing away on this subject for hours and there it is, all succinctly put. Damn!



Enjoy!