A Week of Favourites: WPW

I moved house recently. Unpacking, I went through some boxes I hadn't been through since the last time I'd moved about four years before. Mostly found the sort of things I should have thrown out four years ago, but I did turn up an interesting notebook.

It dated from 1998, when, for the first time, I had a job that afforded me unlimited internet access from my desk. And it was at that desk, working late one night (no really, I was actually working) that I took a break and did something I'd been thinking of doing for some time. I began to browse for images of female bodybuilders.



I came across the Women's Physique World website that night, and within days I had got myself my own desktop for home and bought myself one of those Yahoo discs that allowed you to access the internet for (what would now be) an extortionate price.

Night after night and inch by inch those preview images loaded onto my screen through my dial-up connection. Some of the women and some of the images I had seen in the old WPW mags, but most were brand new to me. I was hooked all over again.



Before long I had a phone bill I had to negotiate a payment plan for. I had to ration my internet use. So I bought a printer. And I was online only long enough to print one or two images and then (among other things) I'd write down my thoughts about them.

And I'd kept the notebook.



The word 'perfection' keeps flashing through my mind as my eyes move over her beautiful bronzed body. Her calves, perfection. Her thighs, perfection. Her chest, her shoulders, her arms. Perfection, perfection, perfection. She smiles back at me, her eyes blazing with confidence and pride. Perfection. And she knows it.

Guess I was blogging before I knew what blogging was. What's embarrassing though is that I wouldn't claim to have written very much in the last 5 years that was very different from what I've found in that notebook - as the sample above shows!



Today's women probably don't need any introduction, but just in case...

From the top row down, left-hand pic first then the right: Zuzana Korinkova, Melissa Coates; Sharon Marvel, Christa Bauch; Nursel Gurler, Paula Suzuki; Jennifer Greenbaum, Christy Wolf; Valerie Gangi, Sue Myers.