First Love

She was on the cover of the first bodybuilding magazine I ever bought.

This particular (UK) issue of Muscle and Fitness was possibly the first one I'd seen that had only a woman on the cover. And what a woman! I'd flicked through magazines in shops before, furtively ogling the female bodybuilders as the adrenaline rush that I have become so familiar with coursed through my body, but I'd never gone through with actually purchasing one. This time though the sight of Anja's incredible body, ripped and oiled in a black bikini was just too much. I couldn't leave the shop without the magazine, or more accurately, without the woman on the cover.

Dry-mouthed, I whipped the magazine off the shelf and went up to the counter and paid. For some reason, the shopkeeper put it in a brown paper bag, usually used to hide porn! Were my intentions that obvious? I quickly popped it into my bag and left the shop in a hurry. I bounced along the road, ecstatic. I was taking Anja home!

FMS, "Meine Top 5 Deutsch Muskel Mädchen: Winner"



It was 1980 and I was 15 years old when I started training with weights. I was the only girl in the gym, but this did not bother me. I actually enjoyed it, especially since the guys were all amazed at how strong I was. Slowly but surely, I got into a regular work-out schedule. For the first six months, I trained twice a week. Gradually, I increased my training to three times a week, then four times a week, and so on. Then in 1981, I decided to enter my first competition, the Baden Wurttenberg championship. I placed second, that is second to last, but rather than letting it discourage me, it fueled my ambition and I trained even harder.

Anja Langer, "My Story"



By the time I was taking Anja home, she was one of the best female bodybuilders in the world. There had been several more contests, first local, then national, then international. At junior level, she was world champion in 1985, then in 1986 she took German and European titles and turned pro. Amazingly, she was just 21 years old.



I didn't know any of that as I unwrapped my precious cargo from its temporary brown paper home, alone at last. Of course I masturbated while looking at her, there was plenty of that, but I also remember spending a lot of time just looking at her, following the contours of her muscles with my eyes. How perfect, and how fascinating her muscular body was! The way her shoulders curved up and out, the way her abdominals seem to be pulling her tiny waist in, her hard muscular chest, the way her thigh and calf muscles flared out - all these details and more became locked away in my brain.



She had a relatively short career in the end. Runner-up at the Worlds (to Bev Francis) in 1987, 4th at the Olympia the same year, followed by another silver medal at the 1988 Olympia. She put her career on hold for a year, intending to return to the Olympia in 1990, but life got in the way, and she had her first child in January 1991.



There have been tantalising glimpses of her since then. She did some photoshoots in 2000, and again in 2009 (with Marjo Selin), and 2010 for the German edition of Muscle and Fitness. She was, as you would suspect, still gorgeous, still toned and muscular even after a second child, a great advertisement for the sport.



For me though, very few female muscle lovin' experiences have ever compared with the excitement of that first magazine purchase, and I will always think of Anja as she was on that cover and inside those pages. You never forget your first love, do you?

Happy Valentine's Day!

And don't forget, voting for the 2017 FMS Hot and Hard 100 will only be open for two more weeks. Email 6ft1swell@gmail.com or use the comment box on any post.

If you have already voted in a comment box, be assured I HAVE received your votes, but I'm not going to publish your lists until after voting closes on the 28th.

A New Golden Age? Part I

It started as an idea expressed during an email exchange...

PumpItUp: You probably know I’ve always seen the 1980s, when likely both of us developed this "interest" we have as being a kind of "Golden Age", where the main media source we had, magazines, had an abundance of female muscle if you knew where to look.

The aerobics/fitness boom meant female muscle crept into film and TV too. Even hardcore but mainstream newsagent mags like Flex had FBBs on the cover, something not seen today.

When the internet arrived, there were sources like usenet groups but downloading pics was slow on dial up and hit and miss. Many of the paysites we know today hadn't really got going. The Diana the Valkyrie mega site was one of the few sources that I was a member of for a few years, still running.

Now with Instagram, blogs and tumblr, (as well as the paysites as intermediaries), we are seeing some of the hottest fittest women, women who would not have been found if they didn't compete or get picked up by WPW or one of the other print mags.

In the age of Twitter and the selfie, too often with its banality, but the benefit for us is these otherwise unknown beauties are posting pics of themselves directly to the world, inspiring and encouraging others to do the same. Suddenly we admirers are spoilt for choice.

I hereby declare this is (probably) the Second Golden Age of Female Muscle!

A little later, the idea developed into the series of posts you'll see here this week, which I'm delighted to say are co-authored by FMS and the legendary PumpItUp himself.

The format is the same every day. Each blogger chooses two images - one from the days when their female muscle addiction was born, and another more contemporary one, and they are the basis of our discussion about issues surrounding female muscle that was then and female muscle that is now as well as our continuing mutual love for these wonderful women.

PART I

FMS: So to kick off, [PumpItUp has chosen] Tina and Aleesha. Presumably it's a size thing! Tina has a less, let's say "enhanced" look though. Would you say that is a sign of the different times?



PIU: Yeah, spot on. Tina was a phenomenon at the time, primarily those legs of course, specially given her age, and we saw fleeting video and pics of her and limited competing while coming up to date, "enhanced" and popular (look at last year’s FMS Hot and Hard 100) Aleesha is on many of the paysites and has her own website.

We had so many remarkable ladies rise and then fade from the spotlight in the old days, who knows what Tina might have become had she started out in this day and age.

FMS: My first pair is Anja and Dani. An old school bodybuilder and a new school Physique star.



PIU: So would you think that much of old style BB is pretty much new school physique (or with much overlap?)

FMS: I think if you are really talking about the mid-late 80s, then - with the exception of Bev Francis - you can see the bodybuilder then look in the Physique look now.

PIU: I haven’t kept up with all the contest changes but do the divisions now allow women to move between them more easily?

FMS: Seems that Figure to Physique is a well-trodden path these days, and more recently women like Zoa Linsey, Klaudia Larson etc. have been moving down.

PIU: And freakazoid Anne Freitas - anything could happen! After I picked up my jaw at her previous extreme form, from what I've seen lately of her, I actually think I prefer her physique look.

FMS: Problem they (and the IFBB) have is that the WPD doesn't quite know what it is yet. There's a massive difference in muscularity between Latorya Watts (Ms Figure Olympia) and Margie Martin, and Physique covers it, so you have the more muscular women winning some shows, and the less muscular winning others.

2016 may be the year the IFBB 'define' the Physique division better though. Autumn Swansen - who won the Arnold Classic - has had a meteoric rise through the pro Physique ranks, and I think her look is what the IFBB are after.



Funnily enough, she looks even more Anja-like than Dani!

Any comments about this week's post would be especially welcome. What's your opinion about the issues come up in our conversation? Is your idea of the Golden Age of female muscle similar or different, and do you agree we are entering another one now?

Part II follows tomorrow.

Treasures from the Archive: Ms Olympia Memories: Part I The Magazine Years

Can't say I remember too clearly what it was like having to follow the Ms Olympia a month (or two) after it had actually happened through the pages of Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Ironman and so on, but whenever I come across an image of Cory Everson with a big medal around her neck, flanked by one or both of the Weiders and/or one or both of the women who made up the top three that year, her arms held aloft, it invariably seems familiar, and takes me back to those early magazine years.



Then, as far as my teenage female muscle obsessive self was concerned anyway, the result was a given. The Ms Olympia was not so much a contest as the annual coronation of the most physically perfect woman in the world. And clearly that was Cory.



In those days you were never exactly starved of images of her to drool over (especially in Weider publications), but for me it was the pics of Cory on stage that were always the most drool-worthy, so the Olympia editions were prized possessions. The tan, the oil, the striations, the muscles, and, I particularly remember, the bikini bottoms so tight that I was forced to spend hours, possibly days, of my life just looking (slightly puzzled at that tender age) at whatever was making that shape between her legs!



But, of course, there were other women, and in those very early days Anja Langer was, I reckoned, probably the second most physically perfect woman in the world... The judges didn't see it my way (not for the last time) in 1987 (left, below) when she finished 4th, but in 1988 (right) Anja was runner-up to (of course!) Cory Everson.



These days, I'm convinced that the reason I've found myself reacting so positively to the Physique division (much more positively than I'd expected to when it was first announced) is largely because the aesthetic is so reminiscent of Anja's and the other female bodybuilders' at the time I first discovered my love of female muscle. Over 25 years later, it seems I'm still programmed to respond to this "classical" aesthetic.

And staying in those early years (but not in the sense that it was an image I saw in a magazine), a screencap of Gladys Portugues during her routine at the 1986 Ms Olympia. It was intended for posting earlier in the year when FMS explored The Agony & the Ecstasy experienced by female bodybuilders when prepping and competing.



Now I've seen women (and men) looking this deliriously happy before, but they tended to be in sweaty clubs set up in old railway arches in the late 1990s and all of them had ingested a substance whose effects gave it its name. I doubt Gladys had had any of that, nor that she looked so ecstatic because Jean-Claude had promised to buy her a dog. This is what pure, unadulterated, Olympian female muscle ecstasy looks like!



We return to my formative female muscle lovin' years with three of the most "exotic" (to a teenage boy in a London suburb anyway!) and, therefore, most exciting women I had the pleasure of seeing inside the covers of the magazines containing Olympia reports. Future Ms Olympia Juliette Bergmann (above left) seemed, I recall, almost impossibly beautiful, and was probably responsible for my eagerness to visit Holland - much more so than the more conventional attractions for a young man. Marie-Laure Mahabir (above right) seemed to be from a different planet altogether.



The months when pictures from the Olympia appeared in the magazines tended to be the only ones featuring European-based FBBs like Marie-Laure, and I guess because I had seen so few images of them it made them all the more exciting - they were more memorable because they were so rare. Their placing at the show was utterly irrelevant to me, though perhaps it did cross my mind how such a magnificently sensual creature like Claudia Profanter could possibly finish 14th (as she did in '91).



But while it may have been an advantage to be European to get Swell's attention (or maybe that should be to bring Swell to attention), it was by no means necessary. As my teenage years drew to a close, Denise Rutkowski's feline power and unforgettable gold bikini proved an irresistible combination. And, for the first time in my life, I was, actually, trying to resist the lure of female muscle in order to appear all normal and stuff as I left school and moved away to university.

[Incidentally, if you are the sort who likes to know how the FBBs of your youth are looking now I am honour-bound to warn you that YOU SHOULD NOT TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT DENISE RUTKOWSKI LOOKS LIKE NOW. I had the misfortune to see, and it is haunting me. Really. Trust me. DON'T.]



And though I regularly fell off the wagon, discovering the likes of Denise, Yolanda Hughes and Natalia Murnikoviene (above, left and right respectively) when I did, I think of that first effort at repressing my desire to view images of female bodybuilders as the end of "The Magazine Years". By the time I re-embraced my sthenolagnia in the late '90s, I didn't need to rely on the mainstream muscle magazines for my fix - there was Women's Physique World and, a bit later, Muscle Elegance. It's rather ironic (and quite fitting) then that I couldn't actually find a magazine scan of Yolanda at the Olympia from a muscle magazine, and instead had to use a WPW pic.

Oh, look! It's Cory winning again...



And I leave you for today with Denise Rutkowski as I would like to remember her, performing her (I think it's fair to say) LEGENDARY routine from 1993. She finished second, and by all accounts that I know of, should have won.

On this evidence, it's easy to see why people would have thought so.

(If you've already got the box of tissues in in preparation for the excitement of this Friday's 2014 meat-fest, now might be a good time to crack them open...)



Enjoy!

More Ms O memories coming soon...

The Way Legs Were

With the notable exception of the (then and now) freaky pair of legs that belonged to a certain Bev Francis, back in my formative years as a female muscle head, the only legs around were rarely as muscular as the majority of women who compete in the physique division today. However, it is, as Einstein once said, all relative, and at the time, the women I saw in the muscle magazines I obsessively bought were more than big enough to get my teenage eyes popping out of my head (among other things).

So today, courtesy as ever of the heroes who scan and upload images from those 1980s mainstream muscle magazines, a trip down memory lane, a bit of nostalgia for all those furtive purchases we made in newsagent's all over the world and the women that made those purchases so urgent. Today, we remember the way legs were.

Rachel McLish

I don't remember this image particularly, but it serves to indicate how little muscle (by today's standards, and even, in some ways, by early 80s standards) it took for a woman to be 'muscular' back then. I arrived at the female muscle party just a little late for Rachel McLish in her competitive pomp, but it seems to me she actually got bigger after she stopped competing.

Carla Dunlap and Clare Furr

Brian Eno named-chacked Carla in a recent interview, provoking some bizarrely hysterical reactions from the female muscle brethren (more about that on FMS in the future). He says, I remember in the early 1980s when female bodybuilders first started appearing and there was one I really liked, Carla Dunlap. She was Ms Olympia or something like that. She was this amazing black woman, absolutely musclebound, beautiful. 'Absolutely musclebound', he says, and that's exactly what Carla would have seemed to be at that time, not just to Eno but to me too. To her right, Clare Furr's (slightly later) thighs seem positively other-worldly compared to Carla's. 'Absolutely musclebound' back in the early to mid-80s could become 'hardly musclebound' almost overnight.

Tonya Knight and Mary Roberts

As I recall, images of women training like this one of Tonya squatting were far more numerous in the magazines of the 1980s, and only if you were lucky would there be the kind of 'glamour shot' the we can see Mary Roberts in here on the right. It sometimes came (again, this is as I recall, so don't take this as gospel) at the beginning or end of a training photoset, I guess as a way of showing how the hard work pays off. I found, in general, that these shots were much more attention-grabbing, presumably because they were more unusual.

Marjo Selin


And gradually, legs got bigger. Compare the next few groups of images. I really can't say if they are at all chronological (this post is simply not that well-researched!), let's call it 'legological' or perhaps 'podological' (!). I just wanted to illustrate the point somehow. By the time you get to Jackie Paisley, who is (and I do know this) very much late 80s and into the early 90s, legs have, well, you can see for yourself, changed.

Lisa Lorio, Janet Tech and Juliette Bergmann in her early days.


Sue Gafner and Dorothy Herndon


Marie Mahabir, Rene Casella and Jackie Paisley


Sandy Riddell and Anja Langer

Two of my favourite pairs of legs of the period (among many). I was especially taken with Anja's calves. Even today, as I look at the way they bulge outwards so that you can see them even when looking at her leg front on, they are magnificent, so at the time they would have been quite literally breathtaking.

Cory Everson

This image, for me, evokes a lot about that time in my female muscle life, not least the way the women in the magazines used to always seem to be glistening. The style of photography of the time, no doubt, nothing more, but I came to think of that sheen as the glow of health and vitality that only female bodybuilders possess. Impossible to post anything about the 80s without her, Cory is the epitome of female muscle in that decade, her legs as much as any part of her wondrous physique. Funny now to think that once upon a time I couldn't imagine Cory and her contemporaries getting any bigger or better.

Enjoy!