The (Mis)Adventures of C. Moore Glootz II

Catch up with Part I here.


Not the object of my teenage affections - she was way better-looking!

School did not end well for C. Moore. In retrospect, my attempts to win the heart of the only female P.E. teacher under 40 were, though heartfelt, rather misguided. I was asked to leave before taking my A-levels, and, somewhat understandably, there wasn't much enthusiasm among local schools to welcome C. Moore into their communities.



At home my bedroom was adorned with pictures of muscular goddesses carefully cut out of muscle magazines (I always bought two copies of everything - one to destroy and one for the files), so you can probably imagine what my own family thought of me.



I sweated out that summer working all hours in a dry cleaning shop, saving almost every penny - I even stopped buying magazines, although I did steal a few. It was time for C. Moore to follow his passion. And so, on an unseasonally chilly September morning, with my father, mother and sister dutifully (but cheerily) waving me goodbye, I boarded my flight to the Land of Female Muscle. Destination - New York.


Central Park - but not in my experience

I'd like to say the States were everything I'd hoped they would be, but sadly my act - illegal (after my tourist visa had run out), unskilled, secondary school dropout with questionable social skills and probably too many questions about where the local gyms were - didn't play very well in New York, and nor did it play well in California, Hawaii (though I swear I saw Marjo Selin drive by while I was there) and Phoenix, Arizona.



But down in Florida, which was my last hope - I hitched there from Arizona, sleeping on gas station roofs when the weather allowed, bus stations when it didn't - I finally found some work with accommodation thrown in, and C. Moore became the handyman at a small resort complex just outside Tampa. I didn't see any female muscle there, but at least I wasn't destitute anymore, and the season was pretty much neverending.



I stayed - for two years. I got good at fixing pretty much anything, and even developed some social skills. I went running along the beach (never saw a single muscular bum, not one), but I got a great tan. I experienced my first hurricane. And my second. I lost my virginity, but not, as I imagined I would, to a female bodybuilder who I'd marry.


Tera Guzman, a good few years later

And I went to my first Bodybuilding show. The 1998 NPC Florida Championships. Kerri Crotty won the Overall, though Tera Guzman and Christine Wan are probably the most familiar names from the eleven who I saw compete that day.


Christine Wan, not in her 1998 Bodybuilding shape

To say that this was the excitement and experience I had crossed the pond and suffered so much hardship for would be a little wide of the mark. Looking back now I wonder at my naivety - I really did think I would be able to just saunter into the pump room, and I really did think once I was there that it would be OK to just feel up some prime female beef. I honestly thought they would be grateful to meet a true fan.



My last few nights in the US were spent in a hospital with a cop sitting next to my bed. As soon as I was discharged, I was deported. C. Moore was driven to the airport at the expense of the county taxpayers, and a big black X was stamped into my passport to ensure I would never return to American soil. I've never tried. But as soon as the plane landed me back in Blighty I set about planning the next contest I would attend.



For a brief - a very brief - moment (and as totally wrong and inappropriate as my behaviour was) (how's that?) [fine - legal dept.] I had laid my hands upon a muscular female body. Everything that happened next - the shouting, the bleeding, the pain, the handcuffs, the mugshot, the hospital food, the piss-taking cops - had been worth it.

A New Golden Age? Part IV

PIU: For me , the pairing of Janice Ragain on the cover of WPW and Cindy was mostly to emphasise the positive appeal to other women (as opposed to the admiring male fans) as a lifestyle choice, while Cindy does her own promotion mostly and offers her own personal training and hopefully encourages the next generation of fit ladies.

FMS: Yes, absolutely. Not all those pictures are for our benefit! One of my other choices will return to the theme of the inspirational - "fitspirational" - types with large female social media followings. For now I'll add that it's a good sign that these women can make a career of being the muscular role model for other women. Not possible in the past I would say. Not to such an extent anyway, even if you were Cory or Kiana Tom and were on TV, I reckon there were a lot fewer women who were after your "look" compared to now.

My next choices probably take us back to a theme we touched on earlier. Marjo Selin - "bodybuilder" - and Diana Schnaidt, IFBB Figure.



OK, I haven't chosen a pic of Marjo at her most ripped, but I think it's fair to say that it isn't just today's Physique women who carry as much muscle as old school FBBs.



On top of that, what gloriously beautiful women they are. I can see how many of the freaky big women wouldn't appeal to a lot of guys, but not finding Marjo or Diana sexy is just incomprehensible.

PIU: Hmmm, Marjo and some others back then seemed to express a particular kind of European elegance and sophistication, as if they had to be that much better to be seen in the early days amid the dominance of the US Olympia contestants, like Marie Laure Mahabir (later Parisian but originally from French West Indies) or a particular early but very rare fave of mine Michelle Sa. Remember those Women's Muscle Power VHS tapes?



(But what is it with me and stunners called Michelle (Lewin, Cummings, Trapp, Sa?)

Now with the internet, we perhaps have a kind of globalisation, where a Russian, a South Korean or a Brit can potentially, if they make the effort to be seen, compete for world attention on a more level playing field, and build a fan base.

As mentioned before, readers' comments are always very very welcome but would be particularly welcomed on the subjects and female muscle eras discussed this week.

Or maybe you are similarly afflicted with a "thing" for hot muscle Michelles?

'Fess up!

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!

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!