BODYBUILDER! Arrested Development?

While I've been working on this week's posts, I've been getting a familiar feeling. It's the thrill, the rush that only the really big girls provide. Shannon in Saturday's post, Lisa with her veins on the outside of her skin - she only bloody won the Omaha Pro you know, but more about that soon - and as I've been going through the old archive for this and later posts this week, it's returned again and again.




I've been feeling that rush for the best part of 30 years now. For the first time as I sat transfixed by the sight of Carolyn Cheshire on TV. Again when Anja Langer in a black posing suit on the cover of Muscle & Fitness compelled me to buy my first muscle magazine. Again when I first saw a muscular woman in public, again when I first came across WPW magazine and later their website. Again and again the feeling has returned, triggered by what have become my most treasured images, my most treasured clips, and my most treasured experiences - first webcam, Sheila Bleck - thought my heart was gonna explode so hard was it pounding!



So I'm putting together these posts and I'm getting that rush over and over and I start to wonder if that feeling is ever going to fade, or even disappear altogether. And then on Friday I see a BBC documentary about music fans, specifically fans who have taken, and in some cases still do, take their fandom to extremes. The "Super Fans".



The gist was that these Super Fans become obsessed with their favourite band/singer during adolescence. It fills a need. Most grow out of it at some stage, but there are some who continue to repeatedly retreat into this "teenage bubble" long into adulthood. And there are a few - the true obsessives - who end up spending more time in that bubble than they do in the quote unquote real world. Sound familiar?!



Pondering the documentary the next day I began to wonder whether I was suffering from some kind of arrested development - and how ironic that would be given the sources of my obsession are so well-developed - until I remembered something I'd read some years ago about another group of obsessives: fans of super hero comics.




It was a review of a book called The Children of Superman, which was, despite the catchy title, a serious academic study. As far as I could understand, the basic idea of the book was that through interviews with hundreds of fans the author had concluded that while her subjects had never grown out of their comic book obsession, they had grown up within it. Over time the super heroes they most related to had changed as they did. I can't remember the exact details, but in general they would be more into "unrealistic" super heroes like Superman when they were younger, but would relate to more "human" ones, like Spiderman I guess, as they got older.



Not necessarily arrested development then. Phew! But was I into female bodybuilders in a different way now than in the past? Would the theory really stand up if I applied it to my own obsession? And if it didn't, what was I going to do about it?




I decided that perhaps turning it into a post was probably the best idea. Get it all out of my system in one go and be done with thinking about it. Cheaper than a psychiatrist, and with the added bonus that to choose how to illustrate the post I get to go through the archives and revisit some of the images that have most thrilled me. Win win!



And as I dug out the old hard drives the funny thing was that I could see how obsessively I used to organise all my favourite things into folders, and how the folders all had names that describe the contents that made it easy - years later - to find what I was looking for. I congratulated myself for not being remotely as obsessive now, but then I do have much more trouble locating stuff on the current hard drives...




So that obsessive cataloguer does have some redeeming features. Actually, I kind of like him. Addicted, most definitely, but he's managed to control the addiction to some extent. He works, he's on the cusp of buying his first house, and he's engaged to a wonderful woman. In a few years' time he'll be running his own business, buying a second property, and he'll have got married to that wonderful woman. He won't be spending so much time on his collecting and cataloguing, but he has made himself a decent little blog which is followed by some very fine people indeed.



But though some things have changed, he's still getting exactly the same thrill as he always has been. No signs it'll fade, and to be honest, he wouldn't want it to. Arrested development? Perhaps it is. But he wouldn't want it any other way.




And in case you're interested, the label the obsessive cataloguer gave to the folder that contained today's thrilling selections was "Prime Beef". Can't argue with that!



Enjoy!

BODYBUILDER! Super Freak

Are you sure she is human? they ask.



If there was a version of Top Trumps with Muscle Women (now there's an idea!), the Natalia Trukhina card would be a pretty good one to have in your hand.



She's got size. 5'7" (170cm), with a chest measuring 47" (or 120cm). Her biceps? 18" (46cm). Quads? 27" (70cm). Seriously? And her waist? Just 29" (76cm).



A powerlifter who's looking to get into bodybuilding, Natalia has impressive strength to match. She holds world titles and records. And she won't be 24 until the 1st July.



Convinced she's not real or that her pics are all morphed? Why not see for yourself? You know it: I'm stronger than you. A lot stronger, she says. You love that. I love that. And I want to show you. I want to show you my big muscles and tell you how much stronger I am than you, and how I want you to obey me. Let's have some fun on Skype. $7 a minute, to make all your muscle dreams come true. (No nudity.)



Yikes! Now, I'm not doing the cam thing these days, but I must confess to having seen a little footage of her in action and she is quite a sight. And just like John Ritter in "that scene" in Skin Deep, I have to tell you I was absolutely scared stiff. For real.



Check out Natalia in a different kind of action. Voice and all.



Enjoy!

BODYBUILDER! She's Not Like Everybody Else

Seeing a really muscular woman in real life is not a pleasure I have had as often as I would have liked. In fact, I could count them on the striations of one of Christa Bauch's pecs. I've written about pretty much all of them on here at one time or another, giving a name to the intense thrill I've felt on each occasion: "The Madness".



And - unless you count a fully-clothed Andrulla Blanchette in the street one lunchtime and only realising it was her once she was well past me - I've never seen a real female bodybuilder. Like (I guess) a lot of other fans of female muscle, I've always admired them in a kind of second-hand way, seeing them in print and on screen, but never with my own eyes. It's probably for the best. Given the effect seeing a muscular runner had on me just over a year ago (the last time I got The Madness), I wonder if I'd actually be able to survive a real-life encounter with a proper bodybuilder!



I’m pretty sure that the reason for the strength of my reactions on these occasions is that these women are so different and I hardly ever see them in the course of my daily life. A woman with muscle looks very different from other women. Her muscularity makes the shape of her body different. And she carries herself differently, she walks differently. She radiates strength and confidence, not something that many, let's say, "conventionally-bodied" women do. She's a rare and uniquely beautiful sight.



This is perhaps best illustrated, for the vicarious fan anyway, in candids where the female bodybuilder is in a public place, where she literally stands out from the crowd. Perhaps the reason that this kind of shot is so beloved by female muscle heads is that it demonstrates her "otherness" so well. Often onlookers are caught gawping in the shot - look at the guy far right in the pic above, for example. That could be me!



While others cover up, her choice of outfit reveals the body she has worked so hard to achieve. And she's hardly going to choose a dull colour for that outfit either. She wants to be noticed, she wants to walk through the crowd and be the centre of attention. All eyes follow her. You've never seen anything like me before, she seems to say, and you'll never see anything like me again - so get a good look while you can.



And the otherness of female bodybuilders is also commonly (and enthusiastically) illustrated wherever female muscle heads get together with shots - often but not exclusively backstage or around show time - by the juxtaposition of competitors with female fans, backstage helpers, or even fellow competitors from other divisions.



In one-to-one shots like these the difference seems even more marked, jarring even. It's not so much that the female bodybuilder is a stronger, superior woman and more that she is a completely different species altogether. A superior being, if you like. And this is especially true of those female bodybuilders - like Tracy Argo, above - who are big (and somewhat butch!) even by the standards of their female bodybuilding peers.



Less common but no less exciting for fans is an on stage mis-match such as the one at last year's NPC USAs when Aleesha Young blew away the rest of the heavyweight class before her sheer size made the overall posedown a very one-sided affair!



This doesn't happen very often, partly because there are so few shows with posedowns between winners of different weight classes these days. Nevertheless, the appeal of a massively muscular woman outsizing a much smaller (even if muscular) one has been acknowledged by, among other websites, HerBiceps and Muscle Angels, both of which have produced clips like those starring Megan Abshire (getting those big arms worshipped, above) and a rightly smug-looking Lisa Giesbrecht (below).



One female muscle fan has taken this kind of juxtaposition even further. On his Tumblr, ZIMBO, he has posted female bodybuilders next to size zero models. And not just any female bodybuilders. He chooses some of the biggest female bodybuilders there have ever been - like Cornelia Brandt and Renee Toney - to shocking effect.



There is, of course, an argument that neither of these two extreme bodies is quote unquote healthy, but there can be little argument that it's the muscle freaks and not the zeroes who have sculpted their bodies into an ideal that comes from within themselves. And I know which of the two I would prefer most women aspire to.



They do remind me of some of the before and after/transformation pics, even more so because there are numerous famous FBBs who initially employed weight training as their way of overcoming disorders like bulimia. Lisa Cross was one (see Cross Is Back: 500 to 5,000), as was Suzy Kellner (see C.Moore Glootz's Fun from Rear).



But transformation pics don't have to be so extreme to be effective, and among the most famous and loved by the female muscle lovin' community are those that show an attractive but unmuscular woman who made herself into a bone fide beast of a muscle goddess. That's another one for the team, we say to ourselves.



What's not to like about these comparisons? They were certainly pretty before, but there are hundreds, thousands, millions of young women almost exactly like them. After, they are one in a million. They are beautiful, and truly exceptional.



But much as I do love the fact that Shannon, Teresa and so on have come over to the muscle side, and much as I do admire how women like Lisa and Suzy have turned their lives around, my absolute favourite transformations are of the fat to fit variety.



Wendy Watson (above), Miava Nelson (below), and previously on FMS Tarna Alderman and Alana Shipp are four examples of women once overweight and unhappy about it. They lost that weight, became inspirations to women in the predicament they once faced, and became sex symbols for the discerning male in the process. And best of all they did it while eating more food than ever!



No comparison then between the female bodybuilder and other, more traditionally shaped women, even if that other woman was the FBBs former self! And that's rather ironic, I think, given that the sport is all about comparisons, both on stage and in the progress pic, where the muscular female charts her own ever-growing journey.



On and on she pushes herself to be bigger, stronger, better... Not everyone can summon up that kind of single-minded drive. And all to the end of building a body that is at odds with the norms dictated by society. She's really not like everybody else, is she? And isn't that, dear reader, precisely what makes her so wonderful?

Enjoy!