Biception

There are a lot of different dogs in the world, but when someone says the word ‘dog’, we all have a general idea of what they mean because we all share a general idea of what all dog have in common. In philosophy, this general idea is a concept.

Now, I think we can all agree that there are definitely not enough women in the world who have well-developed biceps. Seeing them in real life is such a rare occurrence for me that I am forced to scour the internet for them! This rarity has an effect on the general idea, the concept, of what biceps on a woman looks like.



Now, me and you, when we think of female biceps, might imagine those displayed by Sarah Hayes above, or maybe Birgita’s magnificent pair. We might just as well imagine Nataliya Romashko’s works in progress, or [name removed by request] flexing both barrels as she opens the door to welcome us to her home for a night of muscle worship. This is our concept of a female bicep. Our bicept.

[image removed by request]

But the others, those cursed with an aversion to muscular women, or those that simply don’t scour the internet for images of them, where does their biception come from?

Today I overheard a conversation while I was tucking into my green curry at Greenwich Market. Two women were talking about a mutual friend and how big her biceps were getting. They weren’t being negative, just incredulous that this friend seemed to like showing off her big arms.

Apart from thoughts of getting to know the women at the next table so I could get to see their friend showing off her arms, images started to spring to mind. Images of women with big arms. Images that reflect my bicept. Images like this one of the gorgeous Lyris Capelle.



They mentioned her fiancée (Curses! Foiled again!) and suddenly something like this flashed through my mind.



‘Too big’, I found myself thinking. This was, after all, the real world. They couldn’t be that big. Big for most people is something like this.


I’m not complaining by the way, I think they are just lovely, and I’d be proud to rub oil into either one. Or both if absolutely necessary

But then I really did come back to the real world. One of the women said ‘If she keeps going like this, she’ll be like Cameron Diaz.’ What?! As big as Cameron’s?! And not even yet, but at some point in the future ‘if she keeps going like this’?!

The general bicept, therefore, seems to be that Cameron Diaz has huge arms for a woman, whereas our group bicept is something quite different..

I wish I could have opened up the laptop and given them a taste of Alina Popa fully-pumped, Heather Policky (what would they have said about her legs?!) or Danielle Gardner, who has just slammed the door, flexed her arms and told you that she isn’t going to let you out till she’s finished with you.



If I’d shown them Carla Rossi (one bigger than the other, but both far far bigger than Cameron Diaz’s) or Amanda Micka’s big round baseballs, would it have altered their bicept forever?



Some people think it would have. And have set up a scheme whereby other women’s bicept can be re-aligned. Female bodybuilders visit women’s groups, show off their guns, and as a result, the next time one of their friend’s has arms that could maybe one day rival Cameron Diaz’s, they don’t express surprise at how big they are and get me all excited, waste my valuable Christmas shopping time, only to kill all my hopes because of their faulty, and no, I don’t think that’s too strong a word, faulty concept of what a female bicep is.

Rebecca Armstrong is seen here at one of these bicept re-alignment events. She seems to be enjoying it a little more than the other women present, doesn’t she? It’s never nice to find out you’ve been getting it all wrong. And there’s nothing better than being the one to tell them!



Enjoy!

Treasures from the Archive: Magazine Years Part II

More of my favourites from back in the day when this then teenage female muscle fan was forced to survive on the few pictures of women in mainstream muscle magazines and his bi-monthly fix of Women’s Physique World.

Thanks to all the wonderful people who scan the women from the magazines of that era, this, and the previous 'magazine years' post wouldn’t have been possible without you.


Italian muscle fox Claudia Profanter was a huge crush of mine. Her Roman beauty (I am a sucker for Mediterranean women) and sexy muscular body had me reaching for the tissues again and again. Photos like the one on the right suggested to me that she was a very sensual poser, which made her all the sexier still. And many years later when I saw a video clip of Claudia in competition, I realised I had been right - she posed with feline grace, a lioness of a woman. Sadly, photos of Claudia, and other European bodybuilders of the time who didn’t make a permanent move to North America, were (and are) in short supply, as the mainstream muscle media was almost entirely based there. But I reckon that just makes each one more special to find. Any photo of Claudia in her pomp will be a winner.


Tonya Knight, for a while, received the kind of muscle (and more mainstream) media attention that other female bodybuilders could only dream of. There were so many photos of Tonya that by the law of averages there was going to be a few absolutely smoking ones. The two above certainly qualify as that. She was lean, strong, and muscular, but unmistakably a beautiful young woman at the same time, and became the poster girl of female bodybuilding, the one who would crush forever the image of female bodybuilders as masculine. Well, that didn’t quite happen, but when I look at Tonya’s mouth around that sax’s mouthpiece, I seriously don’t care.

Experience has taught me that it’s better to get things out into the open. But back then I was very much inexperienced in the ways of the world, and so throughout these years, I kept my fetish for muscular women absolutely top secret. Was that a bad thing? In retrospect, I think it was. But there’s no point regretting it, and at least I’m managing to be more open about it now, though I’ve still a long way to go!


I bunk off school one afternoon and head for the town centre and a large newsagent’s where I know they have a good stock of muscle magazines. Among them is one I’ve never seen before called Muscle Training Illustrated, and on the cover is Dorothy Herndon. There’s no one browsing near me so I grab it from the shelf. Hands shaking, I flick through to find her pictorial. I’m so excited my eyes can’t focus on any one picture of this vision of muscular beauty, they manically dart from bicep to shoulder, from the abs to the chest. I’m still shaking but pay and leave. I can’t get home fast enough and be alone with Dorothy, back in my private world.

Although not all the pictures had quite the effect on me that Dorothy’s did, it was more or less a similar story every time I bought a magazine for the female bodybuilders inside. I always seemed to get a huge rush of adrenaline that would make me shake, and at the same time I lost the majority of my higher brain functions and went into a kind of trance. It was exciting, I was turned on by these women, but also frightening to imagine someone I knew being in the shop and discovering my secret. And despite the fear factor, that rush became addictive, and even after I moved abroad to work in the early 1990s, once again throwing out my collection of magazines before I did so, I was unable to resist the lure of the rush that muscular women provided for me.

In the only newsagent’s in a small Tuscan town a couple of years later, a special edition of Flex magazine caught my eye and brought on the familiar rush. It was called Power and Sizzle (I think) and was the kind of publication I had always dreamed about, photos of nothing but lingerie-clad or even naked female bodybuilders, like the one of Roseanne Keyser below.


Roseanne’s flexibility, strength and beauty are all showcased here, but above all it was her legs that had me gazing in awe at this photo time and time again, imagining my hands on the beautiful muscular curves of her calves, hamstrings and glutes.


This pic of Sharon Bruneau was another most memorable one from Power and Sizzle. A beautiful woman, very feminine yet at the same time very strong and muscular, I imagined my fingers on her chest, following the striations and veins across it, feeling the muscle, worshipping her power.

Buying Power and Sizzle put me firmly back in ‘collection’ mode but again I threw out my collection when I finished working abroad. This was just before the millennium, and on returning to London I discovered exactly what this thing called ‘the internet’ that I’d heard about was. And that pretty much ended the 'magazine years’!

But before I sign off, a little tribute to two of the women from that era…


The first is Michelle Andrea, whose sultry Latin looks and mouth-watering muscular body make her one of my all-time favourites. What’s not to like? Eyes not big and dark enough for you? Hair not thick and lush enough? Is her bottom not as firm and sexy as you’d like? What about those pecs in the photo on the right – not doing it for you? Do you find insufficient definition in her thighs in those red fishnet stockings? Didn’t think so. Head to toe perfection. Wherever she is now, and whatever shape she’s in, she was once my perfect woman, and looking again at these pics of her, to be honest, she still is.


And then there was Cory Everson… In terms of what she achieved for the sport in terms of mainstream acceptance, there has been no female bodybuilder quite like her. I mean, Iris Kyle is great and everything, but I can’t imagine her getting her own workout show on ESPN! Cory was versatile, a point I’ve picked the photos above to illustrate. She could be a hot little gym bunny, muscular and defined for sure, but hardly intimidating or masculine. She could be an amazon goddess, hard, ripped and oiled, exuding power and femininity in equal measure. And she could be… well, like Marilyn Monroe… but sexier! A woman unique in the history of the sport, and a woman who, during the magazine years, I probably spent more time ‘with’ than any other.

Enjoy! And I hope my little survey of my formative female muscle lovin’ years has brought back a few memories for some readers, or maybe introduced a few women of that era to others.

Friday Fun from Rear

A selection of women whose glutes could crack your Christmas walnuts.

Beach bunz

Her superior glutes flex with every step, and as she passes the men ogling her have to turn onto their fronts to hide their excitement like falling dominoes, one by one.

Competition butts


Thongs should be compulsory, not illegal as in some bodybuilding federations. It's just doownright wrong to have to cover a body part that has been worked so hard on.

Curves

Muscle women have curves everywhere, unique curves that other women don’t have. Hard curves that you dream of running your hands along. In the pic on the left, look at the top of her glutes (it’s more pronounced from the angle if you look at the right-hand side of the photo). There’s a muscle peak at the top of the glute on the outside, then it curves back in. In the middle, the muscle under the glutes inside the hamstrings. As I have such a thing for it, I really should find out what it’s called! And on the right, her glutes have flexed outwards (!) so you can see the whole of her thong between them. She could wink at you without looking at you.

Wonder glutes

Big bulging muscles, striations and vascularity, this woman has it all. I wouldn’t mind if she took off those shorts, but somehow the fact that I can still see the outline of her muscles beneath makes this shot even sexier.

Butts in heels


Close


Closer…


Closest



Enjoy! And for more muscle butt fun check the download page

Treasures from the Archive: Magazine Years Part I

As a teenage female muscle fan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found women to lust over among the pages of mainstream bodybuilding magazines like Flex, Muscle & Fitness, Musclemag, Ironman and Muscle Training Illustrated along with other publications I can’t remember the names of. These magazines were available pretty much everywhere, and after buying my first Muscle & Fitness (cover model Anja Langer) at about 15, I would get at least one of them every month, depending on which had the best female muscle content.


Jackie Paisley from an issue of Muscle & Fitness purchased in the early days. I remember this being part of a pictorial that focused on Jackie’s flexibility, and I could not stop looking at it. In places I never dreamed a woman could have muscles, Jackie had them. What are those things on the insides of her thighs? Hot.


Before some seriously bad cosmetic surgery choices ruined her looks, Melissa Coates, seen here in one of her first pictorials from Musclemag, if not her first, had real star quality. In the mainstream mags, topless and covered was about as racy as it got. Which was plenty racy for a horny teenage female muscle fan.

At one time I had quite a collection of these magazines, all stashed away safely under my bed. But when the time came to leave home and go to uni, the sheer size and weight made it impractical to take them with me. And I didn’t want to leave them at home and risk discovery. So I ditched them. All of them. It was the first of a few purges I have done over the years.


I’m an abs man. Pictures like these probably have something to do with that. Carla Sedecca’s bullet-proof abs, Sandy Riddell in the kind of swimsuit that we see all too rarely these days (you may remember, older readers, she was a fire fighter – imagine her carrying you out of a burning building), and finally the gorgeous muscular symmetry of Juliette Bergman.


Again, the swimsuit with the abs showing. This time it’s Diana Dennis from a workout feature, possibly Flex, possibly Muscle & Fitness. Not the most well-known of Diana’s pics, but ones I remembered as soon as I saw them again on the net many years later. I loved (and still love) the way her tanned skin gleams and the contrast between her thigh muscles in the two pictures. Before there was VHS, DVD or mpeg, there were guys like me moving my eyes real fast between pictures like these!


And this is the magazine that made me come to my senses and start a new collection of female muscle, the exact one. I was in town, saw it, then walked out of the shop. But ‘the madness’ had already descended. Within minutes, I was back in the shop and nervously taking it to the counter, paying and getting back home as fast as I could for my fix. Rachel McLish in a golden swimsuit was no disappointment, and neither was discovering a magazine that only contained female bodybuilders.


Cathy Palyo was one of the downright hottest female bodybuilders of that time, dark and sexy, and I adored this pic first time around and can still remember the rush of seeing her in that bikini for the first time. I came across Denise Rutkowski’s WPW and Ray Martin stuff much later, so workout photos were my introduction to this legend. The size of her arms in this pic makes me weak at the knees to this day. Made for kissing. And then there was Paula Bircumshaw’s perfect British bottom. You don’t see a lot of muscle babes working out in thongs these days. Bring that back!

My eternal gratitude to people who scan these old magazines and share them. Seeing these pictures again has been one of the earliest joys of the internet for me. You are heroes!


I’ll end Part I of The Magazine Years with Monica Haslam. Once I’d discovered Female Bodybuilding existed, it wasn’t long before I found the peerless Women’s Physique World and was savouring the quality pictures of prime female muscle like this one. Through the magazine I came to know many women who never featured in the mainstream muscle media, WPW took the women very seriously, and portrayed them as women, even when at their most ripped. And I started to realise that I was not the only man in the world who found female muscle sexy. It was a comforting thought!

More Magazine Years to come. Thanks again to the scanners. And thanks to all the people who bother getting in touch and being positive about the blog. I'm always delighted to hear from any female muscle fans (6ft1swell@gmail.com)

Enjoy!