Here is a little section form the introduction to the book:
She wraps herself in strength, carries herself with confidence, and works hard, strengthening her arms for the task at hand.
-Proverbs 31:16-17
Women building physical strength and muscle can be seen as the ultimate rejection of the male patriarchy. Occasionally, in the Victorian era and since, there have been women who built their bodies and were celebrated for developing ‘unwomanly strength’ such as Charmion and Vulcana. Proudly displaying their biceps alongside feats of strength before wowed audiences, these pioneers were popular, but were seen as unicorns.
Today, such women seem to be plastered across social media, showing off their hard-earned fit physiques, six-pack abs, and separation between muscles. These women are proving, with their expanding Instagram followings, that the supremely fit woman is growing in popularity. These noticeably muscular women receive varying responses from the public. Many men either belittle their muscles or fetishize them — maybe even both as most men attempt to hide their appreciation of the truly muscular woman — and while some women express appreciation for their sisters in muscle, many others appear either jealous of strong women or defensive about their own lack of fitness.
Are these women pioneers who have determined that they desire not only equality of opportunity, but physical equality? Or is their motivation to lift and develop their body just another aspect of the existing patriarchal construct where they are conforming to a subset of men’s physical desires?
If history has told us anything, it is that the ups and downs of the female body are deeply rooted in gender norms and male preferences. More and more men seem to appreciate the bodies of strong, fit women, but only ‘within reason.’ Forced to look a certain way is connected to the wider problem of trying to control their bodies and their rights. Despite this, more and more women are starting to shape their own interpretation of what is beautiful. Training, honing, building strong bodies to make themselves lithe and powerful, they flaunt their gains on social media, yet they still have a long road to go to receive acceptance or even fairness in the bodybuilding world. “The key to equality is for society to stop telling women what they should look like and allow people to live their lives as they choose.” Yet this equality won’t come easily as the social construct allows women to train, but instructs then not to train too hard and gain comparable strength. Colette Dowling, a respected author and lecturer on psychosocial issues of American women doesn’t hesitate to say men are responsible for this pressure to conform. As men lose the justification for their special privileges, they try to use their physical superiority as justification to maintain their overall dominance in society.
She writes, “women have been excluded from so much in life because of the frailty myth… First, we believed we were weak. Then we began to suspect that we weren’t but kept getting told that we were. Then we began proving that we weren’t and were mocked as men because we were strong. Women have thrown themselves over hurdle after hurdle during the course of the past century, demonstrating extraordinary physical powers and skills, and still, we’re being kept back for no reason other than we’re female.”
Since Title IX women have made great gains. Yet has the needle truly moved that much? Even in the sport of bodybuilding where the stated goal is to use physical resistance to strengthen and enlarge the muscles of the body, women are held back. The female bodybuilding category was removed from the IFBB contests in 2015 with the statement, “women were getting so muscular and so into the development of their muscles that it was not at all aspirational for other women.” The category was reinstated this year so perhaps, grudgingly, things truly are changing.
As women try to fight past gender norms, they may have a new ally advocating their right to increase their physical prowess beyond currently acceptable norms. Tens of thousands of men on the internet exult in and almost worship the muscular female body. Is this group of men who appreciate unusually muscular women significant enough to help women to push the envelope?
In the late 1800s, German psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term sthenolagnia to define a fetish which is based on ‘sexual arousal from a demonstration of extreme muscularity.’
The inclination is found among both males and females, but acceptance of the fetish both historically and in modern social circles is treated differently by each of the sexes. A closely related and sometimes overlapping fetish is cratolagnia, which is defined as the sexual arousal from the display of strength. Both of these terms are known as sexual paraphilias which means that the individuals experience intense sexual arousal to atypical things.
Both sthenolagnia and cratolagnia are not uncommon conditions for both sexes. While these fetishes are frequently accepted or even normalized for women who appreciate men, they are considered unacceptable and deviant when it is part of the personality of a male. The social construct blindly attaches uniform traits to these female muscle admirers. They are derided as “schmoes,” socially deficient pariahs fixated on female muscle to hide their own inadequacies. Further, there is a tendency for many people to assume that all female muscle admirers belong to that same subset.
There is a growing subset of men who are emerging from behind the shadows to demonstrate their appreciation of the muscular female body who don’t reflect this derogatory depiction at all. Some of these men write female muscle growth (FMG), a fantasy genre involving the abnormal muscular growth of a woman. Many of these stories upend the traditional perspective of the man as the partner in charge. These strong women employ role reversal, punishment for transgressions, and dominance in their relationships while growing exaggerated muscle which bends reality.
Other men draw these perfected women with an almost obscene amount of muscle or ‘morph pictures’ of celebrities or muscular women to impossible scale. A growing number of men discuss the most recent muscular beauties that they’ve seen in bodybuilding contests in internet chat rooms, YouTube comment sections, on Instagram, and message boards across the internet.
Why are more men becoming excited about muscular women and more women becoming serious about training their bodies and developing muscle, even to extents not considered mainstream?
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