I am no expert at the business side of fbb but I do know that the sponsorship and prize money for men is much greater when compared to the females and this is a serious problem and it really should be fixed quickly if fbb is going to survive and prosper in the future.
Seconded!
Fasola – I entirely see your argument on femininity. It is subjective. However, so is the whole of BB judging. My main passion is motorsport, F1 especially. Everything is timed to the nearest 1/1000th of a second. Protests about the legality of a car technically aside, there is an objective measure of the winner. In BBing, yes, there are guidelines, but it's still subjective: you cannot objectively, in a contest environment, measure conditioning or symmetry, for example. Therefore, I cannot see how it is impossible for some guidelines on judging whether steroids have affected femininity. I'm a biologist by training, and, to determine whether something like a virus can be said to have the property of being alive, certain criteria have to be met. Could FBBing not have similar criteria, so that, if all of the judges can find, say 5 out of 7 or a similar proportion of criteria in a competitor that suggest a lack of femininity from an endocrine perspective (i.e. competitor X has a lot of testosterone in her system), then she is marked-down? If not, then test for overall test levels, and have a maximum permissable upper limit, therefore ensuring a level playing field (posing stage?). Modern science can, I'm sure, provide the answers. If money for testing is the problem, then promote it better. Also, getting rid of excess steroid use will help make the competitions more popular, hence, more revenue.
I do agree wholeheartedly, though,that the judging criteria, whatever they are, should be stabilised. To keep changing them year on year must be disruptive for judges as well as competitors and spectators.
As regards Johanna Dejager, if any judge couldn't tell the difference in femininity between her and a certain guest on Dr Ablow's TV show a month or two ago, then they shouldn't be judging, IMO.
