[nsl2050]

Congratulations on your progress so far.

Now forget about it.

It might seem like odd advice, but in my experience, you can get obsessed by the progress, or lack of it, that you're making. Try not to get caught up in that whole mindset for a little while at least. Otherwise you start to worry when you achieve less one week than the previous, or a muscle group that felt quite pronounced seems to have shrunk. This leads to trying all kinds of crazy programmes that may or may not be suitable for you at that point in your progress.

You've made the most important step, of going to the gym in the first place, and hopefully by now you see that any fears you may have had were largely unfounded. Now that your comfortable there, learn to enjoy it for its own sake and make it part of your life. Results will come, and progress will be made if you stick with it.

None of this may apply to you, but it did to me, so I thought that I'd share.

[nsl2050]

AB: Eliza's too short (5'5"), and somehow she's not 'regal' enough, but if it got her into the gym, I'm all for it.

I'm not asking for a bodybuilder(although if you have one spare…), just that WW looks like a warrior, so fitness/athlete level muscle.

A non muscular Wonder Woman says to women that it's admirable to be strong, as long as you don't look it.

[nsl2050]

If you follow Wonder Woman in the DC Comic, depending on the artist, Diana is portryed more as a fitness babe more than a body builder.  All Lynda had were the boobs and they were in Sties.

To my mind, this is the test of where we've got to in our war for female muscle acceptance. To most people Wonder Woman is Lynda Carter, so they expect a tall brunette with big boobs. If Hollywood takes the view that WW should look powerful, rather than just be powerful, then it would indicate a fair shift, particularly when the comics can't make their mind up.

It's all about strong role models, but I fear that this already has the hallmarks of yet another missed opportunity.

[nsl2050]

Ah, brave Pimp, ever the warrior. I'm more of a coward/politician (a natural pairing) myself. A little bit of approval here and there to edge the acceptance of female muscularity forward. Sometimes though, things need to be said.

Picture the scene, a young lady with a body type that can only be muscular or fat, she can never be thin in the accepted modern way, becuase she's just not that shape to begin with. She's been going to the gym a bit, and there are some changes happening. She makes the mistake of telling a girlfriend of a friend about how she's enjoying the gym. The girlfriend is the type of woman who gives gyms a bad name, she's got a pretty face and she goes to the gym five days a week, where she aerobisizes herself into a stick and then boasts about how little she weighs. The tanorexic grabs the heavier girls arm in a rude 'feeling up meat' kind of a way and says "Gross, you've got man arms!" She then goes on to tell her that she needs to eat less, treadmill herself to death, and never touch a weight again, otherwise she'll end up looking like a man.

At this point our heroine is looking like the awkward girl she was back in school rather than the young lady who was starting to get the confidence to talk about her body. It occurred to me that she was going to listen, and stop going to the gym. She was going to listen to this (pardon my language) bitch, and never really blossom. Not on my watch she wasn't.

The funny thing is, I don't remember a lot of what I said. People tell me that I tore a strip off the villan of the piece and I know that she still hates me to this day. I know that I didn't really out myself as an admirer, and onlookers thought it was just gallantry on my part, so I can't really claim too much credit from it. I remember that I said that men wanted firm curves and that the waif was a myth perpetuated by gay male fashion designers who wanted women to look like young boys.

I had a good finish though, pointing out that the best thing about getting stronger was that she could snap the waif like a twig if she wanted to.

As this is a true story, I didn't get the girl at the end, but she continued going to the gym at least for a little while, and I rode off into the sunset content that I'd tipped the scale just a little bit back towards our side.

[nsl2050]

Congratulations! You've done the most important thing, you've made a choice.

You've had some good advice from osquip, and the pimp (who is wise in many things), but I would add this:

Every time that you go to the gym, remember that you could have been sat asleep in front of LoTR. However bad you feel, and however frustrated you get at your progress or things that went wrong in your workout, remember that whatever you did was more than you would have achieved by being asleep in front of LoTR. (BTW, I'm not having a go at your mother, I was just using the example at hand).

The next thing to remember is that you're at the gym for you. Try not to get caught up in what you think other people are thinking abut you. For instance, I know an otherwise confident young woman who steadfastly refuses to touch free weights because no other women at her gym do, and she's bothered by the attention. It's mostly in her own mind, as most of the people there are just going about their own workouts, but she's let it become a problem.

One final suggestion, try not to get too hung up on results. If you constantly check yourself out, then you'll find that your weight goes up and down, you have stronger and weaker days (sometimes longer than a day), and muscle size and shape vary a fair bit. If you start to worry about these little variations, you'll lose sight of the fact that this is a long term game.

In conclusion, well done!

[nsl2050]

To be fair, Wonder Woman has seldom been portrayed as muscular, so as far as the public are concerned, they expect a young Linda Carter.

As you observe, Joss is unlikely to expect his star to hit the gym prior to filiming, which is a shame because a celebrity that puts on muscle makes it more acceptable/desireable for normal women to go and do the same.

[nsl2050]

From what I've read, if the amount of testosterone naturally increases, then the amount of estrogen does as well. The body keeps its own ratio. Also, from what I've read, women work with existing testosterone, which means that they don't get a testosterone boost from working out.

If a change in the ratio to estrogen and testosterone doesn't happen later in life, then what do you call menopause? 😉

Ah, I expressed myself inexactly.

To be clear, we're only ever talking about external hormones affecting the brain. So a shift in ratio of the mothers hormones (and I don't know how that might happen) can affect a baby in the womb, because small changes are enough, but later in life you need large amounts of external hormones over a sustained period of time to have an effect (hence sex change).

[nsl2050]

Why? She doesn't lose out on estrogen…

I assume it's a ratio thing. Plus it's not really something that happens in later life unless the amount of hormones are of the full sex change variety. Furthermore we're talking of a very small bias, so a woman can be more spatially aware than most men, but in a sample of a thousand men and women, the men will generally score better at spatial awareness.

I still think that this is rich material for the talented authors hereabouts. Hilary Clinton or Condy Rice gets elected to PotUS and institutes weight training for women to counteract the brain drain…

[nsl2050]

There are also two Big movies that momentarily featured a female bodybuilder, The Cell had a very muscular woman as one of his victims, and of course Napoleon Dynamite featured Carmen Brady and given the mass popularity of that movie among the high school age the next generation of fe-muscle admirerers should be developing nicely, yes, yes, they're almost ready, they're ripe, very ripe indeed…

Actually in my perfect world, every woman would want to be muscular, but the only man admiring it would be me 🙂

Just to pick up on another point about the Simpsons. Back on Wreck's board I once opined that "Strong Arms of the Ma" was probably the most watched program to feature female bodybuilding. Would anybody care to dispute?

[nsl2050]

Umm, it's a bit more complicated than that, and it doesn't quite work that way. Very briefly, testosterone is good for spatial awareness and numerical abstraction, while estrogen is good for language skills and empathy.

Follow that theory, and lifting weights makes a woman an uncommunicative math geek, who doesn't care about others but can parallel park an eighteen wheeler. 🙂

On the other hand, your theory makes a much better starting point for a story (yes authors, I'm hinting at you).

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