How much Muscle Can a Bodybuilder Build?

Well, turns out it depends on if you're competing in Women's or Men's.

Recent class discussions have centered around athletes: the rules their body must follow, or the behaviors they must perform to avoid others questioning their gender and place in their chosen sport. The way in which these athletes bodies’ “true nature” have come into question -- for being too masculine to be considered a woman, or too feminine to be a man -- made me question what the response would be to a feminine body that falls severely out of bounds. How do female bodybuilders navigate standards of gender performance and “authenticity”? Is women’s bodybuilding perhaps an arena where a woman’s body can defy all the usual specifications to “be a woman”? Question in mind, I sought an answer. What I found is: both yes and no, as in “yes, she can defy many of specifications for womanhood but that doesn’t mean there are no specifications”. Because I spent quite a bit of time researching this (I knew very little about bodybuilding, except that it involves a lot of muscles), I think a walkthrough is in order.

Iris Kyle, 2014 Ms. Olympia x

So: women’s bodybuilding. Not really something you see broadcast every day on ESPN or whatever your network tv station might be. It exists in the “public consciousness” -- that is, I would hazard to say that most all of us know that it is a sport, and people participate in it. In their own community, both men and women’s bodybuilding have strong followings, with international competitions, magazines, and all of those such things common to sports. So, knowing that it exists, and is an arena where women can have enormous muscles, incredibly strong physiques, and still have a strong fanbase, I was intrigued about how these women’s bodies might fit into the conversations of our class.

Women’s bodybuilding is said to evolve out of combination of things including “strongwomen” circus acts, and “physique competitions” (bikini shows and swimsuit contests, really) that took place alongside men’s bodybuilding, and men’s bodybuilding itself. The first official women’s bodybuilding competition took place in 1977, with the judging criteria being, at least in writing, the same as in the men’s division: muscular development, symmetry, and physique presentation. From then, the sport grew, with the Ms. Olympia, an offshoot of Mr. Olympia (think buff 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger) competitions being the main venue. Supposedly due to low popularity, Ms. Olympia was discontinued 2014, after which the Wings of Strength Rising Phoenix World Championships took its place. This quick history is more elaborately laid out in this article from Muscle-Insider, which briefly discusses the stars of women’s bodybuilding, and not surprisingly, the importance of magazine covers spreads (and a woman’s marketability) in the survival of the sport. So, take away Number One: to become a star in the sport, from the very start, a woman has have both muscles and sex appeal.

Strong, but still gotta be sexy...
Cover of the 1997 edition of Women's Physique World, a magazine covering
female bodybuilding and fitness from 1984 to 2006. 

This requirement apparently hasn’t changed, which judging criteria still allowing for marks to be taken off for cellulite of stretch marks, bad hair, or poorly done makeup, and marks added for poise and grace. Women’s bodybuilding clearly has a “beauty contest” aspect of it that extends much further than the “muscular development, symmetry, and physique presentation” that defines beauty in the men’s category. Female bodybuilders are both required to be muscular, and retain a “feminine” form. This goes as far as the encouragement of breast implants, with many competitors opting to get them to score better for their “feminine” form. Women also can be big and muscular, but not too big and muscular: in 2004, the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) passed a resolution stating that all female athletes “decrease the amount of muscularity by a factor of 20%”. With my suspicion that male bodybuilders’ size correlates to masculinity, I would hazard to say that perhaps the IFBB saw female bodybuilders as becoming too “unfeminine”, and too close to the men -- perhaps threatening a blurring of category boundaries. And here I think we can find Number Two: female bodybuilders must have a feminine body (read, breasts, makeup, nice hair, curves) to compete and succeed, and they can’t be so big that they might be masculine.

Look at all that muscle. I wonder, at what point, does a bodybuilder like him become too muscular?
                Phil Heath, Mr. Olympia 2014 x

So, women’s bodybuilding: a sport where women can be muscular? Yes. A sport where women can be masculine? No. This places female bodybuilders in an interesting spot. Outside of the bodybuilding community, they are gender outlaws, violating all of the expectations that a woman be small, soft, weak (and on and on, we know the drill), but inside the community, their femininity must be closely monitored in order to succeed, and even compete, in their sport.

Overall, a disappointing answer. It would be nice to have at least one arena in which a woman be simply be an athlete, and not a “woman” first. However, looking into women’s bodybuilding a couple of things certainly have caught my interest. Firstly,  the way that it stretches beauty standards beyond the norm, and secondly, the darker side of this: the fetishization of women’s muscles, and muscular women -- something that seems to be detectable in the treatment of female bodybuilders and fitness models by fans and media. It figures that asking one question would lead to several more. Perhaps at some point I will find the space to find the answers -- unfortunately, that might have to wait until another post.