Weighting Game: For Only the Straight and Narrow?, The

Off Our Backs, Jul/Aug 2004 by Bavington, Lisa

A former professor of mine once told me that research was me-search, in that our individual quest for knowledge is driven by a desire to discover more about ourselves. Given my history of athletic participation, educational background in Kinesiology, academic interest in feminism and professional involvement surrounding issues of sexuality, bodybuilding became, for me, an area of my life where all of these elements collided into one grand experiment.

I have been an athlete all my life, having participated in everything from basketball to figure skating, but I focused on Volleyball and rugby as a York varsity athlete. Sport wasn't just something I did, it represented who I was and, more importantly, what I wanted to become. I first started training with weights after university at a fitness club in Toronto. Initially, I was interested in training for triathlons, but soon found I enjoyed strength training more than I had expected, and results came quickly with relative ease. I was drawn to the feeling of physical empowerment the weights provided that I never received with aerobic conditioning. Bodybuilding seemed to be a natural progression and an ideal fit after years of participating in team sport. It provided me with the opportunity to pursue an individual sport where I would be completely responsible for my own success and/ or failure.

I knew from the beginning that I wasn't going to fit in very well. Being coy is not one of my stronger attributes; neither is playing the femininity game. While some individuals quest for the perfect body to be admired by others, my goal was to develop a competitive physique that would be one day be worthy of a championship title. It was always about athletic competition for me. However, unlike female athletes in other sports, women who compete in bodybuilding are immediately recognizable and always on public display. I grew tired of talking about my best lifts, the size of my arms or what the best exercise was for complete calf development. People were forever commenting on my physique, motives and ability to be successful in the sport, reflecting their own perceptions primarily influenced by negative media attention and false information having little to do with my own experience.

Muscular...Yet Feminine

At first, the sport was an alien subculture to me, as it is for many others and even more so with women. Bodybuilding competitions are based on the aesthetics of an athlete's physique in comparison to other individuals and judged on symmetry, muscular development, conditioning and overall presentation. But I came to find out that the sport is also focused on targeting a specific demographic using extreme versions of masculinity and femininity represented to an audience believed to prefer to see sex (of a particular kind) at shows. For women in particular, bodybuilding is not about performance, but about who fits the criteria of acceptable womanhood that varies for different individuals at the same show.

Identifying femininity as a deciding factor in the overall assessment of female bodybuilders, which requires they adhere to standard notions of what a woman should look like is discriminatory toward female athletes especially because there are no such similar attempts made to enforce masculinity on the men's side. In fact, elite athletes look and act more alike than different, exhibiting traits that are common to them as a group and not assigned to one gender over another. Yet athletes are categorized by gender rather than athletic ability in order to ensure that they remain in opposition to one another, which suppresses evidence of variance among individual characteristics required for success in competition.

Many women in the sport will define themselves publicly as muscular, yet feminine, having retained something that the others have apparently lost some time ago. They attempt to separate themselves from the rest of the pack in the mistaken belief that they will be seen as the exception, rather than the rule. Most take great pains to establish their femininity and go overboard in proclaiming their heterosexuality in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I am both a woman and an athlete, but I realize that women compete in a number of sports that see these as mutually exclusive. Some women choose the former to gauge a successful performance as we continue to battle issues surrounding body image, sexuality and sexual orientation; being too big, too muscular and not feminine enough.

Beauty Before Strength?

Female bodybuilders continue to be compared against images that all females must aspire to and few will ever achieve, although most inevitably spend a lifetime trying. Women who willingly play the femininity game set a standard for female athletes to be judged by their success as feminine women, rather than their value as competitors in their own right. I found that most female bodybuilders represent a contradiction in terms.Their image portrays, on the one hand, a rejection of the ideal female form, and on the other, an attempt to make up for it by adhering to traditional expectations.