You try not to look in the mirror and see what you’ve become. You don’t look like a woman any more. Some of the side effects are permanent, like my voice. I don’t like to talk around people… several of the early competitors have killed themselves.
(ibid.: 64)
Although I do not claim this person’s experience to be representative, it does highlight yet again the immense costs and consequences for this chosen lifestyle.
In order to discover the long-term effects – and, related to this, bodybuilding’s empowering potential for these women – a longitudinal study or a life history approach would be needed to explore these women’s lives further.
Concluding comments
The research has been a challenging, fascinating and sometimes exhausting experience. Immersing myself in the field required a dramatic lifestyle change.
By its very nature, ethnography demands time, commitment, energy and patience.
Furthermore, ethnography is full of political, ethical and moral ‘minefields’ that need to be navigated carefully: for example, feminist ethnographers must justify to their own conscience what intimate ‘data’ should remain private and what should be exposed to the public academic sphere. Research, from this approach, is a deeply emotional and political affair and is inevitably subjective. In writing up, I have been the medium through which the field has been constructed, represented and analysed. As I elaborated in the methods chapter, my ‘fingerprints’ are all over the research and the subsequent findings. Despite these limitations, I believe ethnography was the most appropriate method by which to explore the ‘lived experiences’ of female bodybuilders. As Taylor (1993:17) recognizes, researching the lived body can often be difficult, as ‘living’ is essentially a practical activity; it is done rather than reflected upon, and not necessarily told as a narrative. Yet it would have been impossible to fully comprehend the meaning and importance of female bodybuilding without attending to the ‘intricacies of its lived sensuality’
(Katz 1988: 167).
Journey’s end
As I emerge from the tumultuous sea of research that was, for over two years, my life, I slowly begin to return to long-forgotten tastes and ways of being. My eyes,
Conclusion 163
however, take a while to adjust; they still see things differently. Likewise, certain bodily practices have remained with me and become ingrained into my soma. Still drenched by the subcultural meanings, I wade back to the shore, although not to the same place from which I commenced my travels.
My journey into the fascinating ‘lifeworld’ of female bodybuilders has finished, but for the women who choose to dedicate their whole lives to the muscular order, their heroic journey is far from over.
Notes
2 Researching female bodybuilders
1 However, it would be wrong to assume that there is a singular approach to ‘feminist ethnography’, or even that there is a consensus that this approach is even possible (see Stacey 1988; Stanley and Wise 1990; Visweswaran 1994; Bell 1993; Skeggs 1995; Dauth 2009).
2 This gym possessed an extensive free-weights area (as well as fixed weights and cardiovascular work-out areas) and retained over 4,000 members during the course of
the research (see Chapter 7 for a description of the layout). Catering for a wide range
of clientele, from female and male bodybuilders to casual aerobic exercisers, the gym marketed itself as a provider of good facilities at a low cost (i.e. aimed at lower income individuals and families).
3 Quotes from gym members are coded according to an allocated gym number (between 1–6, 1 being the main site) and for the sake of clarity given a number in the sequence in which they are used within this book. For example, (male, gym 2:5) translates as a comment made by a male gym user in my second research site, who is the fifth person within this gym to be quoted in this research.
4 The hardcore gyms in this study all had signed pictures or posters of bodybuilders on the wall. In one of the gyms, porn magazines were kept on the reception counter.
5 Hobbs (2001: 214) argues that participant observation allows the researcher to ‘learn the language of the host community’. Whilst I was familiar with everyday ‘gym lingo’, elements of bodybuilding discourse, particularly in association to competitions, were an enigma to me at the start of my research. For example, ‘Christmas tree’ refers to the pattern of extreme muscle definition located on the base of the lower back that can be seen on competitive bodybuilders.
6 Refer to sexual orientation and the 2011 census: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/about/
consultations/downloads/2011Census_sexual_orientation, accessed 10 January 2012.
7 The dress code of female bodybuilders inevitably varied depending on the social context and individuality of the person. At competitions there were several female bodybuilders who dressed in a ‘hyperfeminine’ style that called for attention (e.g. very short skirts, low tops).
8 In the gym, my one-rep max reached the following: bench: 72.5 kg, leg press: 330 kg, squat: 110 kg and dead-lift: 135 kg.
9 Anabolic steroids (amongst many other drugs that were used by female bodybuilders) are legally classified as a ‘Class C’ drug within the United Kingdom. Possession or importing steroids with ‘intent to supply’ (which includes giving them to friends) is against the law, and could possibly lead to up to 14 years in prison with an unlimited fine.
Notes 165
3 The history of female bodybuilding
1 Whilst Bernarr MacFadden held the first female bodybuilding contests over a brief period at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, Henry McGhee has been widely credited as the official founder.
2 The Weider brothers, Ben and Joe, co-founded the IFBB in 1946. Whilst there were other amateur bodybuilding associations around the same period, such as the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and the Natural Amateur British Bodybuilding Association (NABBA), the IFBB became the main bodybuilding body in 1965, when it offered prize money to male bodybuilders at the ‘Mr Olympia’ event. For more detail on the history of male bodybuilding please refer to Wayne (1985).
3 ‘Pumping Iron II: The Women’ was heralded by some as the Feminist Film of the Year (Kuhn 1988).
4 The first Ms. International contest was won by Erika Geisen.
5 Murray retained her Ms. Olympia title and won by a controversial one-point margin.
6 Guidelines can be found on the IFBB website, http://www.ifbb.com, accessed
26 February 2013.
7 The quote is taken from a letter addressed to the competitors from Jim Manion
(Chairman of the Professional Judges Committee). Capitals in original.
8 This took place following a memo dated 6 December 2004, directed by Jim Manion.
9 The BNBF and the NPA are the only bodybuilding federations to express explicitly that they are drugs tested and ‘natural’ competitions.
10 Female bodybuilding contestants are often referred to as Physique Competitors.
11 Bodybuilding promoter Terry Shipman, cited in Huxtable (2004: 5).
12 Taken from his blog ‘Hard Talk’, GeneX website and personal e-mails.
4 Muscle is a feminist issue
1 The terms ‘“shredded” and “hard” refer to extreme fat and water depletion which vivi-fies musculature. A bodybuilder in “vascular” condition is so “shredded” that her blood vessels gain anatomy-text-like definition’ (Aoki 1996: 60).
2 A term referring to feminists who focus on the variable of human agency within the structural constraints of society.
3 As female bodybuilders strive for low body-fat levels and manipulate their hormones, they inevitably lose their breast tissue. Consequently, the majority of contenders get sili-cone breast implants, in ‘order to balance muscle and sex appeal’ (MacNeill 1988: 209).
5 The identity, lifestyle and embodiment of the female bodybuilder
1 This comment was posted on the website http://www.buzzhumor.com/videos/3052/
Wom
en_Bodybuilders (accessed 17 November 2008) and is not an unusual reaction to
the bodies of female bodybuilders.
2 Whilst I do not want to pathologize bodybuilding or suggest this is the only reading, during my research I came across both male and female bodybuilders who felt insecure about their bodies and claimed to look small and ‘weak’, when this was clearly not the case.
6 The ‘dark side’ of female bodybuilding
1 Male bodybuilders also do muscle worship sessions for male clients. This is often referred to as ‘schmozing’ or ‘hustling’ – see Klein (1990) and Kaye (2005).
2 Email correspondence.
3 Interestingly, male bodybuilding has attracted derision due to ‘feminine’ aspects of the sport such as ‘posing’ and men looking at male bodies. The male worshippers here are male and gazing at the female body – this is a traditional aspect of the gaze, yet is seen as problematic.
166 Notes
4 A total of seven muscle worshippers were contacted by email, several through a popular blog and then through a snowball sample. Issues of truth and the representation of self through the internet present problems in validity; likewise, the small sample meant that findings are not representative of the target population.
7 Exploring the ‘empowerment’ of female bodybuilders through concepts of space
1 As opposed to the hardcore gym.
2 This is of course dependent to some degree on the individual’s interpretation of ‘modesty’ and ‘privacy’. Some women are far more uncomfortable than others about revealing their bodies in public (depending on their circumstances, e.g. religion, body image, pregnancy etc.). Nevertheless, there are still unwritten rules and norms within the changing rooms, such as not staring.
3 Women are particularly encouraged to participate in aerobics, yoga and other fitness classes. This has been investigated in some detail by the likes of Bordo (1988), Lloyd (1996) and Grimshaw (1999).
4 Sports sociologists have documented the difficulties women faced when trying to access the gym in the past – refer to Klein (1985) and Cheshire and Lewis (1985) for more detail. Interestingly, there are only a small number of ‘men-only’ gyms in the UK
today, compared to the increasing number of ‘women-only gyms’.
5 One of the peripheral gyms that I had observed during my research was trying to refurbish and upgrade itself to more of a health and leisure facility. Consequently the hardcore bodybuilders were asked to leave and a new set of gym rules were displayed.
These included keeping tops on whilst training, not dropping weights and making sure they were returned to the rack – but far more unusual was the rule ‘no loud grunting or groaning’.
8 Ripped, shredded and cut: reworking notions of ‘pain and violence’ in female bodybuilding
1 ‘Animal’ advertisements are found in many muscle magazines, such as Muscle and Fitness and Flex. Several of my female bodybuilders used these texts as motivational tools.
2 An obvious example of this is the alternative name for biceps: they are commonly referred to as ‘guns’.
9 Competitions: a heroic journey
1 For the benefit of description, on occasions I have integrated and amalgamated my own observations.
2 It is worth noting that not all female bodybuilders in my study agreed that to be a bodybuilder you need to compete. For instance, Laura (a bodybuilder of ten months) argued that ‘bodybuilding is a lifestyle… not an act of participating in an organized physique competition’. Nevertheless, most female bodybuilders, unlike their male counterparts, do compete or aspire to compete (Bolin 1992).
3 Judges are volunteers. In order to become a judge you need to register and then sit on the panel and judge for three shows. Scoring is then compared and the individual’s suitability is decided upon.
4 Weber (1915b) uses this famous quote in his ‘Politics as a Vocation’ lecture. The words were spoken by Martin Luther before the ‘Diet of Worms’, after he had been summoned to retract half of his 95 Theses. Luther claimed that he could not go against his conscience. When using these words, Max Weber suggests that regardless of whether it is the ‘right stance’, there is admiration to be found in a man of authenticity and integrity who takes responsibility for his life and actions. See Weber (2004 [1917]): xlii–xlv.
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