Athletic vs. Pornographic Eroticism: How Muscle Magazines
Compromise Female Athletes and Delegitimize the Sport of Bodybuilding in
the Public Eye
by Leslie Heywood
State University of New York, Binghamton
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Introduction
"I was fast asleep," Ben Weider writes, "on the
morning of the 30th of January, when sometime around 3 AM, I received a
telephone call from Nagano, Japan, informing me that the IFBB had been
granted official IOC recognition and that bodybuilding was now a sport
to be respected the same as other sports."i Weider waxes
lyrical about the years it has taken to reach this goal: his struggle to
legitimize a sport that--though those of us within the bodybuilding
community may hold it dear, giving it much of our free time as well as
the literal sweat off our brows--still isn't seen by the mainstream as a
sport. Nope. For the most part, out in the "real world,"
bodybuilding is still seen as a pathetic parade of narcissistic steroid
freaks.
Weider's quest for legitimacy is one that conceivably the entire
bodybuilding community would support, including the legitimization of
the sport's female participants. Yet, as is Flex's custom, a
little over a hundred pages after Weider's story, the magazine runs a
pictorial of fitness competitor Minna Lessig so trivializing and
prurient in its focus (Minna sprawled with her head upside down,
corkscrew curls cascading down, open-mouthed, eyes closed, on her back
across a stool with a base like a corkscrew to mirror her hair, wearing
the requisite satin briefs and heels) that it indisputably contributes
to the fact that female bodybuilders and fitness competitors are not
respected the same as athletes in other sports. In the long struggle for
legitimacy that has finally seen some progress, I would argue that as
long as there is pornographic representation of female bodybuilders and
fitness competitors within the bodybuilding magazines, the sport's main
outlet for media exposure, Weider's dream of mainstream acceptance will
remain compromised and bodybuilding will not be taken seriously as a
sport. Until bodybuilding treats its female athletes with a modicum of
the respect they surely deserve, it will remain the marginalized freak
show that it stages in the mainstream cultural imagination today.
In the midst of a mad cultural dash in a forward direction, something
went definitively retro in the mid-nineties, and it wasn't the return of
platform shoes or the resurgence of the BeeGees, and certainly not the
comeback of the Volkswagen Bug. Retro isn't always a bad thing--it's
harmless, and is so openly nostalgic it can even be kind of fun,
reminding us of our rough and ready carefree days when our lives seemed
simpler. But when retro means turning back the clock on progressive
ideas about women's strength, it isn't harmless, and when the
bodybuilding magazines started to overtly sexualize the top female
competitors in 1993 or '94, this kind of representation did much more
harm than good. More is at stake here than regressive and progressive
ideas about gender, which is a seemingly endless and unanswerable
debate. As I have discussed at some length in my recent book Bodymakers:
A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding, there are several
approaches to the representation of female athletes, and the nude or
erotic portrayals of Olympic athletes seen in the mixed-gender layouts
in Life magazine in the summer of 1996 make the soft-porn
photographic styles characteristic of the bodybuilding magazines seem
laughably regressive. Given rapid and primarily progressive changes in
cultural attitudes toward female athletes in the `90's, when Flex
torqued up the let's-make-female-bodybuilders-sexy bandwagon in 1994
with its Power and Sizzle pictorials (making the incorrect assumption
that they were not sexy without the props of porn), despite greater
exposure and much positive response, it did so at the cost of the
sport's public legitimacy.ii
In his recent book The Erotic in Sports, sports historian
Allen Guttmann takes issue with criticisms of media representations of
female athletes which make a rigid distinction between athleticism and
eroticism. Many critics, he explains, question representations where an
athlete is represented as a "`sexy female' rather than as a
`serious, committed athlete with a discipline and desire for athletic
excellence.'"iii In the period the critics analyze,
previous to the mid-nineties, representations did tend to fall in an
either /or categorization that either presented female athletes as
serious, desexualized competitors, or as sexualized bodies whose
athleticism existed only for the sake of enhancing sex appeal.
But representations that combine both athleticism and eroticism have
appeared more and more frequently since the 1996 Olympics. Guttmann
writes that "the media can be faulted whenever they focus mainly or
exclusively on a female athlete's erotic appeal, which is what they
often did in the past, but it is time to recognize that most of today's
journalists are more than willing to acknowledge the strength,
endurance, toughness, and skills of women . . . Neanderthals still roam
the airwaves, but they are a dying species."iv If you
compare any of the other sports magazines and their progressive,
athletic and erotic representations of female athletes to those
pruriently reductive, cliche-ridden, cheaply sexualized images found in
bodybuilding industry publications like Flex, Ironman,
Musclemag International, or All Natural Muscular
Development, one might be led to believe that, true to stereotype,
the bodybuilding industry is staffed by just such a dying species. Come
on, guys, isn't it time to start rewriting the cliches about male
bodybuilders as well, to refute the dominant cultural perception that
bodybuilders are regressively sexist, brainless hunks of flesh--in a
word, Neanderthals?
The disclaimer that used to run in front of the Power and Sizzle
pictorials argued that female bodybuilders, who are rejected by the
mainstream, would be more accepted by said mainstream if it realized how
sexually attractive female bodybuilders really are, and promoting this
realization was the ostensible reason for the monthly pictorial. That
particular Flex strategy was not without precedent.
Historically, the sexualization of female athletes has often been used
to sell women's sports, as when the women's baseball leagues of the
forties sported deliberately sexy uniforms, or when, in the late
eighties, before the more recent explosion of interest, the women's
basketball team at Louisiana's Northwestern State University were asked
to pose in Playboy bunny costumes for their school's media guide. In a
cultural climate that was hostile or indifferent to female athletic
participation, overt sexualization may have been a necessary strategy, a
way of building an audience that would lead to broader forms of
acceptance and respect. But in a cultural climate that has recently
shown itself to be enthusiastically embracing the female athlete, this
strategy becomes regressive and dated, and may, in fact, contribute to
the continued marginalization of the sport of bodybuilding at the very
time when other women's sports--women's hockey, for instance, are
enjoying widespread acceptance.
There is a powerful, affirmative movement growing in our culture, and
the bodybuilding industry doesn't seem to be part of it. The
bodybuilding world avoids joining this movement at its peril, for at
least since the summer Olympics of 1996, female athletes have been
hailed as the latest site for girls' and women's empowerment, and the
widespread public acceptance of the female athlete--long, long
overdue--has been resounding, and for good reasons.
Women in athletics has emerged as a national public health issue of
great importance. The landmark study written under the auspices of The
President's Council of Physical Fitness and Sports, the report
"Physical Activity & Sport in the Lives of Young Girls"
was the first to "look at `the complete girl' through an
interdisciplinary approach to investigate the impact of physical
activity and sport participation." The study concluded that
regular physical activity can reduce girls' risk of many of the
chronic diseases of adulthood; female athletes do better academically
and have lower school drop-out rates than their nonathletic
counterparts; and regular physical activity can enhance girls' mental
health, reducing symptoms of stress and depression and improving self
esteem. But further vigilance and research are needed to ensure that
all girls and boys can experience the same benefits (5).v
Given the importance of these findings, the study of women and girls
in athletics is a major and exponentially growing area of research.
According to the President's Council study, in the two-plus decades
since Title IX, federal legislation passed in 1972 that prohibited sex
discrimination in education, women's athletic participation nationally
has grown from 300,000 to roughly 2.25 million participants today. In
light of this rapid development, scholars and educators have begun to
research the impact of athletic participation on the lives of girls and
women and have found that there is significant correlation between
sports participation, high grade point average, greater well-being and
sense of self-esteem and significant achievement later in life.
Perhaps because of increased participation as well as these findings,
female athletes now have a distinctive place in the mass media. In the
spring of 1996, Nike ran its famous "If You Let Me Play"
campaign, which focused the social debate and research on female
athletes: "If you let me play/ I will like myself more / I will
have more self-confidence / I will suffer less depression / I will be
60% less likely to get breast cancer / I will be more likely to leave a
man who beats me / I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want
to / I will learn what it means to be strong / If you let me play
sports." In the October 1995 issue of Outside magazine,
the cover story "The Ubergirl Cometh" proclaimed a new
archetype for women: "The age of Gabrielle Reece is upon us. She's
big, she's strong, and with thousands more like her out there, she's
replicating fast . . . Reece leads a pack of women who are currently
redefining our image of the female athlete, inspiring a generation of
young girls to take control of their bodies and pride in their strength
. . . Can you deal with that?"vi
This image of female athlete is new. Mass market appeal to the female
athlete is new. Offering up athletics as a solution to social problems
most often suffered by women is new. A large demographic of women who
participate in organized sports is new. The assumption that enough women
live in the athlete's world--defined by bravery, competence, and
strength--to make up a viable market is new. Female athletes were once
oddities, goddesses or monsters, exceptions to every social rule. Now
the female athlete is an institution.
She's the product of late twentieth-century times: the growth of a
consumer economy which meant more women in jobs for the first time, the
expansion of the entertainment industry and thereby of sports, a culture
marked by progressive movements for change--race rights, gay rights,
women's rights, a culture taking notice of girls and the different women
they become. Chief among these was the passage of Title IX, the
Education Act of 1972, which mandated equal funding and facilities for
women's sports in any institution receiving federal dollars. This one
piece of legislation would make millions of women into athletes,
changing the shape of the female body forever. The female athlete, set
against old ideas of female incompetence and physical weakness, the
woman's place is decorative and is in the home.
Reports that herald the coming of the Ubergirl and that play to the
issue of girls' self-esteem are to some extent responses to the famous
1991 AAUW study, "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,"
the first extensive national survey on gender and self-esteem, which
reconfirmed earlier work like that of Carol Gilligan. The AAUW study
showed that adolescence, for girls, brought a loss of confidence in
their abilities to succeed, bitterly critical feelings about their
bodies, and a mushrooming sense that they aren't valued by the world
around them with a resulting sense of personal inadequacy.
Since the AAUW study, there has been a growing understanding of
issues relevant to girls and self-esteem, which has led to social
initiatives like the "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day." Along
with these initiatives, one of the most frequently advanced solutions
for the esteem problem is sports, and recently the National Girls and
Women in Sports Day (Feb. 5) has been coupled with a "Take a Girl
to the Game" program, which is modeled on "Bring Your Daughter
to Work." Such events show a growing consensus that a lifestyle for
girls and women which includes sports or regular physical activity of
some kind will "inspire a generation of young girls to take control
of their bodies and pride in their strength."
There is a new ideal image that matches these social initiatives to
value girls. As a recent article in New York Times Magazine pointed out,
the athletic, muscular woman is an image that has no historical
precedent, and that, while slow in catching on, has spread like wildfire
in the late '90's. Around the time of the '96 Olympics, Holly Brubach
celebrated the new "Athletic Esthetic," a "new ideal
emerging whose sex appeal is based on strength." Looking at female
athletes, at the rapid flowering of ads that show athletic women,
Brubach writes, "These women exude competence; they can carry their
own suitcases. Their muscles, like the fashion models' slenderness, are
hard-earned, but here the means is not abstinence but exertion. Though
their bodies have been meticulously cultivated, their bodies aren't the
point: the point is their ability to perform. What is most striking,
given that it's the other two ideals [anorexic and voluptuous; Kate Moss
and Victoria's Secret] that are calculated to please--to win the
admiration of women or the affection of men--is the fact that these
athletes seem content in a way that the other women don't."
The kind of personal integrity Bruback eludes to in the athletic
image is not a new idea. Advocates of women's sports, from educators to
participants, have been articulating the benefits of athletic
participation for most of the century, but it isn't until very recently
that these ideas have gained widespread cultural currency. What happened
to make arguments which once fell on deaf ears suddenly register so
powerfully on the national radar? What made mainstream public
perceptions of the female athlete shift so radically from the pejorative
female athlete as "mannish lesbian" stereotype to the
glorified "women we love who kick ass" of the present moment?
What happened to facilitate--finally--the formation of women's
professional leagues, most visibly in basketball?
Part of the cultural shift has a simple demographic explanation. At
the time of Title IX, 1 in 9 women participated in organized sports,
while now the statistics are 1 in 3. More bodies, more interest. Nike
was the first to make the female athlete as athlete, not just a pretty
girl, central to its advertising campaigns, and many other imitators
were soon to follow in the
`female-athlete-as-the-ideal-image-of-female-power' trend. At first it
was just athletic apparel companies like Reebok and Lady Footlocker,
Champs, but after the 1996 Olympics the athletic female body was paired
with everything from Evian ("Within me lives a superhero") to
Diet Mountain Dew to Movado watches. As a result, the athletic female
body has finally made it on the cultural scene. For those of us
who have been athletes for a long time, it's a bit like what feminist
rocker/actress Courtney Love says of her recent spate of cover
appearances: that after years of invisibility or vilification,
"it's like being popular all of a sudden. You know?" We know.
After years of being told we are too muscular or too big, too aggressive
and domineering, our bodies and the attitudes that go with them have
been accepted and even glorified, offered in the mass media as a models
of strength, possibility, and personal integrity for young women, an
example of our growing power in the world. How could the situation be
any better? In short, the cultural stage is set in a way it has never
been set before for the widespread cultural acceptance of female
bodybuilders as real athletes.
Given the decided shift in cultural attitudes toward female
athleticism in general, within the bodybuilding world the question now
becomes whether the industry wants women's bodybuilding and fitness to
be understood as sports, or as kinky versions of the twinned traditions
of beauty pageants and soft-core pornography. Because it is such an
overt exhibition of the body, bodybuilding has courted the
respectability problem since the beginning of its history, as is
reflected in the fifty-two years it took Ben Weider to win Olympic
recognition.
Because of cultural ambivalence about female sexuality, the problem
for women's bodybuilding is that much greater. 'Good girls don't,' but
of course, at least since the '60's, good girls do. As Elizabeth Wurtzel
writes in Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, "bad is
where it's at. . . in the pageantry of public life, in the places where
women invent personae, the one statement a girl can make to declare her
strength, her surefootedness, her autonomy-- her self as a self--is
to somehow be bad."vii Good girls do, but they
don't advertise it. Will she or won't she is the mystery, and the
seemingly unobtainable kick-ass chick like Xena Warrior Princess, or the
it's-just-one-part-of-me sexuality of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a
much more powerful draw than the babe who, like Aphrodite on Xena,
says 'fuck me.'
The establishment bodybuilding photographers, however, have all their
subjects say 'fuck me,' and act as if this is a new and novel thing.
"Sex sells," is often the excuse that is offered, "that's
just the way things are." But it's not just the way things are
(women's basketball sells, too). If we simply accept things 'the way
they are,' we disavow human will, creativity, initiative, the same will
bodybuilders use to get us through the rigors of our sport every day.
The same will of those brave, brave women and men who spent their life's
blood to get us Title IX and ensured girls would be able to compete in
sports in the first place. Let me stress it again: sports are not only
about sex, at least not directly. If you want to be taken seriously as
an athlete at this particular cultural moment, much better to sell your
sport to the public through subtlety, through indirection, through
putting emphasis on the multi-faceted nature of athleticism, of which
sexuality is just one component. As all there and out there
in terms of exposed flesh as bodybuilding is already, anything it does
in terms of sexualizing the representational field cannot be overt or,
like so much contemporary bodybuilding photography, it will be reducible
to a bad cliche.
The swimsuit layout in this year's Flex (February 1998) to
name just one of innumerable issues that are mind-numbing in their
unremitting sameness, was, if possible, more prurient and
blatant that the Maxim Men's Magazine 1998 calendar shots,
which have nothing whatsoever to do with athleticism: "On the
following pages," the Maxim calendar says, "you will
find no Nobel prize winners, no groundbreaking inventors, no inspiring
teachers, no worth politicians . . . in choosing our Women of the Year,
we . . . bypassed intelligence, sidesteped achievement, and did a quick
two-step around character and integrity. We combed the earth for the
finest specimens of female flesh the planet has to offer, seeking out
beauty not in its many wondrous forms but in a single, myopically narrow
form . . . breathtaking brunettes, ravishing redheads, blow-you away
blondes." The pages that follow include Kate Moss, hair upswept in
a messy '50's do, clad only in a pair of black panties, thigh highs and
black platform stilettos, clutching a teddy bear, Tyra Banks, head down,
rear in the air, Salma Hayek in black vinyl rising out of a pool. Yet
these images, which are images of models whose sole purpose is sexual
attractiveness, are pretty asexual, actually, compared to the February Flex,
which features not fashion models but female bodybuilding and fitness
competitors: Carol Semple-Marzetta, 1997 Fitness International Champion,
in black-and-white bikini that is a parody of tux and tails, raising a
top hat, balancing precariously on 6-inch heels on the sidewalk in front
of a hotel. Milamar Flores, fitness competitor, in a bikini of tiny hot
pink pieces of cloth and strings, posed with mouth open invitingly. Cory
Everson, 6-time Ms. Olympia, in a bikini of red macramé net. Madonna
Grimes and Milamar Flores doing a version of spoons: Flores' chest
straining into Grimes' back, her crotch to Grimes' hip.
So are photographers of any other women's sport doing this kind of
thing with Venus Williams? Sheryl Swoopes? Rebecca Lobo? Gwen Torrance?
Picabo Street? Janet Evans? So far it hasn't happened. So why use this
kind of representation when it comes to bodybuilding and fitness champs
like Lenda Murray, Cory Everson, Madonna Grimes? What is it about
bodybuilding and fitness that seem to so readily lend themselves to this
kind of unsophisticated sexualization? Isn't it possible to render these
athletes in a different way?
In his debate with some feminist interpretations of the
representation of female athletes, Allen Guttmann argues against what he
sees as feminist "hostility to the erotic element in sports,"
stating that it is the body itself, not the photographs of it, that are
erotic--that the athletic body is erotic regardless of how it is shot.
It is no more possible, in his view, to eliminate the erotic dimension
in representation than it is to eliminate muscles from a worked-out
body.viii I grant him that premise, but what
Guttmann fails to emphasize is that there are different forms
of the erotic, and the kind that the bodybuilding magazines sell is not athletic
eroticism but rather pornographic eroticism. The work of
Bill Dobbins is one example that makes use of both these modalities. As
I argued in chapter four of Bodymakers, his 1994 book The
Women contains examples of both kinds of eroticism I am discussing
here, and while the former does important cultural work in terms of how
it promotes the sport, the latter is undermines that very work.
Following Guttmann, but differing from his emphasis, I define pornographic
eroticism as characteristic of any representation that operates
synechdochically--that is, any representation that takes sexuality,
which is one part of humanity and human experience, and makes it stand
for the whole of that human being and experience, any representation
that makes sexuality the primary characteristic of the person
represented. I define athletic eroticism as a representation
that includes sexuality as one dimension of human experience, as a
quality that emerges from the self-possession, autonomy, and strength so
evident in the body of a female athlete. Athletic eroticism includes
sexuality as one quality among many, not a trait that is present to the
exclusion of all else. As long as the bodybuilding industry chooses
pornographic over athletic eroticism in their representation of female
bodybuilders and fitness competitors, a representation that reduces
these athletes to their sexuality, these sports will never be taken
seriously as sports, and Ben Weider's dream will never be fully
achieved.
An article in the June 1998 edition of Ironman focuses
inadvertently on this difference between athletic and pornographic forms
of eroticism in a way that joins the debate about the representation of
female athletes to the more specific debate about female bodybuilders.
The "Point Counterpoint" column was devoted this month to the
question of female muscle, and the pro-muscle side of the debate
contained the following point of view, written by Butch Lebowitz:
"I used to think women's bodybuilding was heading in the wrong
direction . . . year after year I'd see the physiques getting bigger and
more ripped, see the women flexing on stage and think, `Man, I wouldn't
want to wake up next to that.' Then one day it hit me. That's not the
point, you friggin' sexist moron. They're not building their bodies to
give me a woody; it's a competition, for crissakes, and they have an
obsessive drive to be the best at something. It's an athlete's
mind-set."ix Thank you, Butch. If Butch can
come around to this point of view--they're not building their bodies
to give me a woody . . . it's an athlete's mind-set --surely
whoever is responsible for the conceptualizations of the magazine
pictorials can come around to this realization as well. It's the
athleticism, stupid.
Indeed, there is some evidence of just such thinking in the most
recent issue of Flex (June 1998, there may be hope yet), which
for the first time since the early nineties includes a pictorial of two
women training in the gym together rather than engaged in some
kind of teasing sex play with each other (as in the centerfold of Amy
Fadhli and Madonna Grimes in the February 1998 Flex, clad
literally only in strings, sprawled on their stomachs,
girls-just-wanna-have-fun smiles on their faces, buttocks elevated,
Fadhli behind Grimes with Grimes' pink strings playfully lodged between
her white, white teeth). "Girl Power!", featuring former Ms.
Olympia Lenda Murray and current Ms. O Kim Chizevsky, is in direct
contrast to the same month's centerfold pictorial of Dale Tomita in
stock-porn modality, decked out in plastic-and-steel stilettos and with
sections of fishnet draped over her. In "Girl Power!" we get
nine amazing pages of Lenda and Kim in full cut-and-pumped-up glory,
straining through a real workout , wearing real lifters' clothes, not
bikinis and heels. They are concentrating, serious, doing their thing.
They are athletes, and they are beautiful, bis and tris and lats to die
for. The "Hot Tomita!" spread is a clear example of what I am
calling pornographic eroticism, while the "Girl
Power!" spread is an example of what I am calling athletic
eroticism.
Now I'm sure that there are some "morons" out there, who
still think that the main purpose of women's bodybuilding and its
representation in the bodybuilding magazines is to "give them a
woody," and these "morons" will write in to Flex
complaining about how supposedly monstrous and unfeminine Kim and Lenda
looked all flexed and striated, quads half a house thick, sweating and
straining through heavy concentration curls. But to me "Girl
Power!" was the most encouraging thing I have seen in a
bodybuilding magazine since the early `90's, a sign that maybe the
general cultural acceptance of female athletes was finally rubbing off
on the magazine's editorial board. Progress at last--my spirits soared.
But then, about a hundred pages later, I got the report in "Flex 'n
Femme that the February 1998 Penthouse ran a six-page spread of
Dobbins photos from The Women, and ten pages after that I ran
smack into "Hot Tomita!" So which is it? Are we going to give
female bodybuilders and fitness women a little respect, presenting them
as athletes who have a sexual dimension, or are we going to reduce them
to a synecdoche for cliched sexual fantasy? Make up your minds, Flex.
So who do you love? And what is at stake in these schizophrenic
representational spreads? Do we truly want widespread, mainstream
recognition of bodybuilding as a sport? Do we, in a cultural context
becoming increasingly supportive of female athletes and their
achievements, want that recognition only for men? Do we want women's
bodybuilding and fitness to be accepted--as Olympic recognition would
seem to merit--as serious sports, or do we want to relegate them to the
realm of an alternative beauty pageant, the site for the production of
reader's woodies? Aren't woodies--or attraction and appreciation,
anyway, also possible in response to athletic eroticism, to
representations that focus on women's athletic achievements, not cliched
sex?
In the arguments I am making here, I am not advocating censorship. I
am not suggesting a boycott of pornography. What I am advocating is a
corollary to what Ben Weider has worked his whole life to achieve--that
bodybuilding become "a sport to be respected the same as other
sports." I am advocating that female bodybuilding and fitness
athletes be respected the same as other athletes. And this is never
going to happen--nor is the mainstream acceptance of bodybuilding for
which Weider has worked so hard--if these athletes are denigrated within
their own industry by representations that frame them in the
context of pornographic rather than athletic eroticism. Along with
cultural critic Sidney Eve Matrix, who finds her positive experiences as
a bodybuilder in the gym compromised by the pornographic eroticism that
is used to represent the top female competitors in the muscle mags, I
also "look forward toward the future . . . [when] women will
continue to gain power and influence in the muscle industry, and then
the major magazines will not be able to get away with the+ir outdated
and inequitable attitudes. Beauty ideals for women are changing, and the
demand for positive images of women with muscle mass is growing."x
But the question of images and the cultural work they do is much broader
than how individual women feel, for as long as the bodybuilding industry
is so blatantly willing to exploit rather than respect its own, it will
never gain the kind of mainstream cultural respect it has been seeking
since its inception. Female athletes are here to stay. Female
bodybuilders are here to stay. Disrespect us at your own peril.
Please send us your feedback on
this article.
Leslie Heywood
State University of New York, Binghamton
Endnotes
iBen Weider, "The Long Road to Glory," Flex
May 1998, p. 55.
iiLeslie Heywood, Bodymakers:
A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), especially
chapters two and four.
iiiAllen Guttmann, The
Erotic in Sports (N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1996), p. 168.
Guttmann quotes from Mary Jo Kane and Susan L. Greendorfer's important
and influential study "The Media's Role in Accommodating and
Resisting Stereotyped Images of Women in Sport," Women,
Media, and Sport, ed. Pamela J. Creedon (London: Sage
Publications, 1994).
ivGuttmann, p. 168.
vThe President's Council on Physical Fitness and
Sports Report, "Physical
Activity & Sport in the Lives of Young Girls: Physical &
Mental Health Dimensions from an Interdisciplinary Approach".
viKaren Karbo & Gabrielle Reece, Big
Girl in the Middle (N.Y.: Crown, 1997), p. 175.
viiElizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch:
In Praise of Difficult Women (N.Y.: Doubleday, 1998),
pp. 2-3.
viiiGuttmann, p. 162.
ixButch Lebowitz, "Point Counterpoint: Female
Muscle," Ironman (June 1998), p. 173.
xSidney Eve Matrix, "Compromising
Positions: The Portrayal of Women in Bodybuilding Magazines,"
posted on the Faith Renee Sloan website, www.frsa.com/bbpage.shtml.
