Fun With Female Bodybuilders
As I spent my last hub whining about the dearth of strong female figures, it seems appropriate that I should spend some time mentioning women who go out of their way to redefine femininity in a strong way - female bodybuilders are those women.
I'd like to preface this with something of a caveat however, many female bodybuilders take the obsession with building muscle and tone too far and use hormones and other artificial means to achieve bodies that could never exist in nature. At that point, you've gone beyond a strong body and mind and fallen prey to an ideal that can never bring happiness and often results in severe illness. Steroids are bad, mmmkay?
Fortunately, not every female bodybuilder is a 'roidhead. It is possible for women to strengthen and tone and achieve muscled physiques without turning to artificial substances to do so. Are muscly women attractive? That's a question down to the beholder, and I would argue that its a question that is entirely irrelevant. It is ridiculous that every question to do with women inevitably comes down to 'is she hot?' It's natural for attraction to be a factor for people every now and again, but not every single issue to do with women should boil down to whether it makes them more or less attractive. There are some men (and women) who find muscled women attractive. There are some men and women who think that they are not attractive. Given that 99.99999% of people with an opinion will never meet the people they're passing judgment on, let alone be in any position of intimacy where such an opinion might have some relevance, the question itself is simply a facile waste of time.
It's positive that women have made headway in the world of bodybuilding, simply because it gives us an alternative view on what a woman can be. A woman doesn't have to be soft and weak. A woman can be strength and muscle. I imagine that in our more primal days, the average woman would have had to have been quite strong. You don't survive in a world of saber tooth tigers, or even more recently, settling and colonizing new lands filled with 'savages' (otherwise known as native peoples) and beasts without having wits and some strength about you.
If not taken to extremes where a woman subverts her health, well being and sanity to achieve a muscled body, I see no reason why female bodybuilding events should receive the same sort of attention as other so called 'women's events' like the Miss Universe pageant do. In fact, I see no reason why female bodybuilders should not be sent to Miss Universe. If it's really just about celebrating womanhood as pageant defenders often claim, and not just about oogling pretty skinny girls with the brain power of your average minnow, why not?
