Humping Iron

By Petra Browne

Bodybuilding is a lonely, expensive, and physically punishing pursuit, especially for female competitors. In this preview from our new issue, Petra Browne lays out the history of women’s participation in the sport.

HALFWAY THROUGH RONNIE CRAMER’S 2001 documentary Highway Amazon, bottle blond Christine Fetzer speaks into a cordless phone. The camera is tight on her face, though by now we’ve seen over thirty minutes of her dense, sinuous body, including shots of her doing a dumbbell routine on the shoulder of a road beside bluffs of red sandstone. Even as she tours the country, she has to keep up her physique. After all, men at each of her stops—Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York; the list goes on—will pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the chance to wrestle a female bodybuilder. “It’s kind of an underground thing here, what I do,” she says into the phone. “People don’t believe you actually wrestle men on beds in hotel rooms.” In the next shot, a horizon is formed by the teal coverlet of a motel bed. Fetzer, wearing a black vinyl lingerie set, is on her feet, locked in a struggle with a weedy, olive-skinned young man who could have just walked out of a university chem lab. Her well-muscled arms are thicker than his, but he pulls her arm over his shoulder, spins his back into her, and gently rolls her onto the coverlet. The camera bounces. Moments later, they are both on the bed and she mounts his body, taking his head in a scissor hold between her thighs. For an instant before the shot cuts, her firm, rounded glutes jut out below his chin. This is the moment he has paid for: the erotic surrender. According to Fetzer, about 50 percent of these sessions will end with the client masturbating to climax as she stands out of reach, flexing.

Like most bodybuilders, Fetzer entered the sport believing she could make a living through contest winnings and sponsorships. But also like so many, she has found herself reliant on the thousands of men who lurk on forums and exchange photos of their favorite female bodybuilders, as well as hot takes, smut fiction, and reviews of “sessionettes” like Fetzer. This hobby, as it is commonly called, provides economic support for as much as half of all female bodybuilders. Without these men, there would be fewer women with the means to pay for gym memberships; spray tans; custom posing suits; choreographers; supplements; steroids, insulin, and human growth hormone (HGH); and, of course, treatments to counter the androgenic side effects. They are, by turns, reviled and welcomed. They are a lifeline. They are, in the parlance of the trade, schmoes.

“Like most bodybuilders, Fetzer entered the sport believing she could make a living through contest winnings and sponsorships.”

That women as nonconformist as Fetzer and her peers should depend on male intervention is less surprising when we understand their sport’s historical origins in the 1950s, when bikini or women’s “fitness” contests began to appear as side acts at male bodybuilding contests. Back then, these women more closely resembled pinups than today’s muscle-bound competitors. With few exceptions, female bodybuilders didn’t exist yet. This was the era when collegiate women played basketball on the half-court because running the full length was thought too strenuous. These pageants—for that is what they were—bore little resemblance to today’s bodybuilding competitions. While the entrants might cheekily flex a bicep onstage, it was understood that they were there to present trophies to the men, hang on their arms like ornaments, and otherwise service the male gaze. Muscles were not required or even wanted. What were required were bikinis, heels, makeup, and costume jewelry. The women’s function, like that of ring girls at a boxing match, was to affirm the tenuous heterosexuality of the all-male audience as they looked long upon slippery, shaven male bodies.

Their feminine presence reflected a core anxiety of male bodybuilding: Is it gay to look at dudes? After all, by the 1930s, photographers were taking out advertisements in the back pages of physique magazines, offering “undraped”—read, nude—photographs of beefy men, and by the 1950s, homoerotic publications like Physique Pictorial were available on newsstands. It became so pervasive that in 1956, the mainstream fitness magazine Iron Man called for the eradication of “the homosexual element” that permeated physical culture, suggesting a ban on magazine advertisements for nude photographs. Similar worries would motivate bodybuilding kingpin Joe Weider when, in 1980, he decided that each cover of his flagship magazine Muscle & Fitness would feature both a man and a woman; a defense, he explained, against “the public’s lingering suspicion that bodybuilders were gay.”

But another thing drove Weider toward equality on the page: the dream of doubling his empire. Women were a market, after all. By 1983, the combined annual circulation of Muscle & Fitness, FLEX, and Shape—all published by Weider—had grown to one million. Furthermore, Muscle & Fitness, which began in 1940 as Your Physique, a mimeographed zine with very few ads, had become a full-color marketing vehicle for numerous Weider products: mass gainers and protein powders, exercise equipment, instructional videos, et al. In fact, before 1979, it exclusively advertised Weider products. All of this would have been enough for Weider to play kingmaker in a growing sport. The fact that his brother Ben ran the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation (later renamed the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness, and mystifyingly shortened to the IFBB in both instances), widely acknowledged to be the “only game in town,” seems almost gratuitous. That the American arm of the IFBB was, at least until 2017, a nonprofit is immaterial. The league was simply the black earth from which their crop grew and magazines the combine used to harvest it.

Continue reading “Humping Iron,” an essay by Petra Browne, on our site.

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