Strength Sports & Exploitation

The Washington Post has an exposé today on exploitation of female bodybuilders. Because of the well-known differential in average male and female desires and visual nature of much male desires, these things are always about women being exploited. Gay males do it to males, too, but at a much reduced rate simply because of numbers. Of all the forms of exploitation we regularly encounter, this seems to have been less violent and aggressive than we often find: soft-core rather than otherwise, consensual rather than otherwise, coerced only by offers of money, denial of fair treatment for those who didn't play, or promises of favoritism in treatment if  you did. 

Possibly this is because the women were stronger than the men who sought to coerce them! Physical strength is a virtue in the strict sense, and has the pragmatic consequences of being protective as well as enabling one to do certain practical things that others cannot do.

I would advance the hypothesis, though, that this would not be found to the same degree in the other strength sports that women participate in -- I mean my own sport of Strongman ("Strongwoman") and Power Lifting. Of the three, bodybuilding is intensely focused on perfecting physical appearance rather than performance at lifting or carrying weight. This results in body styles that are less attractive, but more functional. 

These charts are about men, but it's not all that different.

Hollywood loves the bodybuilder physique, the triangular one with the abs and the v-cuts. Conan the Cimmerian tends to be portrayed in movies by bodybuilders like Arnold or Jason Momoa, and also artists who depict Conan usually do so in the bodybuilder physique since Frank Frazetta. They are not, though, as strong as those with the rectangular physique and the thick core muscles. They are just preferred aesthetically. Bodybuilding as a sport focuses on achieving that aesthetic, not on lifting huge weights or carrying them over distances or through obstacles. 

My hypothesis is that people who are erotically motivated by sight of strong people probably gravitate towards bodybuilding in a way that they don't towards the other communities. Women who want to compete in a strength sport without such exploitation thus probably have a live option. Women who want to look good in a bodybuilder way, say like a comic book heroine like Red Sonja, are beginning from a path of looking attractive rather than being strong, and that is going to tend to lead to encounters with men like these. 

That's not a moral judgment; you should do what you want. If you want to look good, though, you're probably going to have to develop stronger "coping skills" as Mr. Hines likes to call it.