On Training, Weightlifting, Feminism, and Stuff

[silk_noir]

This is going to be a long and rambling post, so hold on.

I met baronalejandro at Lilies War and we hit it off reasonably well. As most of us do, we connected later on LJ. On one particular post about fighting over at my SCA blog (baronnemelisend if you wanna see), he replied something to the effect of "If I can help, let me know."

One of the benefits of reaching my age is

Comments

[tedeisenstein]

I didn't take it personally; I'm finding this whole discussion to be thoroughly interesting and a bit fun, too. Lord knows even I need to have assumptions challenged....

As for the quote; I didn't take Mr. Ritchie's comment to imply his ex-wife was too skinny. I read it to mean that he thought she'd exercised so much that she was all muscle, all grit and sinew and tendon and hardness, that he found the experience thoroughly unpleasant. It wasn't "she's underweight", it was "she's overmuscled".

I also suspect that such a comment would apply to male bodybuilders as well as female. I pass by weightlifting magazines in the supermarkets, and glance at the bulging-muscle guys on the covers - and I think they're, well, grotesque. I would hate to have sex with them if I were a woman as much as I would hate to have sex with female equivalents.

For me, it's not the sex of the person that gets my dander up, it's the muscles - or, rather, how far the person has gone in developing defined, ripped, toned, musculature. Enough muscles to be healthy and good-looking is definitely good; too many muscles, in anyone, turns them into, for me, caricatures, of the "why don't they get a life?" type.

It's not a sexist thing. It's a too-much-of-a-good-thing, errr, thing. And it is certainly one of personal taste; a man who you think is just right may be over-muscled to me, and someone who is to my taste might need more exercise for you.

[orbitalmechanic]

See, this is so interesting to me--what an amazing range of body types we can interpret as "overmuscled." That picture of Madonna doesn't look strong or athletic or muscled to me at all, it looks wasted, even ill, the opposite of those bodybuilders. I wonder if, culturally, part of this issue is that we expect men to lift weights in order to bulk up, and women to lift weights in order to slim down? So we all kind of measure of that, no matter how much we think it's dumb. I just can't imagine looking at the bodybuilders silk_noir talks about and saying "tendon and gristle." Even though I don't personally like that look!

(I'm reminded of a class I taught once, where I asked my students to write definitions of the stereotypes of mothers and fathers--each one wrote a note at the top of the page saying "I don't agree with any of this!" but they all wrote exactly the same definitions. That's going to have an effect, however hard we try to turn away from it.)

[tedeisenstein]

Not everyone gets traditionally overmuscled (if there is such a thing); a fair number will get that edged, chiseled, sharp look (as with the women in the photos in the original posting), and some get, well, the Madonna Look. Same cause, different results. Dunno what other words to describe the variations, though.

I am not entirely convinced that all women lift weights to slim down, nor men to bulk up. Back when I was still going to the gym, I was lifting weights to tone myself up - lose a bit of weight and several inches, get into better shape, and get a bit more muscular without adding bulk. I have heard anecdotal evidence that some women lift to add a bit of bulk...but, yeah, I could be easily persuaded that what you say could indeed be the Cultural Consensus, even though there's wide individual variation.

Madonna was tendon-and-gristle'd through too much body building. The photos silk_noir posted weren't - but they were still overly, errr, body-built. In both cases, my own, personal tastes run towards "they've gone over the edge", but, then, I've always liked moderation in working out. And in pretty much everything else, in both sexes.