Iron Ladies

Iron Ladies

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

I was surprised and at the same time fascinated to read the comments (mostly written by men) in a post I placed with a photo of a female bodybuilder with quite developed muscles, "monsters", "beasts”, “freaks", transvestites” and other horrifying and insulting barbarities that seem to confirm the attacks towards machismo that radical feminists often denounce, the detail is that a woman dedicated to bodybuilding rarely shows those characteristics of the so-called radical feminists, usually, great champions of the discipline such as Lenda Murray, Iris Kyle, Dayana Cadeau or Yaxeni Oriquen, often use offstage elaborate hairstyles, make-up, nail fixation and quite feminine attire, rarely or never you will see them wearing a mohawk, showing their breasts "in protest", wearing masculine clothes, showing axillary hair or expressing their hatred towards the men and the oppression of the "patriarchy", the most paradoxical thing is that female bodybuilding seems to be the closest thing to that instrument of battle against machismo, involves women out of the ordinary entering the almost exclusive territories of man, causing a strong shaking in the male gender.

Muscles, those structures or organisms that are responsible for general movement in our bodies, those sets of tissues capable of exemplifying the theory of "Anti-fragility" developed by the writer and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, developed to the maximum through the resistance natural recreated in gyms through bars, discs, dumbbells and other devices, it is extreme stress applied to the muscles in order to destroy the fibers of the muscle tissue and encourage the creation of larger and stronger fibers, a sport that for a lot of time was almost exclusive to man, but thanks to pioneers such as Rachel McLish, Cory Everson and Bev Francis began to be overtaken by women, the increasingly physical demand, challenge the genetics itself, a will of steel, years of discipline and dedication, in addition to chemical aids in the highest spheres of professional competence was taking the sport and its aesthetics to the extreme, powerful competitors like Kyle, Gates, Murray, Chizevsky, Fuller, Andersen, Oriquen among others took the sport itself to its maximum expression, shaking male insecurities from its foundations.

An excess of muscles would turn these women into "males" in the eyes of men, the application of testosterone would turn these women into "men disguised as females", muscles and testosterone not exclusive to the male gender would seem to become the main object of claim of the insecure male, of course, the irrational logic would dictate that the muscle is exclusive to man, and that the muscle developed in automatic turns a woman into a man. Are we talking about the lack of muscle in a man as the cause of his femininity? Is a man devoid of muscles “feminine”? Is a man attracted to a woman with "female" muscles “feminine”? Should not a man, attracted by other men, look for "men" and not women with muscles? And it is that what the female bodybuilding has shown us is precisely what radical feminism tries to exhibit, the myopia of the masculine gender, the real strength of the feminine gender, the capacity of the woman to break with the myth of the "weak gender" and put yourself for you in terms of strength and development, and beyond, compared to man.

Is female bodybuilding a threat against machismo? Of course, since it uses male insecurity to shatter the retrograde machismo that cannot tolerate being widely surpassed by a woman in the until then almost exclusive franchise of muscles and strength, I do not see feminism triumphing through the exhibition of breasts or axillary hair, less through the appropriation of issues such as abortion, I see strong women facing man in their own field, developing their own bodies, their own femininity of steel, taking to the extreme the beautiful female body and multiplying by self-effort the virtues granted by nature.