Great ideas originate in the muscles.
THOMAS EDISON
JUST WHEN OUR IDEAS about men and women seem to have gone as far as they can go, something comes along to push them even farther. Pumping Iron II: The Women, a dramatic documentary about the women’s bodybuilding movement and its pivotal contest, the 1983 Caesars World Cup of Bodybuilding in Las Vegas, was released in 1985 and became a historic mind-blower. It began a revolution in our ideas about women’s bodies that is still going on.
Even for those accustomed to new images of strong women in sports and fitness—or in bodybuilding—the twenty-eight-year-old, unassuming star of this documentary came as a big surprise. A gentle, intelligent, courageous pioneer who was already a four-time winner of the women’s world powerlifting championships, a world-class runner, shot-putter, discus and javelin thrower, Bev Francis had long been known as a champion in her native Australia. Her fame spread dramatically with her achievements in bodybuilding—a form of competition that was new to her. Indeed, it was only because she had torn her Achilles tendon and been unable to run or throw until it healed that she’d been willing even to consider entering a bodybuilding contest—a sport she’d previously disdained as not active enough. Once she made the decision, however, with the monomania of a champion she lost weight to reveal muscle definition, did endless, minutely designed repetitions to achieve the megadevelopment such contests reward, and ended up with a body far beyond the limits of imagination for most men and for any women. Pound for pound, she was stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I had signed up for a screening of Pumping Iron II only after seeing a photograph of Bev in bikini and muscle-displaying pose that blew what I had thought were my already well-blown ideas about gender. It made me realize something very new was going on, and also forced me to face my own bias against bodybuilding. Whether for men or for women, it seemed useless and narcissistic: What were all those muscles for? The only possible pleasure I could imagine from such contests was to see men compete on the basis of appearance alone, as women so often have been encouraged to do in beauty contests and forced to do in life. Even that hadn’t been enough to send me to see the first Pumping Iron, the 1977 documentary that introduced an obscure muscle man named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though I knew the film had humanized bodybuilding enough to help it overcome its freak-show image and to set Schwarzenegger on a path that eventually turned him into an international movie star—and though women’s bodybuilding had the added Annie Oakley appeal of females competing in a male domain—I still had major misgivings.
As usual, prejudice marks a mental land mine. What I expected was a movie that flattered the masculine style by imitation and encouraged women to play a game they couldn’t win. What I discovered was the real-life saga of a woman who was changing the rules and creating shock waves that would eventually reach all of us. Certainly, I’ve never felt the same about the female body since seeing the strongest woman in the world.
At first, the purpose of this documentary about strong, sleek women assembling to compete for a whopping $50,000 purse—a big change from earlier women’s competitions, which had been minor sideshows to male events—seemed to be showing us just how much the routine resembled that of a traditional beauty contest. Hair and makeup assumed great importance. Contestants had to have their bikini tops checked for padding. Even in talk among the strong women themselves, there was a debate about what “femininity” really was. Many of these women had come to “pumping iron” through fitness and beauty routines, school sports, or boyfriends who were bodybuilders, and their pleasure in their own strength was limited by a constant need to prove that muscles were “feminine,” that body balance and symmetry were the point, and that they themselves were “real women.” Yes, they were bodybuilders, but, they kept reassuring us, they hadn’t gone too far.
Even so, the contestants seemed far less obsessed with ideals of gender than the judges (all men but one, the wife of a bodybuilder), whose standards were under fire from reporters, from the more rebellious contestants, and even from one of their own, a younger judge who was protesting what he felt was the surrealistic nonsense of judging athletes for their feminine appearance. Limiting muscle in a bodybuilding contest was, as he put it, like telling women skiers they shouldn’t ski too fast.
In self-defense, the judges attributed their concern to public rejection of muscles in women; yet most of the spectators seemed to be ahead of the judges. After all, many women athletes had already increased the public’s comfort level with female strength (think of Martina Navratilova and her weight training for women’s tennis). So had some pioneer women in bodybuilding. There was Doris Barrilleaux, who discovered in the 1950s that weight training was an efficient way to get back in shape after her children were born. When she was in her forties, she was appalled by one of the early sideshow-variety women’s bodybuilding contests, and tried to elevate the sport by founding the Superior Physique Association and a newsletter that reached many women who had been training in the privacy of their own homes or in local gyms. Anthropologist Lisa Lyon bodybuilt her way to victory in the first World Women’s Championship in 1979. She also wrote two books about women’s bodybuilding, helped to found the National Physique Committee as the women’s division of the International Federation of Bodybuilders (the primary professional men’s group), and generally tried to create “a new standard of beauty—a high-tech body.” She also posed for Playboy, though whether this was a victory for female muscle or for that magazine’s traditional effort to show all women as sexually available was unclear.
But the conversations filmed in the gaudy halls of Caesars Palace revealed there was still plenty of free-floating anxiety about how “femininity,” ideals of beauty, and the reality of bodybuilding could coexist. There was even an internal split within the world of women’s bodybuilding itself. This had first surfaced earlier in the year at the Miss Olympia Contest in Philadelphia (later renamed the Ms. Olympia Contest), with the appearance of contestants like Auby Paulick and Cammie Lusko, who rejected the traditional limits of “symmetry and balance,” the code words used in women’s bodybuilding for “not too much muscle.” Such standards had resulted in bodies that were only a little more muscular than those of gymnasts or dancers. Once women refused to be bound by those standards, they had begun to develop all the muscles their individual bodies could produce, just as male bodybuilders had always done.
Of course, the representatives of this new aesthetic didn’t win. Rachel McLish did. A smoothly muscled, sloe-eyed, dark-haired former cheerleader and born-again Christian from Texas, she was much more acceptable to the judges because of her beauty, and also because her muscles didn’t stand out to the point of gender bending. On the other hand, those muscular pioneers who lost did greatly increase curiosity and interest among spectators, as did the slightly freakish appeal of the scenes from this contest that were picked up by television.
As Frank Zane, a former Mr. Universe, said to a bystander while watching those newly well-muscled competitors in 1980, “You familiar with Carl Jung?”
“Yeah.” The bystander nodded.
“Well,” said Zane, “I don’t think there’s an archetype for this.”
By the time of this 1983 Las Vegas contest, prize money was equal to that of men for the first time, and the controversy was heating up. (“I’ve argued that there are two types of women and that the solution would be two types of contests,” complained an embattled Doris Barrilleaux. “I’ve met with nothing but opposition.”) The flame that had brought this controversy to a boil, however, was the entry of Bev Francis. She had not only weight-trained hard but lost forty pounds from her powerlifting weight of 180. (Because powerlifting doesn’t allow the use of momentum, as Olympic weight lifting does, it requires even more brute strength.) This allowed her to look “ripped”—that is, to lose the surface layer of fat that conceals muscle definition—and arrive in Las Vegas at such a peak of muscularity that she seemed to represent another species.
Unlike the other contestants, Bev also had a face without artifice, and one that was no more conventionally beautiful than that of, say, Babe Didrikson, one of the greatest all-round athletes, or Billie Jean King, the pioneer of modern tennis. Moreover, Bev’s well-developed neck, intricately muscled stomach, enormous biceps, and tree-trunk-like thighs not only were more impressive than those of the other women but resembled those of the most developed men. Whether the sight turned her sister contestants on or off was hard to tell, but they certainly seemed awestruck, and they treated Bev with a friendly respect. Indeed, one of the film’s pleasures was the camaraderie among most of the women, even though they were competitors.
Soon, however, the judges became obsessed with the crisis of standards that Bev Francis’s appearance presented. It was obvious that some of them had already made up their minds. The sole woman judge, also a writer about women’s bodybuilding, was challenged by a reporter on the impact of Bev Francis’s potential victory. “I think it would be a total disaster,” she said bitterly, “and I think the sport would totally go in reverse. … She doesn’t look like a woman. She doesn’t represent what women want to look like.”
Of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t look like most men’s ideal either, but she had a point. The distance between Bev Francis and her gender’s image was certainly greater than the distance between Schwarzenegger and ordinary men. Nonetheless, those of us watching the documentary had an advantage the judges didn’t. We knew Bev not as a freak of nature but as a likable, engaging human being. The film had shown her in Australia, where sports had made her a quiet folk hero. We’d watched her with her supportive family, who found her boundary-breaking career a natural extension of her teacher father’s love of sports and her mother’s early career as a dancer. (In addition to working as a physical education teacher since graduating from college eight years before, Bev Francis also had trained as a ballet dancer.) Most important, we’d heard the simple philosophy that shaped her career as a champion athlete and was obviously carrying over into her bodybuilding work: Accept no limits but those one’s own body imposes. In fact, as we listened to her praise the beauty of strength in animals, her subversive ideas sounded like common sense. If male and female panthers and lions and horses develop their muscles in a similar way, she asked, why shouldn’t female and male humans? Indeed, why not?
By then, however, the allegiance of most viewers was probably mixed. We’d come to know several of the other contestants, and to like them too. There was Lori Bowen, a shy twenty-five-year-old from Texas, who had been turned on to bodybuilding by her boyfriend and inspired to compete by the example of Rachel McLish. This was her first professional competition, and she needed the prize money to get married, rescue her quiet husband-to-be from his job as a male stripper in a Texas nightclub, and try for a more stable life.
We’d followed the hard work of Rachel McLish herself, fascinating and beautiful in a way that was both conventional and exotic, whose earlier victories had just begun to pay off in product endorsements, posters, and television appearances. Clearly, she could make strength sexy to some men and thus more acceptable to many women.
We’d come to know Carla Dunlap, one of the few black contestants, a former competitive swimmer from New Jersey. We watched her work hard at both bodybuilding and graceful water ballet, and heard her joke in a down-to-earth way about this Las Vegas adventure. Though not as well-muscled as Bev, she was also challenging the judges’ definition of “feminine,” both in degree of strength and in racial stereotype.
In fact, we’d been an intimate part of the hope and sweat and intensity that had gone into a remarkably unhostile competition among fifteen women and their friends, families, and trainers, and heard real dialogue as concise and revealing as anything that could have been scripted. George Butler, the filmmaker who created both this and the original Pumping Iron, was wise enough to resist narration and to let us eavesdrop on this world that was new to most of us, and in transition itself.
In the end, the surprise was less that Bev Francis lost, or even that the judges placed her in a humiliating eighth—to the boos of many spectators—than that Rachel McLish, the more conventional favorite, lost too.
The winner among this glistening array of strong, oiled bodies was Carla Dunlap, a clear compromise between the old and the new. She was more muscled than Rachel McLish, though just as graceful and beautiful; a breaker of racial barriers in this mostly white world; but not even close to the gender-bending body of Bev Francis. Whoever we might have been rooting for, it was easy to celebrate Carla’s victory as a pioneer, and as someone we’d come to like. We’d seen her arriving in Las Vegas with her mother and sister instead of the usual professional male trainer, working on her own routine while others were being coached, and befriending and applauding Bev Francis.
Still, the emotional climax of the film was the scene of Bev in her hotel room, trying hard to be cheerful as she talked over the phone to her family in Australia, and ordering from room service all the foods she had been denying herself. Here was one more woman whose clear right to win had been judged less important than her lack of prettiness and her refusal to conform. Though she accepted the judges’ verdict with a champion’s good grace, her training partner and lover, Steve Weinberger, an American powerlifter, voiced outrage on her behalf. The film ended on his angry question: Why?
Of course, we knew why. Yet she had shocked us too. By breaking all past stereotypes—even archetypes, as that Jungian spectator pointed out—she had forced us to ask: If I had been a judge, what would I have done?
It was this echoing question that made her the one contestant who would live on in our minds.
By the time Pumping Iron II opened in New York, more than a year had passed since its events. Bev Francis and Steve Weinberger had become engaged and were living quietly in Queens. They were also helping each other train for their respective powerlifting competitions. Though Bev hadn’t decided to drop out of bodybuilding completely, she had returned to her powerlifting weight, thus tailoring her body to the sport at hand. In spite of her humiliating public defeat for not looking “like a woman,” she had just returned to pressing her own boundaries.
But in the long run, she may have won after all. In the two years since her precedent-setting appearance in Las Vegas, many women bodybuilders had been coming into contests heavier, more muscled, less willing to accept social limits on the development of their bodies. Moreover, these more muscled contestants had been scoring higher, as judges’ standards began to shift. By being an athlete focused only on achieving her personal best, Bev had changed the context within which other women bodybuilders worked—and even dreamed. I was looking forward to meeting this woman who was enlarging everyone’s world by moving the frontier.
On the way to a gym where George Butler had invited me to watch Bev work out, I asked him for the answers to some of my novice’s questions. As a longtime bridge-builder between the public and the esoteric world of pumping iron, he explained:
Yes, most women have to train and diet harder than men in order to achieve muscle development and visible definition. With less testosterone to build muscles and a thicker layer of body fat to conceal them, women have to drop far below their normal 20 to 25 percent body fat. Nonetheless, men and women do have the same basic muscle groups, as in Bev Francis’s example of female and male animals.
Yes, women bodybuilders—like joggers and other very active women who fall below a certain proportion of body fat—may have no menstrual cycles until their activity changes and a greater percentage of fat returns. I wonder: Since sports require muscles and good diets—not unhealthy thinness—could they be one of the healthier forms of birth control?
No, most women who are into weight training don’t develop “masculine-looking” muscle. For that matter, most men who pump iron don’t look like male bodybuilders. Only a handful of people are likely to have the determination, patience, athletic skills, and genetic makeup to achieve that bodybuilder look. But whether women are seeking unusual muscles or not, weight training has the appeal of efficiency and effectiveness as a form of exercise. Especially when compared to running and other sports that are usually done outdoors, often in isolated places, it also offers personal safety. Already, it’s as popular as jogging in the United States, with women a full 50 percent of Nautilus users in gyms and even more women using free weights at home.
No, women bodybuilders don’t routinely take drugs, as far as George has been able to tell. Male hormones encourage muscles, but they also produce facial hair and other unwelcome male characteristics. Most of the women in the film, including Bev Francis, denied taking steroids, although many professional athletes do use them, in spite of their dangers. Since tests were not administered in the Las Vegas contest, however, there was no way to be sure. On the other hand, we do know that Bev Francis was almost certainly telling the truth, for as a shot-put and powerlifting champion, she had been taking drug tests for years—unlike most bodybuilders of either sex.
Yes, Bev had been subject to chromosome tests and other insulting challenges to her genetic identity as a woman, and she had passed them all with flying colors. As she said in the book version of Pumping Iron II: “I have female responses, I have female hormones in my body, female chromosomes. … I’m happy with being a woman. I never wished that I was a boy. I just wanted to do the things that boys were allowed to do.”6 I wonder: Would men who do badly in sports ever be subjected to the same tests as women who do well?
Of course, there were questions that only the future could answer: With some women gaining upper-body strength more like that of men, would sports competition ever switch to categories based on height and weight instead of gender? More important, would muscles and strength become acceptable for females in general?
Finally, George explained, Bev and the others are not “muscle-bound.” In spite of the popular idea that muscle development impedes movement and flexibility, he vouched for the fact that Bev was supple and easy-moving in person. “If we all went to a discotheque,” he said, “Bev would be one of the best dancers on the floor.”
Watching Bev Francis at the gym in lower Manhattan where she and Steve were going through the slow, arduous ritual of machines and free weights when George and I arrived, I saw what he meant. She had an evenly paced, effortless style of movement that was far more androgynous than Rachel McLish’s seductive poses or Carla Dunlap’s feline stretches, but it was just as graceful—and hypnotic to watch.
Seeing her in contrast to the dozen or so men and women bodybuilders around her, I could appreciate the difference in her motions. Steve, her fiancé, was very good, and so were several of the others. But each of Bev’s repetitions was full, controlled, seemingly perfect, and exactly like the one before. In contrast, many of the other athletes seemed erratic, jerky, occasionally out of control. Since the exactly right pattern of each repetition was what gradually built and defined an individual muscle, I began to appreciate the precision and stamina this required.
We’d been standing aside, trying not to break Bev’s concentration or that of the men and the women who, whether they knew it or not, were pioneers of a sort, since most bodybuilding gyms had been all-male preserves until a few years ago. When Bev and Steve finally stopped and came over to say hello, she was direct and friendly, but he seemed protective and suspicious, as if he’d become accustomed to people misunderstanding Bev and feared this would happen again. Most men might feel ambivalent about being the lover of the strongest woman in the world, but Steve, who understands her unique accomplishment in a field that is also his own, was clearly proud. Like the Olympic wrestler George Zaharias, who married and did his best to protect Babe Didrikson from the ridicule of an earlier generation, which greeted her athletic feats with charges that she was not a “real woman,” Steve has joined Bev in creating what was clearly a mutually supportive world of their own.
One of my first surprises was that I was taller than Bev. That she was only five feet five made her ability to conquer three categories of powerlifting—to bench-press 331 pounds, squat 480 pounds, and dead-lift 476 pounds—even more impressive. Indeed, since the non-Olympic sport of powerlifting required more force than Olympic weight lifting, which involves an overhead, clean-and-jerk motion that rewards agility as well as strength, there was an outsider’s pride in both Steve and Bev. She explained the difference with a punning remark about “a lot of the Olympic clean-and-jerks I have met”—the closest she was to come to either complaining or bragging.
George Butler suggested that Bev take me through one round of machine and free-weight exercises so that I would better understand what I was recording, and she cheerfully agreed. As a trained gym teacher, she understood how to scale each weight down to the exact level necessary to test my very modest strength. She also gave easy-to-follow, supportive instructions. I could imagine her as a precise ballet student in her earlier years, and as a patient and supportive coach, once her own career as a world-class athlete was over.
Afterward, at a nearby restaurant where the four of us went to talk over coffee and Italian pastry, Bev made clear that she gave her coach, Franz Stampfl, who had originally trained and encouraged her, much of the credit for her career. He had transformed her from an unconfident eighteen-year-old at the University of Melbourne into a multisport champion. Stampfl was already famous for training Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute mile, but this seventy-year-old man had been a supporter of women’s rights since the 1920s, when he campaigned for legal abortion in his native Austria. As a coach, he had encouraged many women athletes during his career in England and Australia.
“We all have reserves of unexpected strength,” Bev explained. “We’ve all read stories about the woman who lifts a car off her baby, because the adrenaline and desire are there. Franz helped me discover confidence in myself and train in many sports. I loved the variety and only recently started to specialize in powerlifting. Women have had only six world championships in powerlifting; men have had fifteen, but we’re getting there. Maybe the Olympics will include powerlifting as a new category.”
In spite of her disappointing experience in Las Vegas, Bev found the United States to be more accepting of strength in women than Australia was, though not yet as open as Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. “My coach created a center of support around me at the university,” she said, “but society in general wasn’t that open. In the past, the only place where women could show strength was the circus—at least we’ve advanced from that. But when I was growing up, I wanted to go as far as I could. I wanted freedom. There was a TV ad in Australia that I always hated. It showed a woman dishing out food and saying, ‘Feed the man meat.’ Why shouldn’t I do more than that?
“On the other hand, freedom takes responsibility, and a lot of the girls didn’t want that. They always had a way out. If things got too hard for them, they would just stop, and everyone would accept it because ‘she’s only a woman, she’s only a girl.’ It’s hard to achieve when everybody gives you a cop-out. Every once in a while, I use being a female as an excuse to get out of something, and I always hate myself for it afterwards.
“Most of my life, boys were my friends, not girls, because I was doing things boys understood and girls didn’t like. But I never wanted to imitate men. Even when I’ve competed and powerlifted against men, I didn’t work to beat them. I just wanted to beat my own past performance, to push my own limits. Sometimes people think I am a man, which I understand because of my developed shoulders and shortish hair. But when I explain that I am a woman and they say, ‘No, you’re not,’ it really irritates me, because I’m an honest person. I’m happy to be a woman. But I try not to show my anger with them, because aggression is a male characteristic, and that’s what they expect. I value female responses.”
I asked her about her quote in the Pumping Iron II book: “I’m not a feminist in the sense that I don’t believe women are better than men.” Given that feminism means equality, not superiority, I asked if she still felt that way.
“I was responding to early feminists in Australia,” she said thoughtfully, clearly trying to sort out her feelings. “Germaine Greer and others seemed to be imitating the worst characteristics of men—‘Belly up to the bar’ and all that. But I guess the truth is I’ve been labeled so many things that I’m still afraid of any label. I just want to be myself.”
It was the response of someone who had always been a loner, and unique. I wondered, too, how much her feelings were colored by the lack of support from some women, by their antipathy to female muscles and strength. Even in talking to friends about Bev and the movie, I had noticed that many men were open to it in a general way, while women fell into two groups: proud and enthusiastic or hostile and turned off—with little in between. Oddly, the division didn’t follow the logic of women who did or didn’t support equality in other areas. It seemed more visceral than that.
Yet Bev’s own interpretation of the film was a very feminist one. “The first Pumping Iron was a good movie, and more humorous than this one,” she explained, “but I think ours has a significance that goes far beyond the world of bodybuilding. I hope people will think about the variation in female potential. I hope it will make them look beyond the still photographs of women bodybuilders and athletes that sometimes fall into stereotypes. This movie allows you to know the people inside the image and to see how diverse, and human, women are.”
Certainly, the world was beginning to accept a few strong women. After that afternoon with Bev, I saw two television commercials: one was for a light beer, a funny scene in which a very pretty Lori Bowen picked up comedian Rodney Dangerfield with one hand; in the other, for a diet cola, a glamorous Rachel McLish gave bodybuilding tips to beefcake actor Lee Majors.
But there were still racial limits. Though Carla Dunlap had great beauty as well as the speech skills of an actress, she had been offered no television commercials. The dozens of bodybuilding magazines had also declined to put her on the cover. This first black woman bodybuilder was a champion in a very white and biased world. While waiting for Bev in the gym, for instance, I’d been told that some bodybuilding fans insisted Carla Dunlap found it “too easy” to build muscles, implying there was a racial difference in strength or the amount of work required: a version of the comments one sometimes heard about why, say, many boxers were black. Clearly, the answer had to do with poverty, not race—once, most boxers were Irish or Italian—but in terms of overcoming racial bias in bodybuilding, there was a long way to go.
As for the acceptance of strength in ordinary women of all ages and groups, the answer was still blowing in the wind.
But no matter how friendly or frightening this new territory might be, Bev Francis had been its first explorer.