The Body Politic: The Political Battle of Bodies Between Man and Woman (Short story... more essay or treatise on strength between genders)

The Body Politic: The Political Battle of Bodies Between Man and Woman

Written by: SteeleBlazer

Between the body politics of men and women there are no small or little rules—both written and unwritten, both spoken and unspoken between the genders. Because even the smallest and tiniest of rules exist for bigger reasons than most might think or initially comprehend. Most of these rules are in place to protect the status quo, to protect the fragility of the male ego, to protect the frailty of the male muscular patriarchy. A patriarchy whose hold has always been tenuous at best… a grip that kept slipping, weakening, until finally it lost its hold altogether on the female political body—thanks to the female body growing stronger than ever.

This is especially true when we look at the rules in bodybuilding… where you might expect only one rule to reign supreme: bigger is better. But on a stage where the biggest muscles should reign supreme, female muscularity was about to be let off the leash. Men were not prepared for such a massive, muscular feminine explosion to be unleashed upon them. They scrambled, they panicked, they tried to do what men have always done—they tried to subjugate, to restrain, to tighten the leash back on.

This is the story of the never-ending tug o’ war between the sexes. About how gender and body politics between man and woman have been there since the dawn of civilization and the very dawning of politics… politics that has always been about gender, and has always been sexist. I’m talking about the body politics between man and woman. And men have always thought they were superior because they were bigger and stronger… quite the sexist view to have, just because you’re bigger.

And bigger has always been an important part of the male body politic and identity. They love being bigger everywhere—bigger than not just women but other men. And you can find such politics even in the smallest of places… even the bodybuilding stage doesn’t escape the sexist shadow cast by man. A stage where there should only be one rule: bigger is better.

But even on the bodybuilding stage—front and center not just for male and female bodybuilders but for the political tug o’ war between the sexes—the rules were rewritten. That stage became a stage for the body politics of men and women, on full display. And you can bet men have made plenty of tiny, little rules about how a woman could, would, and should compete. Not that you’d ever call anything on a bodybuilding stage small—no—this was always about the male ideology of bigger is better.

Except, of course, when it comes to women and female bodybuilders… Then it’s not about simply being the biggest you can be… They felt threatened by the women who, year after year, kept growing bigger and stronger muscles, starting to build and forge their hardbodies through their hard work—muscles that were starting to rival the men’s, if not in terms of size then in sheer raw muscular definition. And they were afraid that the definition of strength and muscularity might need to be rewritten to accommodate the growing, ever-changing, and expanding definition of femininity and what it meant to be a woman.

So, they changed and rewrote the rules, making them not just abstract but archaic, saying to the female competitors: you had to keep and not lose your femininity… whatever that meant. And by whose view of femininity were they being judged?

Big breasts, wide hips, and tight glutes, and long legs, and long pretty hair, and long painted nails? Whose definition was that?

And why was it men that were in charge enforcing such rules? That’s always been the preferred body for the male body politic. Ever since the dawn of sexual politics men thought because they were bigger and stronger they made the rules. They thought they had a divine muscular mandate to be stronger and this made muscles inherently masculine, and hence strength was masculine and big muscles manly… And weakness they classified as feminine, along with being skinny…

And in the ensuing years as more and more women took up weightlifting and bodybuilding, more and more of those women not only got bigger, but their girly muscles—once the subject of jokes and ridicule, as the term itself was bandied about not as a compliment but an insult—well, those girly muscles started to encroach upon men’s ideas of masculinity. And the idea of feminine strength ceased being a joke and became a threat.

So they changed the rules for them. Because if nature couldn’t keep their rule and reign of patriarchal muscular supremacy, they’d change the political rules of the body politic itself, to control the body of the women, just as they have done throughout time—with the very fashions that adorned the female body itself.

Whether it be with the corset—lace it tighter, tighter, till ribs cracked and lungs collapsed, sold as elegance but really a velvet-lined cage meant to weaken. Or the Chinese practice of foot binding—little lotus feet crushed and curled until every step was pain, sold as beauty but really bondage. Or the hobble skirt, stitched so narrow at the ankles a woman could only shuffle, totter, and stumble, fashion turning her stride into a prison-yard shuffle. Always the same game: weaken the woman, so the man might seem stronger by comparison.

And now that muscle is fashionable and en vogue, men even hope to clothe their own insecurities, their own growing feelings of inadequacy, their growing feelings of emasculation and belittlement, beneath the swelling muscular mass of the female body. This isn’t just about losing political strength—it’s about losing their status as the stronger, superior sex. They had to find a way to keep women in their place, to keep them smaller and weaker.

So now women were penalized for getting too big, too muscular, so that the men’s own muscles wouldn’t look—no—small. Because the men were still bigger… only next to a woman with great big bulging mighty female muscles, the men were starting to look less impressive, less big, more ordinary. And this upset them. They wanted to really look more impressive among the women, to prove to women that they’d always be the “little lady” in any relationship with a man, even and especially on the bodybuilding stage…

So mixed posing was the first to go… It was all fine and dandy when a girl was sporting cute, firm muscles that bulged impressively—yet still were smaller than the average male’s. It still seemed muscles on a woman could be prim and proper, so long as those muscles were petite when pumped and not pumped up to a degree that made men’s own muscles look deflated.

But when those women started to eclipse the average male, with bulging beefy biceps bigger than most men’s—well, you can’t have a competition where the woman looks almost as big as the man. Even though in mixed posing competitions the contest isn’t between the man and woman in the couple, but between couples against other couples, there is always, always, a competition between the sexes. And in men’s sexist view, it’s only right and natural for them to be bigger and stronger than a woman.

And they started making more and more little rule changes… Because women’s once smaller and littler muscles kept growing bigger and bigger. They changed how women could flex. No longer with a hard closed fist, but now with an open palm. The closed fist wasn’t feminine enough—it allowed women to flex and pop their biceps harder, to flex bigger and higher muscular peaks… And men were afraid that women’s muscular potential would not plateau but keep rising higher and higher, reaching new heights and summits surpassing their own highest peaks.

Besides, they reasoned, this new way of posing would allow the women to show off their cute little nails all painted up and sparkling, but it took the emphasis off of flexing and onto those little cute painted sparkling nails, and not on the woman’s big, bulging, rippling, tanned, toned, glistening, and sparkling biceps—where it should belong in a bodybuilding competition.

It wasn’t just the bicep flex that they altered, but the lat spread pose itself was softened so that women wouldn’t cast as imposing of a shadow across the stage. The men could see the growing and encroaching darkness from those shadows and feared being eclipsed by it. So they changed it—to show off more of the woman’s form, more of her figure, her feminine curves, and not her muscular curves.

Instead of flaring out and spreading her shoulders as wide as possible, the woman now stuck out her backside as far as possible. Men preferred a woman’s muscular backside to be mooning them, rather than looming over them. It was all about appeasing and placating them—posing in ways that visually, physically, subjugated the woman, offering her up to the male gaze.

Men would never dare act demure on a bodybuilding stage. They want to be seen as big, as powerful as possible, basking in the stage lights, making the stage itself tremble and quake as they strike pose after pose. But this was not so with the women. Muscles too big were viewed as obscene. It was not about seeing how much space a woman could take up, because men would not permit a woman too much space in this world—or else they’d lose their grip on the tug o’ war between the genders.

So the end goal was not to see how wide and big she could make herself, but how ideally she could shape herself to meet masculine approval and demands… and not her own approval, not her own demand for more size and more power.

Bigger was only better for men. When it came to women, you could have too much of a good thing—or too much muscle. As they’d say, a woman had become too muscular, too masculine. But men’s grasp on muscle was starting to weaken, and women were starting to gain more strength and power.

So they banned and outlawed more flexes and poses. The “most muscular” pose they barred women from using in competition, and would penalize them for using it on stage. The body politics behind it meant that only the male bodybuilder was able to use it, and so it became identified as a masculine pose and synonymous with superior manly strength. The pose was deemed by the ruling male governing body to be antithetical to femininity and at odds with the notion—or their notion—of how a woman should pose in order to please their manly values.

But try to hold on to their traditional masculine values—those were changed and evolved, much like how women have evolved and changed. And we all know rules are made to be broken… And as men’s strength didn’t just plateau, it faltered. Atlas himself didn’t so much as shrug but shrunk, and he could no longer support and hold up his burden. And the weight of the world fell from man’s shoulders… where women promptly picked it up.

This created a seismic shift between the sexes that rattled and shook the entire world… Not with an earthquake, but a gender-quake!

Women shattered the societal chains that were holding them back, and gone were the old norms social morays and gender rules holding women back. Just looking at the modern muscular woman and you’d know no man could hope to hold her back, especially when you look at just how shredded and jacked that muscular back of theirs now is, not to mention their broad brawny shoulders, muscular arms, and tree trunk thighs, that are just as sleek and feminine as ever, just loaded up with more feminine sex appeal than ever.

Now women are the bigger and larger and harder and stronger of the sexes… The very definition of masculinity and femininity has now been rewritten. Girly is strong, manly is soft. Masculinity is to femininity what femininity is now to masculinity… To put it simply: femininity means to be strong, and to be macho is to be pretty and delicate, while to be sissy is to be strong and muscular!

This is a new age for women. The age of the muscular new-age Amazon.

And you better believe that women are just as beautiful as ever—if not even more beautiful than ever before—because they’re so much more than what they ever were. They’re bigger, stronger, harder, and more beautiful than ever. They just had to change what it meant to be beautiful in this modern age.

Beauty, in the old order, always had a frailty to it—delicate ankles, tiny waists, fragile feet, lungs gasping for air. Beauty meant weakness, softness, fragility.

But now? Now beauty is buff. Beauty is brawny. Beauty is big, bulging, beefy biceps, and a gorgeous woman gorgeously engorged with gargantuan girly muscles. Beauty is strength. Beauty is power.

A new age has dawned, and with it came new rules. With the changing bodies of males and females came not just changes to their rules, but a change to the entire body politic between man and woman. Women now ruled. Which makes sense—might makes right, and no one was mightier than women, thanks to their mighty female muscles.

And so now new changes were made to bodybuilding competitions. Mixed posing is back—but now it’s the men being lifted up onto the broad brawny shoulders of their posing partner. It’s the men fawning and preening at the feet of the women as they pose together. The men anchor themselves against the living carved marble statues that are now the pinnacle of the feminine physique—these women, living pillars of strength for society and for every young girl to aspire to become strong like them, with biceps bigger than any man’s ever.

The biggest change—besides women’s bigger and stronger muscles, and of course inversely men’s smaller muscles, and really there’s nothing big about men’s muscles now—is that the men are the ones wearing the makeup too, and getting their nails done up—because that’s what’s expected of the modern male. They need to look manly. They need cute little macho nails that glimmer and sparkle, nails they can show off along with those cute manly biceps of theirs… biceps so much smaller than all the girls’.

And just like how the women’s lat spread was changed, now the male lat spread is changed. Only theirs is altered to show off their biggest muscle—the only muscle of theirs still bigger than a woman’s. They don’t stick their backsides out and preen, no, they stick out their hips, posing and framing their masculinity in the best light they can, hoping to attract the female gaze with the one muscle women still agree looks bigger and better on a man.

Because there is no doubt: muscles are now feminine. Muscles look far better on a woman than they ever did on a man. And when the women hit a most muscular pose—showing to the world just who the most muscular between the sexes are—there is no doubt that male muscular supremacy has been eclipsed by women.

The male muscular patriarchy is no more. The body politic between the sexes is forever changed, thanks to the changing of the feminine form and their new superior muscular female physique.

On the bodybuilding stage the king is dead—long  live the new muscle queens! Let mighty female muscles reign supreme and let the only rule be bigger is better, and we all know nothing can be bigger or better than mighty female muscles! And may their reign grow even bigger and bigger along with their muscles.