The Strangeness of Having a Female Muscle Fetish

I often wonder how many straight men, if they were forced to give an honest answer, would admit to being attracted to muscular women.

Mainstream society tends to frown upon women who’ve gained too much muscle. For example, we like our female athletes to remain feminine, beautiful and graceful even when they’re in the middle of hitting a tennis ball, shooting a free throw, skiing, sprinting at full speed or smacking a softball. Gymnasts, naturally, are supposed to be graceful, so this is an obvious exception.

Female athletes like Venus and Serena Williams, Hope Solo and Lolo Jones are right at the cusp of being “too muscular” while remaining “easy on the eyes.” As long as they keep winning Olympic medals and championship trophies, we’ll endure seeing their non-conformist figures on ESPN for now.

But this is not supposed to be a rant against sexism in mainstream American sports. This is about something else entirely.

In a previous post, I talked about the allure of female bodybuilders. This post is by far the most popular individual post I’ve written on this blog. I think its popularity can be credited to two aspects: 1. Search engines like Google and Bing, and 2. Curiosity.

Straight men (I can’t speak for lesbian women) are not often given a forum to discuss weird sexual fetishes in places other than the Internet. You don’t often hear two dudes talk about their love for feet at a crowded Starbucks on a lazy Sunday morning. Nor do you hear a bunch of football lovin’ good ol’ boys talk about their “thing” for overweight MILFs while watching the game at a bar. These are not topics we discuss in public.

So, I will attempt to dissect and explain to the best of my abilities my personal reasons for being sexually attracted to muscular women. Let’s see where this goes…

The Beginning of My Awakening

I understand “The Beginning of My Awakening” sounds ridiculously overdramatic, but bear with me.

I can’t pinpoint an exact time when I began to be attracted to muscled ladies, but I think it can be traced to this one time when I was a little boy (I was probably no more than 8-years-old), I was at a video store (for you young kids out there, once upon a time ago when we wanted to watch a movie we had to go to a video store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video and rent a VHS cassette. This is practically ancient history) with my mom and I saw the cover for the movie “Red Sonja,” a cheesy 1985 B-action movie starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I will admit, I’ve never seen this movie nor do I ever plan on seeing it. The 4.7 rating it received on IMDb is not exactly convincing me to go out and rent it.

But I distinctly remember, as an impressionable prepubescent little boy, being taken aback by the movie’s cover: It showed two warriors, one male and one female. The male is obviously strong and tough, which any male action hero should be. But seeing a female warrior also look intimidating and ready to kick butt opened my eyes to a whole other world.

Women can be tough, too.

As an 8-year-old boy raised on hyper-violent Saturday morning cartoons and action figures, this was without a doubt a paradigm-shifting realization.

Of course, as I got older I started to “notice” girls once puberty hit. At the tender age of 12, I encountered my second experience with a tough, nontraditional woman. My parents bought a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records for the year 1999 and inside were tons of colorful photos of people doing all sorts of weird and hardcore things.

One page stood out in particular, though: a full color photo of Cory Everson. In it, she looked startling. It was the first time I’d ever seen a woman with bulging muscles all over her body.

She looked freakish; as if she weren’t human. I didn’t want to say she looked gross, but my hormone-driven mind couldn’t process what I was seeing: a woman with muscles. In the years afterward, I would continuously turn back to this particular page to gaze upon this indescribably sight.

Later, when my family first got the Internet (we had dial-up. Remember that?), I discovered the joys of online porn. Like any teenage boy discovering the opposite sex (and the concept of “sex”), viewing pictures of naked women on a computer screen occupied many hours of my life and led me to also discover masturbation, an activity I still enjoy today.

However, it wasn’t until college that I truly became enamored with muscled women.

The Female Muscle Fetish Begins

As a freshman in college, I began to work out regularly. During high school I casually lifted weights at home, but the first time I ever stepped foot into a gym was visiting my university’s recreational center on campus. It was small and, looking back upon it, unremarkable; but it was a gym nevertheless.

I lifted weights probably around three times a week. As a beginning weightlifter, I used poor form and technique like any novice would. It even came to a point when people working out next to me would stop me during my work out and tell me how to do certain lifts the right way. Those were embarrassing moments.

This video changed my life, just like that cover of “Red Sonja” and that photo of Cory Everson. Though the video was amateurish and grainy, it showed a beautiful woman working out and showing off her gorgeous muscled arms. Sculpted and divine, Ms. Bickels opened my eyes to an Earth-shattering fact: muscular women can also be feminine and beautiful.

That hyper-muscular photo of Ms. Everson isn’t the only way to view female bodybuilders. They don’t all look “man-like.” They’re just typical women. The only difference is that they’re women who strive to be as strong as possible.

As expected, over time I visited YouTube and watched videos of countless other female bodybuilders such as Karen Zaremba, Maryse Manios, Deidre Pagnanelli, Lynn McCrossin, Monica Brant, Krissy Chin and others. I must have seen literally hundreds of videos during my freshman year of these well-defined ladies posing for photos, doing incredible lifts or being interviewed.

It wasn’t until after graduation when I moved back home that I discovered a whole other world: Hardcore porn.

The World of Smut

I feel like this is a progression. First, it was a cover of a b-movie. Next, it was a sports photo in a record book. Then it was a short online video of a woman exercising. Then it was a whole slew of YouTube videos of muscle ladies doing their thing.

Finally, we get to the next step in my personal muscle fetish evolution: porn.

The first hardcore porn video I ever saw was Lynn McCrossin and Yvette Bova, two gorgeous FBBs, pleasuring each other in a steam room. Before then, I’d never seen a woman’s genitalia up close and personal on a computer screen before. And not just any type of genitalia: These two women have very large feminine endowments, something you don’t see every day.

This epic discovery opened the doors to watching other kinds of videos: Female bodybuilders having sex with men, FBBs having sex with each other, FBBs masturbating, FBBs playing with sex toys, FBBs posing nude, etc. This was the first time I ever saw female bodybuilders as sexual beings. I definitely fantasized about them before, but I’d never actually seen them in action before until now.

Smut can be a funny thing. Once you see what people choose to do in their bedrooms, you can never look at the world the same way.

Watching porn (both hardcore and softcore) introduced me to other female bodybuilders like Francesca Petitjean, Denise Masino, Melissa Dettwiller, Lauren Powers, Gayle Moher, Yvette Bova, Victoria Dominguez, Amber DeLuca, Autumn Raby, Roxie Rain and plenty others. While I don’t want to categorize any of them as “pornographic actresses,” I discovered these women thanks to videos of them either being nude and/or engaging in sex acts.

Along the way, I also discovered other FBBs like Alina Popa, Katka Kyptova, Lisa Cross, Angela Salvagno, Karla Nelsen, Colette Nelson and others via Dailymotion, Google Images and Facebook pages.

Regarding FBBs and porn, I could write a whole post discussing this topic. But for now, I’ll just say this: If a woman (or man) makes an independent decision to pose for photos or shoot videos that are sexually explicit, who are we to judge? It’s their bodies. They can do whatever they want with it.

Fantasy vs. Reality

Unlike a lot of guys who are into muscle women, the sub-genre of erotica called “Female Muscle Growth” stories isn’t really my thing. These stories usually involve a guy meeting a dainty, weak girl who, either by magic or through some scientific potion, grows a freakish amount of muscle to become superhuman. For whatever reason, I’m only attracted to watching and looking at strong, muscled women doing real things; like pumping iron, posing for pictures or doing whatever they do in porn.

Personally, I’ve never met a professional (or amateur) female bodybuilder, so my only exposure to FBBs is through the glorious wonders of the Internet.

The closest I’ve ever been to a real FBB was back in college when, for some reason I could never quite figure out, I walked past a woman (she was older and clearly not a student) in our student union building with huge arms busting out of her short sleeve shirt. I didn’t get a clear look at her, but I could tell she didn’t just casually lift at the gym. I could tell she puts extra effort into her exercising.

Speaking of the gym, most of the women who go to my gym either do only cardio exercises or attend classes like Zumba, Pilates and yoga. Only a small handful of women lift with us guys. Of them, only two of these ladies have any discernible muscle definition. Too bad.

So…in other words, I’m attracted to the real thing, not a fantasy. I’m not turned on by the idea of a strong, muscular woman. I’m turned on by actual strong, muscular women. Nor do I have any alternative fantasies involving role playing or BDSM.

The idea of wrestling an FBB doesn’t appeal to me. Neither is being tied up and spanked by one. Nor do I want an FBB to wrap her legs around me in a headlock. Instead, I’d prefer to make love to a beautiful, strong athletic woman just as though she were any other kind of woman.

I guess this means I don’t necessarily fetishize female bodybuilders; I’m just attracted to them in a special way. They’re women who take great care of their bodies. They’re women who spend countless hours pumping iron at the gym and making lots of dietary and lifestyle sacrifices in order to get their bodies to look the way they want it to look. There’s a lot to admire about that.

Some women starve themselves to look “beautiful.” Others go under the knife to remove any perceived “blemishes.” Some hate themselves because when they look in the mirror all they can see are “imperfections.” My previous post about FBBs best summarizes why I’m personally attracted to a woman with muscle. The purpose of this post is to give you some context and perhaps a deeper explanation.

So…What’s the Big Deal Anyway?

Simply put, I’m attracted to female bodybuilders because they are, quite simply, beautiful. I hope others who share my attraction feel the same way. I hope you now understand that being attracted to a lovely muscled lady isn’t weird, strange or disgusting. There’s nothing incomprehensible about it.

A woman with muscles is still a woman. She’s not a woman trying to be a man. She’s a woman trying to become the best woman she can possibly be. That’s another great reason to be physically and emotionally attracted to her.

Perhaps, little by little, society can start accepting muscular woman as a normal thing instead of a freak of nature. I strongly believe when people are disgusted by a muscled woman, it’s because there’s some deep rooted sexism at play. Plenty of people in our society still expect women to be dainty, weak and ultra-feminine. Anyone who rebels against this is either a “gender traitor” or a monster.

Look at the photos of the FBBs I’ve put in this post. Are any of them disgusting to you? Do you find any of them “masculine,” “repulsive,” or “monstrous?” If you do, I think that reflects more on you than it does on me.

But please don’t misinterpret me. I’m not claiming to be some quasi-feminist activist. I’m not claiming to be “sexually progressive” in my attraction to FBBs. I’m not trying to destroy the foundations of gender roles or sexual politics by this post or through my blog. All I want to do is express my opinion that being attracted to a muscular woman isn’t all that strange.

In fact, it makes a lot of sense. Muscular women are healthy, curvy, dedicated, passionate and strong-willed. Who could possibly be turned off by that?

So the next time you encounter or see an image of a female bodybuilder, female athlete or a woman who takes her fitness hobbies very seriously, keep an open mind and try to appreciate a different side of life.

Who knows? You might just enjoy it.