You know you want to. You know you need to. But there’s a voice inside your head that tells you that you shouldn’t. Or that if you do, something must be “wrong” with you.
Or is it the other way around? Is the fact that society tells you that you shouldn’t actually like a certain thing indicative of the reality that something is wrong with society, not you? It goes with the old saying that “I’m not crazy. Everybody else is!”
Indeed, liking muscular women is something that feels a bit…naughty. Maybe not taboo or morally reprehensible, but mischievous. Like eating a cookie while you’re on a diet or taking a much longer smoke break than is allowed at work, what you’re doing isn’t going to kill anyone or harm anything. But, that doesn’t mean it’s totally 100% innocent. Isn’t there something a bit scandalous about digging the looks of female bodybuilders?
To be truthful, yes there is. But this feeling has very little to do with what “society” says. In today’s world, there isn’t much that isn’t at least somewhat socially acceptable anymore. This is both good and bad, the specifics of the situation dictating which is which. Without question, female bodybuilders are not particular popular or widely accepted as part of our pop culture. But that’s just part of the equation. It’s the very nature of female bodybuilders themselves that explains why it feels so naughty to be turned on by them.
In a nutshell, the argument is this: Muscular women are not supposed to be real, but they are.
Muscular women defy almost every notion we hold about the differences between men and women. Even for the most open minded of us, the sight of a woman with large muscles will make us do a double-take. Even if we question or flat out reject traditional paradigms regarding gender, the presence of muscular women cannot help but throw a monkey wrench into the engine.
Muscular women are rare. So rare, we sometimes don’t believe they actually exist. Of course, we see photos of them on Instagram and bodybuilding magazines, but are they really real? Our brain tells us “yes” but our heart tell us “uh, maybe.”
This is why we get butterflies in the stomach moments before meeting a muscular woman for a wrestling or sensual worship session. This is why when we first see her, our minds need a few minutes to fully process what we’re witnessing. This is why when our time with her is over, we feel like we’re in a daze as we ask ourselves the burning question: Did that actually happen?
Well, yes it did happen. Every moment of it was very real. We know that on a gut level, but it can be surreal to experience something that is truly out of the ordinary. And not just extraordinary, but mind boggling as well. Female humans are supposed to be weaker than men. They’re not supposed to be able to bench press 300 pounds, deadlift 350 pounds or squat 400 pounds. But some of them can. And there are plenty of men who cannot. None of this should surprise you if you’re well versed in the world of female bodybuilding. But alas, not all of us are.
But even if you are, it’s still pretty darn jarring to see a cute blonde lady like Minna Pajulahti deadlift like an Olympian weightlifter. Even if you know intellectually that she can do this, it still makes your heart flutter a bit when you get to see it happen right before your eyes.
Those of us who are fans of female bodybuilders are not only keenly aware that our beloved muscle ladies can accomplish amazing feats, it turns us on like nothing else to see them carry out these feats. It’s arousing. It’s exciting. It’s jaw-dropping. It’s unforgettable. It’s forever etched into your memory. It’s like a drug…and lovely Instagram videos of our favorite FBBs showing off their hard work gives us our fix. And like most junkies, we need our fix periodically or else we might go mad.
So, our unexplainable love for muscular women, combined with society not giving these ladies the credit that is due to them, manifests itself in this way: we feel like we’re being naughty.
Not naughty in a moral or ethical sense, but naughty in a giddy schoolboy sense.
This sense of “naughtiness” isn’t quite the same thing as when you snuck dirty magazines into your bedroom and ogled at them late at night. Or when you discovered the art of masturbation and did whatever you could to please yourself as quietly as possible without anyone hearing you. Or when you tried to sneak a peek at the cute girl sitting in front of you in math class without her noticing.
Those feelings of adolescent guilt eventually go away once you reach adulthood. The giddy feeling you get of trying to do mischievous things without mom and dad finding out is very real, but that only lasted for a short while. The naughty feeling you get at being attracted to muscular women doesn’t ever really go away. It doesn’t fade off into the distance or become “normal” after a few years.
Instead, this feeling of impishness is here to stay for the long haul. But unlike actual feelings of guilt – whether borne out of religious convictions or your own personal sense of moral decency – you don’t ever feel the need to apologize for your attitude toward muscular women. You love them to death, no matter what anybody else says. You just don’t feel too comfortable letting the whole world know about it.
Perhaps that’s the core issue at play here. For the vast majority of us, our love for female bodybuilders, wrestlers, athletes, and fitness models are kept secret, or at the very least publicly restrained. We don’t go around announcing to the Universe that we love women with big muscles or women who can easily kick our ass. We obviously feel these things in private, but we very rarely dare to ever say these things out loud.
The reasons for this are not complicated, nor do they need to be rehashed here. What is worth talking about is the fact that deep down inside, we actually relish the idea that our fetishes aren’t mainstream – or at least not yet. There’s something rebellious about being a female muscle fan. But not rebellious in an “I’m-going-to-shove-it-in-your-face kind of way,” but instead in an “I-don’t-need-to-justify-myself-to-anyone-in-public” sort of way. We love female muscle, but we feel no need to shout it from the mountaintops.
Unlike other forms of social rebellion (like getting a face tattoo or dying your armpit hair pink), it doesn’t matter to us if anybody else knows that we love big muscular women. So we’re not rebelling for the sake of rebelling. We’re rebelling because, well, that’s sort of the way it is. We’re not intentionally being contrary. We’re not aiming to go against the grain and defy social norms. We just happen to be doing those things by happenstance. It’s more of a happy accident than an intentional choice.
So this is why our feeling of being naughty is more fun than degrading. There isn’t an Atlas-style burden of guilt being thrust upon our shoulders that we must harbor for all eternity. Loving muscular women is awesome, alluring, and astounding. It just isn’t something that we need to make public. It’s not something we share across Facebook or Instagram. We don’t discuss it at the dinner table or around the water cooler during our lunch break. We’re fans…quietly.
Being a quiet fan can be odd, indeed. It can be interpreted as being embarrassed about being into certain things, just like the high school jock may not want to also admit that he has an ample stamp collection. Or the popular cheerleader who also attends knitting seminars on the weekends. Or anybody with even an ounce of self-respect who admits to actually liking Nickelback’s music.
And there is definitely a significant amount of truth to that. It’s a bit strange for a guy (or gal) to be attracted to a woman who can deadlift 400 pounds or squat like an NFL offensive lineman. But that doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the matter. There’s something else going on here below the surface. There must be the element of naughtiness that relishes the fact that one is being naughty. In a funny sort of way it makes you feel somewhat superior.
This is not to imply that guys who love muscular women are more enlightened, intelligent, and cultured than guys who do not (although that is most likely true!). This is to imply that we receive a unique thrill from knowing that if anybody would find out that we love what we love, that person wouldn’t look at us the same way. Or maybe, this person might actually secretly love the same thing! They were just too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. All they needed was someone else to break the ice and make it more “socially acceptable” to talk about this topic.
Whenever I read and exchange emails with fans of my blog, I get the sense they feel relief knowing that they’re communicating with someone who also “gets it.” We’re both in the same boat. We may not be into all the same fetishes, but we’re in agreement with the basics of female muscle fandom even if our kinky interests don’t fully align. I may not be into wrestling quite like you are, but I understand why you dig it. And you don’t have to worry about me judging you harshly. Because I won’t!
Likewise, rarely will anyone send me a nasty message demanding I explain why I harbor such subversive thoughts. More often than not, my correspondence with folks tends to be jovial, pleasant, and productive. Like I said before, they feel a sense of liberation knowing they’re talking with someone who gets where they’re coming from. In fact, my blog might help them understand why they feel the way they feel in ways they could not articulate before.
It’s fun to be naughty, isn’t it? But more than that, it’s fun being a female muscle fan in general.
One other aspect of female muscle fandom that cannot be understated is how we tend to embrace the secretiveness of our fetishes. Remember in grade school when you created secret handshakes, passwords, and playground clubs with your buddies? These “secret clubs” didn’t really amount much to anything, but that wasn’t the point. If you and your best friend had a personalized handshake that only the two of you knew about, most of the kids around you didn’t care at all. But that didn’t stop you from having one.
So why did you do such things in secret?
It’s because you loved being someone with “insider knowledge” about something that everybody else was completely oblivious to. It harkens back to our feelings of superiority that I talked about earlier. Human beings love keeping secrets not because the secrets you kept were necessarily important per se, but because you loved the feeling that you knew something that nobody else did. And that feeling makes you seem powerful.
For example, in the BDSM subculture a popular practice is for couples to engage in their submission play while in public…without making it too obvious. A man might ask his wife to wear a butt plug while they go out for dinner at a fancy restaurant. A woman might force her husband to wear a cock ring around his penis while they meet friends for happy hour drinks. There’s an irresistibly naughty feeling that comes with doing something scandalous in the privacy of your own mind without anybody else knowing about it. Only you (and your partner) know about it and the innocent elderly couple sitting right next to you has absolutely no idea that anything “dirty” is happening in their proximity. And that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. That’s what makes it fun.
Likewise, those of us who love muscular women cherish the fact that we keep it secret. I’d even go as far as to suggest that there’s a small part of us that wishes that female bodybuilding doesn’t ever go mainstream.
Really? Is that true? It can be, yes. Like hipsters who hate it when their favorite band become popular with the larger culture, I’m willing to guess that deep down inside there are lots of us who don’t want FBBs to become as popular as MMA fighters or NASCAR drivers. We sort of like them as being perpetual underdogs. We like that they’re not famous. We feel indignant – in a good way – when people write nasty comments about them in online chat forums. Perhaps we’re secretly afraid that if FBBs were to become “mainstream” our love for them might dissipate.
Or maybe that’s total BS. Whatever. Even if you could imagine a scenario where female bodybuilders reach a point of becoming mainstream pop culture celebrities, would a tiny part of your soul become crushed knowing everyone is jumping on the FBB bandwagon when you’ve been riding this train for years and years? Then it’ll no longer be naughty. It’ll become mundane and boring. That would be a tragedy.
Or perhaps not. Regardless, without a doubt there’s a part of our psyche that doesn’t want this naughtiness to go away. We want to feel like we’re part of an exclusive club that we can’t talk about out loud but will intently defend to our dying breath. That fluttering of our heart gives us life, even if we don’t know why. We can’t explain it. But we love it like nothing else. In that respect, we’ll keep stealing cookies from the cookie jar even if we’re the only ones telling us we shouldn’t.
The Adventures of Ryan Takahashi 