muscle – Page 2 – The Adventures of Ryan Takahashi

What is Your Female Muscle Holy Grail?

Gold Chalice In Altar With A Ray Of Divine Light — The Holy Grail: You have chosen wisely!

From King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to Indiana Jones, everyone seems to want to get their hands on the Holy Grail. The journey to acquire such a coveted treasure is full of peril, challenging our heroes to face such dangers like bloodthirsty armies, treacherous terrain, nefarious double-crossers, and the dreaded Knights Who Say Ni.

The Holy Grail is famous for allegedly being the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea then used it to collect Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion. You don’t need to be very religious to know that this object – whether it actually existed or not – is an immeasurably valuable treasure. There’s no need to get into the etymological history of the term “Holy Grail” because it’s complicated, hotly debated, and ultimately boring.

In today’s parlance, we use the expression “Holy Grail” to describe any object or achievement that we consider to be most important to us. Examples include winning the Super Bowl, getting accepted into an Ivy League university, scoring a date with the hottest cheerleader in school, climbing to the top of Mount Everest, or meeting your favorite celebrity. Sometimes we achieve these goals. Most of the time we never even sniff the possibility of accidentally achieving these goals. Life goes on.

For female muscle fans, we have our own version of the Holy Grail. Hidden deep within our imaginations, we fantasize about certain things that we can only picture in our minds. Occasionally, we are fortunate enough to actually be able to live out these fantasies. But more often than not, they remain just that: fantasies. Situations we conjure up inside our brains that never come to pass.

But let’s not go down this dour path. Instead, let’s celebrate our female muscle fandom by sharing what our personal “Female Muscle Holy Grail” is. I shall start with a few suggestions from my own personal playbook:

Holy Grail - Denise Masino — Denise clearly isn’t shy about showing off her greatest physical asset.

Giving Denise Masino cunnilingus

My love for Denise Masino should not be a surprise to anyone. She’s currently my favorite female bodybuilder of all time, mostly for reasons that have little to do with her actual record as a competitive bodybuilder. I wrote a blog post in which I expressed my love for Ms. Masino. I recommend you check it out when you have a spare moment.

Denise is famous (or is it infamous?) not just for her beauty, strength, charm, sexiness, confidence, muscularity, femininity, compassion, and spiritedness. She’s also renowned for what exists between her legs. Between her thick tree trunk legs, Denise boasts the most beautiful genitalia in the world. Think that’s a really bizarre thing to say? It is, but if you have an appreciation for the finer things in life, you’d understand.

For the record, Denise isn’t shy about showing off her most prized asset. In fact, she proudly displays it in most of the videos she produces for her website. She isn’t reticent about the fact she has a larger-than-normal clitoris, thick meaty labia, and a bright pink vagina that seemingly glistens at all times. She understands full well that there are plenty of guys and gals out there who adore her genitalia and can’t get enough of it. We crave it like it’s an addictive drug.

So this isn’t a weird thing to fantasize about. Nor do I think she’d be embarrassed to accidentally stumble upon this post and read about some random guy’s thoughts about it. Denise has made a steady income exploiting (or treating us to) her most famous physical trait. And I don’t judge her at all for it. If you got it, flaunt it. If you have a talent or asset that makes you money, by all means ride that donkey as far as you can. Thankfully for us, she does exactly that with a bright smile on her pretty face.

Being able to perform cunnilingus on Miss Masino would be a dream come true. Her clit is heavenly, one of the best in the world. It’s certainly one of the most famous in the world. Female muscle fans can dispute who possesses the “best” meat between her legs, but Denise should be on the top of everyone’s list – if such a list were to exist. If there ever comes a time when I can attain this Holy Grail of Female Muscle Fandom, I could die right then and there a happy man. I probably speak for many of you too.

Can you imagine spending hours feasting on Denise’s beautiful bits while listening to her passionate moans of orgasm? Music to our ears!

Holy Grail - Alina Popa — Queen Alina in prime form.

Touching Alina Popa’s entire body

Queen Alina is the Undisputed Goddess of Female Bodybuilding. She may not necessarily be my personal favorite, but she doesn’t have to be. Alina is a special breed of woman. Her charm, beauty, impressive muscularity, femininity, and accomplishments (both on stage and off stage) are second to none. She’s incredible.

What makes her noteworthy, however, is her remarkable muscle control. She can bounce her pecs, biceps, quads, and glutes like no one else. Her ability to completely isolate her individual muscles and flex them for the leering camera is unprecedented. If there’s someone else who can match her in this arena, please let me know!

Therefore, I’d love to touch every single inch of Alina’s gorgeous body. I want to feel her bicep peaks. I want to cup her glutes and squeeze them. I want to rub her quads, hamstrings, and calves with baby oil and see them shine brightly. I’d love to lay down in bed with the Queen and spend all evening worshiping her muscles. I’d take my time. No need to rush things. No need to hurry. This worship session should take as long as it needs to.

Which, ideally, would be a very, very long time.

Her pretty face. Her massive chest. Her broad back. Her meaty thighs. I’d ask her to flex each individual muscle and marvel at her keen ability to make them dance. “Alina’s Dancing Glutes” may not sound like a punk band you’d like to see in concert, but they’re definitely a sacred piece of flesh that deserves to be appreciated with divine reverence.

Witnessing her muscle control in person would alone be worth the price of admission. To be able to place my fingers onto her flawless physique would make that a once-in-a-lifetime bargain deal. Oh boy.

Holy Grail - Karen Zaremba — You can wash your entire wardrobe on Karen Zaremba’s abs.

Feeling Karen Zaremba’s abs

This Holy Grail fantasy is probably 10-15 years too late, but oh well. When my female muscle awakening began in 2005 (it actually started a few years before that, but this was when my interest in female bodybuilders skyrocketed), Karen Zaremba was one of the first women I discovered. I clearly remember the countless hours I spent sitting at my computer in my dorm room watching videos of Miss Zaremba strutting around in a bikini over and over again.

I made sure my roommate didn’t see what I was watching, of course. But I still managed to ensure my Karen Zaremba fandom remained prolific.

Other than her gorgeous face and heavenly bronzed physique, Karen is best known for her abdominal muscles. Wow! She didn’t have a six-pack. She had an eight-pack. Or a ten-pack. Or something like that. Yowza!

Karen was my first favorite FBB. Was it strange that she’s more than twenty years my senior? Probably, but that didn’t matter one iota. It is unusual for a teenage boy to be enamored with a woman in her 40s, but in the privacy of my own imagination, nothing is taboo. It was perfectly normal. As it should have been!

Miss Zaremba had abs that were the dictionary definition of “washboard.” You could clearly see the grooves between each individual muscle. You could pour a glass of water onto her stomach and the deep grooves of her abs would catch every drop of it.

I fantasized about being able to put my tongue in between those grooves and lick her abs to my heart’s delight. I still think about such things today, even though Karen has retired from bodybuilding and probably isn’t nearly as muscular anymore. Like I said earlier, this fantasy is a couple of decades too late, but never mind that. Karen will always remain a sentimental favorite of mine, no matter what she chooses to do with her life moving forward. I really like her and still do.

Holy Grail - Cindy Landolt — Cindy Landolt looking divine.

Making love to Cindy Landolt all night long

Oh Cindy. Cindy, Cindy, Cindy. The Muscle Goddess of Zurich is probably the most Beautiful Female Bodybuilder of All Time. She’s the total package. She’s not as large as Alina or as outwardly erotic as Denise, but she’s impeccably sculpted and as gorgeous as a supermodel.

Cindy speaks fluent English with an accent, which is something that lots of American guys find irresistibly hot. I don’t care which corner of the world she’s from or what language she speaks. Cindy is a flawless woman who redefines beauty. She’s a perfect “gateway” FBB who combines traditional femininity with nontraditional muscle mass. She can have crossover appeal for both guys (and gals) who love female bodybuilders and those who are still “FBB-skeptics.”

She doesn’t “look like a man” or a “manly woman.” She looks as feminine as that cute cheerleader you had a crush on in high school. She could be on the cover of fashion magazines and you wouldn’t blink – if not for her large muscles, that is. I think she has universal appeal. I’m guessing there are plenty of folks out there who would agree with me on that.

I fantasize about spending an entire evening with Miss Landolt in a secluded cabin somewhere deep in the mountains. After a tasty meal and drinking an entire bottle of champagne, we light up the fireplace and watch the amber glow fill the room. We kiss. We whisper. We eventually undress. We walk to the bedroom hand-in-hand. We turn off all the lights, silence our phones, and ignore the outside world for the next twelve hours. Nothing matters except for the two of us.

Moonlight romantically streams through the window. Perhaps it’s snowing lightly. The sky is peaceful. It is quiet everywhere. We crack open the window and let the dual sensations of cold air and heat from the fireplace greet out naked bodies. We then make love all night long. We consummate our love in every way imaginable. Maybe we make love for an hour, maybe three hours, maybe literally all night long.

We make love in bed, in the shower, downstairs next to the fireplace, on the staircase, perhaps even outside. It may be chilly, but the heat from our joining bodies cancels out any discomfort that would cause. She showcases for me her stamina, sexual appetite, and sensual imagination. I indulge in everything she desires to do together. It’s a night to remember, one neither of us will ever forget.

It’s pure bliss.

Holy Grail - Deidre Pagnanelli — Deidre slaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaying!

Stroking Deidre Pagnanelli’s gorgeous face

This is a fantasy that might also be a few years too late, but that’s totally irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that Deidre is still one of the most beautiful women on the planet. I’ve probably said that about at least a half dozen other women, but this time I mean it.

Maybe.

Deidre is a 40-something mother of four children – yes, you read that right – who was one of the hottest fitness models of the 90s. Oh wait, she’s still one of the hottest fitness models out there. My mistake. Deidre looks like a supermodel and carries herself like one too. Even if she weren’t muscular, she’d still be world famous. And deservedly so.

She possesses an absolutely gorgeous face. Stunning. Jaw-dropping. Mesmerizing. Captivating. Enthralling. Intoxicating. Her natural beauty is incomprehensible. It’s difficult to imagine how someone could actually be that beautiful. But she is. She’s so beautiful you cannot help but stop dead in your tracks when you see her. To see her is to reject everything you previously thought about female beauty. It’s not too often that you observe a woman who is so gorgeous your brain struggles to process it.

“Did I just see that? Is Deidre Pagnanelli a real person? Or is she an animated avatar that existed in some guy’s imagination?”

Nope. She’s real. She’s damn real. And we’re all better off for it.

If I were to be blessed with having an intimate moment with Deidre, I would definitely want to do all the activities that have been described previously. That goes without saying. But if I had to choose a unique “holy grail” activity to do with her, it would be to stroke her face.

Her cheek. Her jawline. Her mouth. Her lips. Her nose. Her eyelashes. Her forehead. I’d touch it all, in an effort to appreciate her aesthetic beauty in the most tactile way possible. It’s one thing to see it, it’s quite another thing to experience it.

Her divine beauty deserves to be tangibly acknowledged. To feel her flawless face is to be one step closer to Heaven. I’m still on earth (technically), but I might as well be in the Afterlife. Even in her 40s (she may be approaching her 50s!), Deidre has not lost any of her beauty. She isn’t “fading.” In fact, she’s getting more beautiful as time goes on. She’s aging better than most people – male and female alike – are realistically able to. Even if her face contains a few wrinkles and crow’s feet, they just add depth to her beauty. They tell us that no matter how old she gets, Deidre deserves a special place in our hearts.

To see her is to stare into the face of God. At this point, I don’t know if there’s much of a difference.

***

Alright, what’s your Female Muscle Holy Grail? Let me know in the comments below or send me an email at ryantakahashi87 (at) yahoo (dot) com. I’d love to hear from you and get this conversation going!

Truth or Dare (part one)

Twice a week, I get to see Shawna.

Shawna is a professional bodybuilder, personal trainer, model, fitness accessory spokeswoman, pornographic actress, and overall Muscle Goddess. I first got acquainted with Shawna at a fitness expo last year when she delivered the keynote address to a room full of hundreds of nutritional experts. I was among those in attendance on that fateful day.

Shawna is the Most Perfect Woman in the World…and I do not mean that lightly. She’s strikingly beautiful, stands at 6-feet tall barefoot, and has bigger muscles than the typical Meathead Bro you see at the gym. She has long blonde hair, ocean blue eyes, curvy hips, and bulging muscles covering every square inch of her incredible physique. She’s absolutely flawless. I don’t know how old she is, but she probably hasn’t hit 40 yet. Or maybe she has. I don’t know. None of that matters. She’s ageless.

I work for Healthy Living Nutrition, a medium-sized startup company that specializes in producing breakfast bars, protein shakes, and hot to-go meals that people can order via an app. Just download the HLN app and within minutes you can plan an entire month’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (not to mention a few snacks here and there).

The app allows users to plot out every single one of their meals in advance and have them shipped to the address (or addresses) of their choice. We began serving clients only in greater Seattle, but have recently expanded to include Spokane, Portland, Coeur d’Alene, Boise, and Redding. We foresee expansion to Los Angeles – which is considered the Holy Grail of markets – and Phoenix within the next two to three years.

But first, we needed a spokesperson who could sell our app to the bodybuilding community. We’ve already enlisted pro baseball, football, basketball, and tennis players, respectively. Now we need an “in” with bodybuilders, figure competitors, fitness models, and anyone who aspires to become one of those. When me and a colleague registered to attend this fitness conference, I knew Shawna could be that “foot in the door” that we so desperately needed.

And as it turned out, she was.

My co-worker Dale and I chatted with Shawna after the expo ended over glasses of wine and plates of cheap happy hour nachos. We told her she can use the app for free for an entire month, report back to us how she felt about it, and choose to endorse it if she wanted to. We told her the percentage of our profits that she can earn in a year, which appeared to go over well with her. She agreed to our deal, downloaded the app onto her phone, and went about her merry way. Dale and I felt happy about ourselves, all the while staring helplessly at her impressive, angelic muscular body.

“Holy shit, she’s perfect. She can’t possibly be human,” Dale quipped after she left.

“The amazing thing is that she is human,” I said. “She looks like that because she dedicates her entire life to looking like that. It didn’t happen by accident.”

“Damn,” Dale replied, downing the rest of his wine. “So fucking gorgeous.”

A month passes and Shawna emails me saying she loves the app and would be happy to endorse it in our upcoming advertising blitz. She signed her name on the dotted line and agreed to keep using the app for at least a year and appear in several promotional videos, radio hits, and social media posts. I got a promotion. Dale ended up leaving the company after being plucked by a competitor. His replacement ended up being a dopey idiot fresh out of college. Life moves on.

Factory where pre-packaged food is made.

Me being promoted meant I had to move to a different city. Now I reside in Santa Monica, right in the heart of where we want our business to expand to. I guess the logic is that if the company moves its best people into a desirable target market…eventually that’ll mean we will successfully penetrate that market. We’ll see if it actually works.

Shawna, coincidentally, also lives in the area – albeit Torrance. We’ve met up a few times to discuss business-related items, chat about our lives, and complain about the things regarding the fitness industry that drive us up a wall. As it turns out, we both hate everything Planet Fitness stands for and would love to see its business model burn to the ground. Great minds think alike, right?

My office is located within walking distance of the factory where we produce our breakfast bars. Every day we churn out tens of thousands of granola bars and ship them to gyms, grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations, and online retailers across the country. And occasionally, out of the 25,000 we produce daily, a good dozen or so will be “unfit” for sale.

What does “unfit” for sale mean exactly? It could mean a variety of things. A bar could accidentally get smashed, come out wrongly shaped, not fit within the designated packaging, or fall on the floor when a clumsy warehouse worker nears the end of his shift. Regardless, we normally toss out the “bad” bars so that the public doesn’t see them. We can’t allow our newly developed brand to be sullied in any way.

Sometimes, employees will steal a few bars that didn’t make the final cut when nobody is looking. There’s technically no internal rules against that, although the higher ups at Corporate would prefer these misshapen bars never see the light of day. Heaven forbid if a random guy on the street accidentally sees one of our breakfast bars with an unauthorized crack down the middle. That’ll spell our inevitable doom for sure.

Recently, I got the brilliant idea of delivering some of these misshapen bars to our favorite customer – Shawna. These bars don’t taste all that great, but they aren’t supposed to. They pack a nutritional punch, stuffing in every single vitamin and mineral known to mankind in a single bite. They’re supposed to help bodybuilders get “gains,” and that’s exactly what they do. Shawna recognizes and appreciates these benefits better than anyone. That’s why she’s our #1 spokeswoman.

Whew. Deep breath.

All of that is to say that twice a week, I come over to Shawna’s home and deliver to her as many “unfit” breakfast bars as I can manage. I usually visit on Tuesdays and Fridays, but sometimes I come on a Thursday if she plans on being busy the next day. I have no life, so it doesn’t matter to me when I get to meet her. No girlfriend, no kids, no hobbies, no nothing outside of work. It’s depressing, but I try to not think about it too often.

I should also hurry up and mention that because these bars are so super nutritious, they’re also super expensive. $8 per bar. Yeah, that’s quite a lot. But they’re supposed to supply an entire meal’s worth of nutrition in a few bites, so they’re pricy for a reason. The bean counters aren’t just making this up out of thin air. Shawna likes them a lot but can’t afford to purchase too many of them legitimately.

So, that’s where I come into play.

I give her free breakfast bars twice a week. Each delivery could be worth up to $100. That’s a lot of free stuff. Although, it’s not completely free.

Nope. She does pay me.

In sexual favors.

I usually arrive at her house between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m., depending on traffic (and, for the record, traffic really sucks in California). I park my car in her driveway, take out a non-conspicuous looking brown cardboard box out of the trunk, and casually walk to her front door. I knock three times. Within 30 seconds she opens it. We kiss each other on the cheek. We exchange pleasantries for a couple of minutes. Sometimes she offers me iced tea or lemonade. I graciously accept. I politely drink it all, whether I like it or not. She takes the box of contraband granola bars from me and stashes it away in her kitchen.

Then, she dims the lights, closes the shades, turns on some quiet music, and strips naked.

I also strip naked.

We enter her living room and begin the festivities. She poses for me. She shows off her muscles. She goes to the gym and trains five days a week, with Tuesday and Friday being her two off-days (hence, this is why I visit her on these days). She’s a Tall Blonde Muscle Goddess who stands – I believe I’ve said this before – 6-feet tall without shoes on. She’s a marvel to look at. From head to toe, she’s ripped. Completely ripped. Jacked up. Her biceps are larger than my legs. Her legs are larger than my torso. Her torso is larger than…a freight train? A Mack truck? A Boeing 747?

I touch her body. I sometimes rub oil on it. I worship her muscles. We almost never talk during our “play time.” I kiss her skin as she flexes. Occasionally, when she’s in the mood, she’ll lie down on the sofa and spread her legs wide, revealing her swollen clitoris.

It’s huge. HUGE. Three inches long when fully erect. That’s not a fucking joke. I’m not exaggerating one fucking bit. Her clit is that enormous. Unbelievably enormous. It defies science. And that’s an understatement.

Eye-popping. Jaw-dropping. Heart-stopping. And highly erotic.

After she spreads her legs, I get down on my knees and suck on it. I suck on it until she comes. She’ll come multiple times. At first, I was terrible at it. But after repeated attempts, I’ve become exceptionally good at it. Shawna’s coached me on how to properly give her cunnilingus. She explicitly tells me how to use my tongue, lips, and fingers to my advantage. Now, I can play her like a fiddle. I know how to give her pleasure that literally makes her scream.

Shawna could be a taller Lindsay Mulinazzi. Note: This story is fictional and does not reflect any real world experiences.

I know how to give her satisfying climaxes that make her entire body shudder. I know how to prolong her orgasm just long enough to make her beg me to finish the job. I know how to tease her, how to torture her, how to make her teeter just long enough on the edge of orgasm but deny her the conclusion she seeks. And once she does reach that orgasmic climax, it’s the greatest orgasm she’s ever experienced…up to that point, of course.

Once I’ve satisfied her, she enthusiastically returns the favor. Most of the time, she’ll give me a simple hand job. Occasionally, a blow job. But that’s it. Those are my two options. We’ve given each other oral and manual stimulation hundreds of times, but we’ve never had actual penetrative sex. She has strict boundaries, and I respect those boundaries.

I always respect her boundaries.

Although she’s not currently married (she’s been divorced twice before) and doesn’t appear to be in a relationship with anyone (that I can tell), she doesn’t want to cross that threshold with me. She says it’s not personal. It’s strictly a professional choice. I dutifully accept that explanation.

“In a weird way, this is a business transaction,” Shawna once said to me moments after cleaning up my semen off her neck. “An unconventional business transaction, but a business transaction nevertheless. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I would agree with that,” I replied.

So we’ve never had sex – at least, “sex” properly understood and traditionally defined. But we’ve been very intimate with each other. Many times. During the past year I’ve spent countless hours with her clitoris in my mouth. She’s had my semen smeared on almost every imaginable place of her magnificent body. Yet, we’ve never gone “all the way.” I don’t think we’ll ever get there.

Shawna is a unique kind of person, both externally and internally. She obviously looks different on the outside – not too many “normal” women have muscles as big as an NFL linebacker – in every conceivable way. But on the inside, she’s both open to talking about her life and extremely guarded in other areas.

For example, she rarely talks about her kids. During one moment when both of us were slightly drunk, she revealed that she has four kids. She first became pregnant when she was 15. Her second born arrived when she was 17. Her other two kids were born when she was 18 and 20, respectively. She’s now in her late 30s or early 40s, and her youngest child is now old enough to be a college student. Yikes.

The father of her first child was a 15-year-old kid just like her. He panicked, ran away from home, and later joined the Army. He was deployed to Iraq shortly afterward and came home in a body bag. Very tragic. The father of her second child was a Catholic missionary who apparently tried out the “missionary” position with her. That’s no joke. When she became pregnant and refused to have an abortion, he quit his job, renounced his Catholicism, and committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Yet another senseless tragedy.

Her other two children were the product of her first marriage. I don’t know much about this guy. She didn’t have any kids with her second husband. I also don’t know much about him.

Her first husband was 25 years her senior, and her second husband was born two weeks earlier than she was. She’s now single…and definitely not ready to mingle. She says she has no intention of getting married ever again.

I don’t know which of her kids are male and female. They could all be boys or they could all be girls. Or somewhere in between. It’s probably somewhere in between. But at the end of the day, I don’t know much about this part of her life. And that’ll probably be the way things remain.

As I pull up to her driveway for the umpteenth time, I think about whether or not her kids are aware of what Mom has to do in order to get her daily quota of protein, vitamins, and minerals. I’d rather not ponder that, but how can the thought not cross my mind?

I knock on the door and wait. The wait is shorter than normal.

“Hello sweetie! Come on in,” Shawna greets me after opening the door.

I step into her house and take off my shoes. I try to not notice the glaring hole in my left black sock, exposing my big toe for everyone to see. It’s embarrassing, but Shawna is like an old buddy to me. A buddy with big muscles. And the Universe’s Largest Clit.

Her house smells like freshly coated paint. I hope I don’t start to sneeze.

“Did you finally repaint the bathroom?”

“Yes, I did! Thank you for noticing,” she says. I drop a box full of contraband granola bars on the kitchen counter as Shawna deals with something in the dining room. Cleaning up after dinner, perhaps?

Shawna pokes her head in the kitchen with a glass of champagne in hand. “I have an idea for what we can do tonight. It’ll be fun. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“I’m sure I will. In the mood for something more creative?”

“Yes, I am,” she begins. “I’m feeling a bit adventurous tonight, for some odd reason. Probably because I’m still on cloud 9!”

“Oh? What happened to you?” We move our conversation to the living room. I start to undress like usual until Shawna places her hand on my shoulder, indicating I should stop.

“I just got cast in a movie! It’s not a major Hollywood film, but it’s not a typical porno either. It’s something low budget, independent, and artistic,” she announces.

“That’s awesome! What’s it called?” I kiss her on the cheek to congratulate her.

“It doesn’t have a title yet, but it should soon. It’s basically about a middle-aged couple whose marriage is going through the motions. In order to spice things up, they decide to play a game of erotic Truth or Dare.” Shawna sits us down on the sofa. Even when we’re both sitting, I still have to look up to her. “One of the dares the wife makes to the husband is to hire a female bodybuilder for a competitive wrestling match. You can guess who I play in this little drama.”

“Neat! You play the chauffeur, right?”

Shawna laughs. I do too.

“Not quite. We start filming in two months. Locally, so I don’t need to travel anywhere. However, in the meantime, I thought it would be a cool idea to play our own game of Truth or Dare. What say you?” She stares at me, smiling with a big toothy grin. I cannot think of a reason to refuse her offer.

“Of course! Let’s do it. You can go first if you’d like.”

Shawna sits up and blinks a few times. I feel my heart start to race, as this is a very unusual way for our evening to commence. We’ve settled into a routine. She clearly wants to break this routine, at least for one night.

“I would love to go first,” she says. “Alright. Truth or dare?”

“Dare.”

“Fantastic.” Shawna clears her throat. “I dare you to have anal sex with me. Without protection. Right now.”

Muscle Note: A Shinigami’s Greatest Gift to Mankind?

A Muscle Note. Whose names would you write in it?

“Hear this: I’m not only Kira, but I’m also God of the new world!”

Or so proclaims Light Yagami, the protagonist of the manga (and later anime) series “Death Note.” With the release of the American film version on Netflix happening not too long ago, it seems only appropriate to discuss a Death Note-inspired fantasy that every female muscle fan would love to see enacted in real life.

What if there existed a Muscle Note?

For those of you who need further background information, Death Note is a popular Japanese manga (or graphic novel) series written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. It was released between December 2003 and May 2006. The animated television series followed from October 2006 to June 2007. Shortly afterward it was dubbed into English and released in North America.

The plot is simple yet ingenious: From the realm of the spirit world, a Shinigami (or a God of Death) named Ryuk drops into the human world a black notebook known as a Death Note. The human who discovers this paranormal tool is named Light Yagami, an intelligent, popular, handsome, and – for the most part – normal high school student. The basic function of the Death Note is easy to understand: If you write the name of any person in the notebook, he or she will die. There are plenty of other finely tuned rules attached to it, but that’s pretty much all you need to know for now.

Eventually, Light tests it out and discovers that the notebook is no joke. It’s real. Its powers are genuine. Then, he gets the idea of killing off criminals who are either crowding the prison system or just simply deserve to die. Light imagines how much more “just” and peaceful the world could be if criminals could easily be “erased” with the literal stroke of a pen. The criminal justice system is too slow, corrupt, bureaucratic, and flawed to serve justice effectively. Fancying himself as the judge, jury, and executioner all in one, Light exhibits delusions of grandeur as he proudly proclaims that he will be the “God of the new world.”

If you are not already into Japanese anime, do not let that stop you from watching this epic 37-episode long TV series. It’s a compelling watch. You could actually waste an entire weekend binge watching it if you’re not careful. And odds are, you won’t regret it. I highly recommend it for everyone out there, even those of you who don’t normally like Asian animation shows. There are a few moments that unfortunately cross over into “immature” territory, but for the most part the series is intelligently written, briskly paced, and a joy to behold.

What if you could transform Gal Gadot into Aspen Rae?

But let’s spin this in a different direction. As alluded to earlier, what if instead of a Death Note, you stumbled upon by happenstance a Muscle Note? The functionality is essentially the same, except for one significant difference: By writing a person’s name in the notebook, you magically transform their bodies to become as muscular as you desire (within a certain limit).

Here are the rules of the Muscle Note:

The human whose name is written in this note shall experience enhanced muscular growth.
This note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
A number on a scale of 1 to 10 must be written next to the name to indicate the level of muscular growth that will occur. Failure to write a number will result in no change in his/her physical appearance. 1 means minimal muscle growth and 10 means maximum growth. Writing a number larger than 10 will not result in any additional growth beyond the threshold of 10.
The muscular growth will happen within 40 seconds of the name being written.
Muscle atrophy will result if the human does not take measures to maintain his/her muscle structure. Therefore, the enhanced muscle growth is not permanent.
The human whose name is written must be between the ages of 18 and 70. If he/she is older or younger than these parameters, no change in physical appearance shall occur.
If the paper on which the human’s name is written is burned, his/her body shall return back to its original state. Erasing the name is not sufficient.
The human who possesses the Muscle Note cannot use it for their own body.
The same human’s name can be written multiple times if the paper on which his/her name was previously written on is properly burned. Writing a different number will result in that human’s body adjusting accordingly.
No more than three humans can possess the Muscle Note at a time.
No human can lose possession of the Muscle Note unless a Kratos decides to take it away from him/her. A human can request to have the Muscle Note taken away from him/her. A Kratos is under no obligation to honor this request.
Humans who suffer from debilitating diseases or chronic physical disabilities and have their name written in the Muscle Note will not experience better health, only enhanced muscular development.

There are probably additional rules, but that’s enough for now. Also, just for your reference, a “Kratos” is named after the Greek god of strength, might, power, and sovereign rule. A Shinigami is a Japanese god of death, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to be distributing Muscle Notes to the human world. So there’s that.

So imagine you encounter such a notebook. Let’s say the Kratos who decides to drop it on your lap is named “Ryanuk.” He seems friendly enough. Sure, a bit frightening in appearance, but once you get used to him it becomes no big deal. Ryanuk unexpectedly visits you in your bedroom one fateful evening. He carefully introduces himself and explains the rules in detail. Nothing is left up to ambiguity. You thank him for this unrequested gift.

Alright. So now what?

Odds are, since you are unable to use it on yourself (sorry!) you have to use it on somebody else. Where do you begin? Do you “test” it out on somebody first, such as your best friend or a random classmate/officemate? Or do you dive in head-first and go for jugular by writing the name of a young lady you’ve had your eye on?

Oh, the possibilities! Perhaps that’s why the story of Death Note is so compelling. Not only are we watching Light Yagami make these sorts of decisions on the fly, we are also making them for ourselves. What would we do if we were in his shoes? How would we react if unforeseen stumbling blocks like the enigmatic detective “L” or an infatuated fan-girl like Misa Amane with the Shinigami Eyes were to hinder us from properly executing our larger plans? Could we evade capture for as long as he did, especially considering his own father is a police chief? The suspense built up by the plot has more to do with these endless “what if questions” versus presenting a series of boring and pointless action scenes.

Possessing a Muscle Note would present different questions, but equally intriguing questions – especially if you are a female muscle fan. The first question you’d be asking yourself would be:

“Who?”

Who would you choose to magically transform into a bodybuilder? Maybe you write the name of a girl you have a crush on. Or perhaps a famous celebrity like Gal Gadot or Ariana Grande. Or, of course, your best buddy who goes to the gym five days a week but still can’t get gains to save his life (he’s clearly not consuming enough protein). Regardless, you cannot use it on yourself. Sorry. Ryanuk does have his limits. Selfishness is not a virtue he shares.

Ryanuk also values realism. The peak muscularity a person can reach is that of a Mr. or Ms. Olympia (R.I.P.) competitor. He’s not a fan of “female muscle growth” fiction, so fantasies of transforming a person into a superhuman muscle freak with as much bulging flesh as the Michelin Man is not going to become a reality. So, writing a person’s name and the number “10” after it will result in him or her becoming really muscular, but not unreasonably so. If you were expecting anything more than that, you will be sadly disappointed.

A person who loves muscular women will no doubt feel giddy being in possession of such a supernatural tool. One can only imagine how he or she would utilize it. No doubt many of you have already fantasized about possessing such powers (although not necessarily in the form of a physical Muscle Note). It’s hard to not ponder such things when the supply of muscular women is as rare as a solar eclipse (when statistically compared to the entirety of humankind, that is).

Therefore, the candidates whose names would be written down in this notebook would probably include the following:

Real life crushes
Celebrities
Best friends
Athletes on your favorite teams
Enemies whom you would like to play tricks on
Complete strangers who would look more attractive with enhanced muscle mass

The list can probably go on from here, but you get the point. One does not simply possess a Muscle Note and not take full advantage of it. Especially when you might actually be doing some people a favor by using it. This is your opportunity to become a genuine humanitarian. Did that thought ever occur to you? Well, now it has.

Here’s what your first page of names might look like:

Katy Perry 7
Megan Fox 10
<Cute girl who works at Starbucks> 4
<Your wife/girlfriend> 3 (hey, you want her to look good, but not better than you!)
Nicki Minaj 9
Kim Kardashian 10
<Your favorite basketball player who could grab more rebounds if he were a bit stronger> 6
<Superstar athlete who plays for your hated rival> 1
<Idiot jock who bullies you at school> 1
Pamela Anderson 8 (for those of you who grew up in the 90s)
Scarlett Johansson 5
Gal Gadot 8
<Your boss whom you hate with a passion> 10 (just to see him/her freak out!)
<Your best buddy> 4
<That hot chick who jogs around your neighborhood> 9
Donald Trump 1

You delight after reviewing this list. Then you look at your watch for 40 seconds to pass. Then you check Twitter 10 minutes later to see who’s freaking out. And then you relish the fact you’re causing so much havoc on a global scale without standing up out of your chair.

Right, right. This is all fine and dandy. All of that being said, the second question you might ask yourself is this:

“Should I?”

Obviously, the taking of somebody’s life without their permission is an act of moral reprehension. We call it “murder” and it’s highly illegal for a reason. While making someone’s body more muscular isn’t nearly as morally repulsive as murdering them, there are still ethical considerations to be had.

Basically, is it ever right to do something to a person without their permission, no matter how trivial or “beneficial” it might be? Becoming stronger is almost always a benefit, but that’s irrelevant when we consider the question of personal sovereignty. Using the Muscle Note would be a violation of personal sovereignty, even though many of us dream of looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s. Think about how many 20-year-olds who dream of playing in the NFL or MLB or UFC could actually get there if someone (strategically) used the Muscle Note on their bodies. Obviously, one should not use it in drastic fashion – such as transforming someone with a “3” body into a “10” overnight – that could arouse suspicion. That would blow your cover and expose the existence of either a Muscle Note or a miracle drug that somehow snuck into the open market.

These folks are not who we’re talking about. Rather, we’re talking about a gorgeous supermodel who wakes up one morning and finds her physique transformed into Aleesha Young without her permission. That might bring joy to many of us, but that would bring feelings of horror to her. You don’t need to be the world’s most empathetic person to know that’s probably a bit unethical.

But let’s face it. Being the owner of a Muscle Note isn’t about ethics, philosophical values, or vague notions of empathy, compassion, or integrity. Instead, it’s about making your wildest dreams come true with the innocuous stroke of a pen. A Muscle Note is the greatest gift to mankind because it can be used to improve people’s lives, not end it. Yet, one cannot help but think about the grave ramifications of using it on a large scale. Could it instigate a worldwide panic much like Kira did in Death Note? Perhaps. Or it could go unnoticed if it’s used modestly.

Yet, wouldn’t this sort of “cheapen” what it would mean to become a muscular person? Bodybuilders, both men and women, earn their impressive physiques through hard labor, perseverance, strategic planning, forethought, and mental toughness. If you could magically transform someone into a bodybuilder in less than a minute, wouldn’t that person lack a certain level of intrigue?

Many of us love female bodybuilders partly because we are turned on by how difficult it is to be one. Those of us who have participated in a muscle worship or wrestling session with a muscular woman deeply appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that must have been shed during her journey of achieving such muscularity. We love them not only because their bodies are beautiful; but also because we respect what they’ve chosen to do with their lives. They’ve elected to lead an unorthodox life in pursuit of a physical aesthetic that is not only untraditional but supremely difficult to reach.

One cannot rest on their laurels and still be a bodybuilder. Muscles eventually recede if they are not probably maintained. Thus, being a bodybuilder is like climbing a mountain that has no summit. Even when you reach the top, you still have to labor in order to stay at the top. It’s like reaching the peak of Mount Everest and still having to work in order to stay there. You can’t stop to smell the roses. If you do, you will start to slip further and further downhill. What a cruel thing the human body can be at times.

Or Scarlett Johansson into Shannon Courtney?

But a Muscle Note is one way of bypassing all those scientific rules. With a Muscle Note at your disposal, you can reach the top of Mount Everest and stay there for as long as you want without lifting a finger. Seriously. Just keep that pen handy at all times. That’s all it takes.

Yes, that does cheapen what it means to be hypermuscular. But if we’re just using it for fetishistic ends, the philosophical/ethical considerations are a moot point. If you want your girlfriend to look like Minna Pajulahti for one night only, you can do that by writing her name in the Muscle Note and burning it after you’re done “playing” with her in her temporary costume. So on a crude level a Muscle Note only exists to fulfill our primal sexual fantasies. Oh great. Nothing more, nothing less.

But isn’t that the point of Death Note to begin with? Human beings cannot be trusted with supernatural powers because inevitably people will use it for destructive means, even if their intentions are good and noble at the beginning. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the old saying goes. No person should ever have that much power because no person will ever know how to control it. Eventually, power will control you. History has taught us that lesson repeatedly. The real tragedy is that we fail to learn it.

Perhaps this means a Muscle Note is not actually the greatest gift to mankind from the spirit world. No matter how “innocent” our fantasies might originally be, one can never anticipate which road our behavior will go. Will we choose the honorable path, or will we be completely consumed by our own greed and carnal desires that we abuse our powers to the detriment of others?

We can promise that we’d use the Muscle Note to help people like victims of polio, aspiring athletes who come from poor families that could earn riches beyond their wildest dreams, insecure people who could gain considerable self-esteem, and all sorts of individuals suffering from debilitating diseases. Yet, we all know how supernatural powers are usually put to use: to punish people we don’t like or to indulge in our own greediness.

You can guess which path most of us would probably take. Be honest with yourself. You know you’d go crazy and use it for purely selfish means.

And that would be wrong. Yet unquestionably enthralling. And arousing. Oh, the possibilities…

Humans are so interesting, indeed.

Nostalgic for Naughtiness

An old issue of Women’s Physique World featuring Shelley Beattie and Sharon Bruneau.

Every man who was once a teenage boy with raging hormones should be able to identify with this scenario:

You borrow a copy of a dirty magazine from a buddy at school. Or you steal it from a grocery store with the stealth skills of a Special Ops commander. Or you’re lucky enough to stumble upon an old issue of Playboy or Hustler sitting in a garbage can or recycling bin. No matter how you acquire said dirty magazine, it’s a prized possession that you will guard with your life.

Your brothers and sisters cannot know about it. Your parents especially cannot know about it. So it must be kept a secret from prying eyes, forever fated to be stuffed in your sock drawer or underneath your mattress. The only time you can look at it is at night under the cover of darkness. Bring it to school and you risk one of your teachers discovering it, confiscating it, and telling Mom or Dad about it. Talk about bad news. Can’t possibly risk that. No bloody way.

But what’s in that dirty magazine that’s so damn intriguing? It’s simple: Beautiful girls wearing very little (or no) clothing. Just a few short years ago, girls were disgusting creatures who were annoying, bad at sports, and had different hobbies than you. Today, it’s a whole different story. Girls are enigmatic creatures who make you feel wiggly inside. You cannot help but stare at the ones who were the prettiest or had the shapeliest bodies. And you definitely struggle to stop staring at the ones with big boobs. Oh boy…

But your magazine offers a special glimpse that you cannot possibly have while sitting in math class. Your treasured magazine shows you a whole new side of the female species that you’ve only just begun to discover. You finally get to see what a pair of breasts look like. You finally learn why Dad married Mom in the first place. And, you finally find out what girls have between their legs that you don’t.

This scenario should be especially familiar with those of you who are older than 30. However, as the Internet Age rolled around, teenage boys don’t have to sneak dirty magazines into their bedrooms in order to get their “fix.” Pictures of gorgeous naked women are only a simple Google search away (not to mention a furious effort to delete one’s browsing history before Grandma next uses the family computer). So as time goes on, one presumes this familiar scenario will become less familiar.

Will you accept this rose from Raye Hollitt?

Nevertheless, for those of us who love female bodybuilders, there’s an added dimension to our story of how we discovered what turns us on. In addition to conventionally beautiful lingerie and fashion models, we were also introduced to pretty women who sported a bit more muscle mass than usual. So not only were we smuggling copies of Playboy into our coat closets, we were also sneaking in contraband fitness and weightlifting magazines.

Sure, the majority of those publications featured big burly men. But on occasion, we got to feast our eyes on ladies with big burly muscles.

Oh baby.

In today’s modern world in which everything you can possibly think of can now be accessed through the Internet, it’s becoming easier and easier to indulge in your vices in complete privacy. Private web browsing has been a helpful tool in hiding your fetishes from anyone who also happens to use your computer. Granted, you still need to be cautious when you’re at work, but when you’re sitting at home you can be as freaky as you want to be without a single soul knowing about it.

Yet, with all this erotic material readily available at your fingertips, doesn’t it seem like the “old days” were a bit more, how shall we say it, “naughty?”

What is meant by that is the general feeling that back in the days when images of beautiful muscular women were rare, the few opportunities we got to feast our eyes on them seemed much more exciting than they do now. Today, we can easily scroll through hundreds of female bodybuilders, fitness models, and athletes on Instagram, Tumblr blogs, and fan websites without breaking a sweat. No need to sneak in magazines underneath your Mom’s watchful eye. No fear of Dad finding out. Also, no need to research where you can find these photos, which in our youth we treated as precious commodities like gold, diamonds, and crude oil.

With search engines and social media making our beloved ladies more easily available than ever before, why do simple Google searches fail to send that same tingling sensation down our spines that peering through old photos of Rachel McLish late at night in our bedrooms once did? Is it because we’re older and more accustomed to seeing photos of gorgeous muscular women, or is it something deeper?

Let’s explore the latter. It is not beyond comprehension that part of the reason why our adolescent brains were kicking into overdrive was because, well, the clichéd phrase “raging hormones” exists for a reason. So is it fair to say that as we get older our hormones get more under control, thus we become less fanatical in our desire to ogle beautiful women? Maybe, but that doesn’t appear to be the only answer. For the female muscle enthusiasts out there, another explanation must cover the territory of the “forbidden fruit.”

As if peering at photos of beautiful women weren’t scandalous (relatively speaking) enough, being turned on by photos of muscular beautiful women is a whole other story. Now we’re crossing into “weird” ground, not just “scandalous.” It’s not embarrassing to admit you’d like to tap Pamela Anderson (especially if you grew up in the 90s), but it would definitely raise a few eyebrows if you declare proudly that you’d also like to screw Kim Chizevsky. Especially if the people you were with knew who Kim is and what she looks like.

Talk about awkward.

But awkwardness is exactly the point. We’re embarrassed because we don’t want others to find out about our attraction to female bodybuilders, but we’re also somewhat embarrassed for our own sake. We start to wonder if something is wrong with us. We ask questions such as: Am I normal? Am I secretly gay? Why don’t more people feel the same way as I do?

But even those questions are starting to diminish. The Internet has played an integral role in breaking down almost every social taboo you can think of. You can easily locate like-minded individuals who are into the same “unusual” stuff as you. Do you enjoy drawing Game of Thrones fan art? Or writing Harry Potter fan fiction? Or immersing yourself into “Furry” culture (don’t look it up if you aren’t prepared to truly find out what it is)? Well, finding other people who are into the same things as you has never been easier. This is quite a blessing, especially if you are prone to wondering whether if you’re alone in the Universe. Odds are you are not.

The same goes for female muscle fetishism. For all its flaws, Saradas.com is a popular forum for discussing and sharing content related to female bodybuilding, sessions, fantasy wrestling, and the like. You can easily connect and communicate with people all across the globe who enjoy the same female muscle-related activities as you. This level of connectivity with souls spread around the planet is unprecedented. Yet here we are. What a time to be alive.

However, despite the ease of which we can access photos/videos of muscular women and meet people who share our common interests, why does it seem like (to repeat the question articulated earlier) the old days were much naughtier? Maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but it’s not beyond the stretch of the imagination to say that once something becomes mainstream, it starts to lose a little bit of its juice. Granted, female bodybuilding is still (and probably never will be) not considered mainstream, but within the world of Internet subcultures, anything can be mainstream if you look in the right places. What’s the deal here?

The best explanation has to be the fact that before the Internet existed, most of us truly didn’t know if other people felt the same way about female bodybuilders as we did. Before Google allowed us to discover information faster and easier than before, we had no idea how many other people (if any at all) shared our fascination with them. It’s not just loneliness. It’s the fear that nobody else is crazy enough to get turned on by a woman with big muscles. And if that’s the case, isn’t the next logical conclusion that there must be something “off” about us?

Hence, our uncontrollable and unexplainable attraction to female muscle felt supremely naughty. And not just naughty in a moral sense, but also in a psychological sense. We didn’t know if our brains were working properly. That’s taking naughtiness to a whole new level.

The other explanation is the supply of female muscle-related media. Back in the pre-Internet age, our exposure to FBBs was limited to magazines, bodybuilding contests on television, and your old dusty VHS copy of “Pumping Iron II: The Women.” That’s about it. So the few instances in which we could find new photos of female bodybuilders were few and far between.

That made the experience all the more exciting. The rare occurrence when we could get our sweaty hands on a brand new issue of the latest fitness magazine seemed like a quasi-religious experience. It was as if we had found a Golden Ticket in our recently purchased Wonka Bar. We felt as giddy as if it were Christmas morning. But instead of a new bicycle or autographed football, it was a magazine chock full of images of powerful women with bulging biceps and massive quads. Hell, this beats the experience of tearing up presents underneath the decorated tree by a mile!

Back when the product is scarce, we appreciated it more. Now that the product is available in abundance, you’d think we would appreciate it more, but we don’t. Ironically, an overabundance of the product actually ends up making us appreciate it less. Thirty years ago, we had to risk life and limb to sneak a copy of a bodybuilding magazine into our rooms without our parents detecting it. Today, we can skim through endless Instagram feeds of scantily clad female bodybuilders, athletes, and fitness models with our only concern being whether we’ll run out of battery power.

This is a good thing, right? Of course it is. But human nature being what it is, we can’t help but sense a diminished sense of giddiness living in today’s media-saturated environment. Our love for female bodybuilders seems cheap. Easy. Casual. Maybe not mainstream, but certainly less-out-of-the-ordinary-than-before. Female muscle fetishism has lost some of its naughtiness. What should we make of this?

Well, not much. But this does provide a valuable lesson about the relationship between cultural acceptance and modern communications technology.

People tend to react viscerally to things that are unusual, even if they aren’t necessarily “weird.” Unusual is simply anything that is not usual. But the more common it becomes, the less unusual it is, and the more “normal” it seems. This is not rocket science. This simple observation is also true for female muscle and our reaction to it. We think it’s strange to see women with big muscles precisely because women with big muscles are rare. But as our definition of “mainstream” starts to veer away from legacy corporate advertising and toward more grassroots-based media, the doors to almost anything will swing wide open.

The list goes on regarding things you once never saw but now can see whenever you feel like it: Plus-sized models, South Korean soap operas, documentaries about dwarfs (not the Lord of the Rings kind), Bollywood movies, Japanese pop music, Australian rugby matches, Brazilian cooking shows, cosplay conventions, Facebook groups for people who identify as “Gender Non-Conforming,” and so on. And yes, this includes photos, videos, blogs, and communities dedicated to female muscle. Almost anything you can think of is out there for public consumption.

An iconic female bodybuilder, Rachel McLish.

You just have to know where to look for it. Because not all of it will appear right under your nose when you least expect it.

Maybe this is why our love for female bodybuilders seems less naughty in today’s world than it did in yesteryear’s world. It’s not mainstream in the traditional sense of the word, but the very concept of “mainstream” is being challenged like never before. The Internet has allowed for the proliferation of subcultures and subcultures within subcultures to meet and convene in ways that were unimaginable even twenty years ago. And that’s not a long time ago, in relative terms.

Hence, we may be reaching – or have already reached – the point where the familiar scenario outlined in the beginning of this article will no longer be familiar to the younger generation. Those of us in our late 20s and early 30s might be the last cohort who remembers sneaking dirty magazines into our bedrooms. Today, this is a thing of the past. Those days are over. Everything we love is now digitalized. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only time will tell.

Laurie Noack Gibson by the swimming pool. Want to jump in?

But what we can conclude is that for lovers of female muscle, this is a fantastic cultural development. Our access to beautiful muscular women has reached unprecedented levels. Well, actually, our access to anything you can possibly think of has reached unprecedented levels. As much as this can be a cause for celebration and popping the champagne corks, there is something tangible that’s been lost. That rush of adrenaline we all felt when we were scared out of our wits about being caught with muscle magazines has now been replaced with remembering to delete your browsing history. Ho hum. Boring!

Or is it? Is feeling naughty – and by extension, guilty – really a positive thing? Or does it only serve to suppress our natural desires and keep us shackled to society’s stringent standards? The answer to this is impossible to fully know, and perhaps we’re just being prisoners of nostalgia. We want the next generation to experience the same things we did when we were younger…for no other reason than we enjoyed it.

But will they? Maybe all this sneaking around wasn’t healthy at all and that society will actually benefit from being more open about sexual attraction, desire, and impulses. In this case, we should applaud the trends we’re currently witnessing.

But one suspects that being naughty, no matter what form that takes, will always be with us. And if that’s the case, does it matter how crotchety old fogies like us think about it?

Gym Bros, Reluctant Girlfriends, and Human Clay

I’d love to have someone who looks like Michele Levesque as my girlfriend. But at what cost?

At the gym where I frequently workout, I often see a sight that I’m pretty sure many of you can also recognize.

I see a huge Gym Bro who looks like he spends way too much of his free time lifting weights and avoiding cardio (not to mention Leg Day) drag his girlfriend (or wife) to the gym with him. She may or may not be in shape. She may or may not even want to be there. Perhaps she’d rather be at home watching reruns of The Bachelorette or reading a book. Or going out to drinks with her friends. Or going to the gym, but not five times a week.

Gym Bro clearly loves working out. You can see it in his huge arms, enormous chest, and cocky strut. The Reluctant Girlfriend of Gym Bro is a different matter. She could be skinny, a bit overweight, or perhaps quite obese. But the body type she isn’t is “muscular.” And you can tell, whether he is willing to admit it or not, that he’d love it for her to become as muscular as he is.

He teaches her how to deadlift, squat, bench press, and shoulder press. She does as she’s told, but you can tell she does it with little enthusiasm. When she uses improper form, he lashes out, or at the very least aggressively tries to correct her “errors.” Not wanting to upset him further, she does her best to please him. It’s a sad sight to see. It’s pathetic. You feel sorry for her and secretly desire to punch him in the face.

I could very well be misinterpreting this situation, or maybe I’m spot on. I don’t see this all the time, but it happens enough that I feel compelled to write about it. Long story short, Gym Bro secretly – or not so secretly – wants his girlfriend to look a certain way. He thinks she’s too skinny, too fat, or too average. Regardless, he wants her to bulk up. He wants her to look like Michele Levesque, even if she has no desire herself to look like that. For those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, Michele is a gorgeous fitness model who possesses the ideal look: she’s fit, unquestionably feminine, as gorgeous as a supermodel, and has built enough muscle to turn people’s heads – but not so much muscle that she upstages the man she’s with.

Our friend the Gym Bro understands that women who look like Miss Levesque, Julie Germaine, Autumn Cleveland, Lauranda Nall, and Sheronica Sade Henton don’t just grow on trees. They are far from a dime a dozen. They are a one-in-a-million rare specimen that must be treasured because they are few and far between. However, Gym Bro secretly dreams about possessing a girlfriend with such a treasured physique…and will not sit around idly and wait for it to happen.

Therefore, he must take matters into his own hands. Even if that requires “forcing” his girlfriend to put a pair of dumbbells into her hands.

Thus, he nudges her in the direction of bulking up like him. He tells her it’s a healthy choice. He reassures her she won’t start “looking like a man.” He insists she’ll develop more confidence, curves in all the right places, and unsolicited compliments from complete strangers (naturally, the flattering kinds of compliments, not the creepy ones). She sort of goes along with it. After all, she wants to spend quality time with her boyfriend, right? Who wouldn’t?

She goes to the gym whenever he goes to the gym. They lift together. He “trains” her and cheers her on. He gives out advice as if it were candied apples on Halloween. She learns how to lift. She’s taught the proper form, breathing techniques, and recovery methods. He makes post-workout protein shakes for the both of them. She begrudgingly drinks it every single time. Maybe she likes the taste, maybe she doesn’t. But it’s all to keep their relationship intact, so it must be worth it.

If this scenario doesn’t seem familiar to you, don’t worry. Sooner or later you’ll witness something like this up close. And it’ll make you squirm. Or at the very least, feel sorry for her and all involved. You might start to ask yourself whether this behavior crosses into the territory of abuse. Does it? You sure hope not, but how can these thoughts not come to mind?

Sheronica Sade Henton showing off her hard work.

Essentially, Gym Bro wants his Reluctant Girlfriend to become Human Clay. He wants to sculpt her into becoming a Perfect Muscle Goddess who will fulfill his every lustful carnal desire. He wants her to become an Amazon, a strong confident young woman who takes life by the horns and never relents in pursuing her goals. He wants the ultimate arm candy. He wants a sexy flesh-and-blood trophy he can call his own and show off to his fellow gym bros.

Meanwhile, you get the sense she doesn’t really want to do this. She’s all for living a healthy life and looking good, but is it worth the soreness and agony of going to the gym all the damn time? It goes without saying that one does not simply become a Muscle Goddess overnight. Nor does it happen by accident. You only look like Cindy Landolt if you put in the effort to look like Cindy Landolt. If you don’t want to look like her, then you won’t ever look like her. It’s as simple as that.

The scenario described above troubles me. But unfortunately, I see it – and hear about it – all too often. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening to see. But alas, it’s quite common. When you start to “force” somebody to do something they don’t actually want to do, that’s problematic.

As I’ve written before countless times, I love muscular women. But I would never pressure my significant other to ever become a muscular woman unless she genuinely wanted to become one. And if that were to happen, I’d enthusiastically support her 100%. But if not, I’d understand completely.

It’s perfectly natural for straight guys to be attracted to muscular women. It happens more frequently than a lot of us are aware of. And it’s also understandable why many of us dream about having a muscular girlfriend. Who wouldn’t want to come home every night after a long day of work to a woman who looks like Minna Pajulahti? I know I would!

And you can share a bed with her every f*****g day? Count me in!

So the awfully awkward situation where guys start to treat their girlfriends like Human Clay seems sort of inevitable. Isn’t that the logical next step? Isn’t this just a natural progression for anyone who appreciates fit women? Well, no. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I fully believe that a woman has every right to pursue bodybuilding and fitness if they choose to do so. Many women find participating in the sport empowering, uplifting, and worthwhile. Yes, it’s a cliché to use the word “empower” when we’re dealing with women and their physical appearance, but clichés are formed for a reason. For many women, bodybuilding has helped them deal with trauma, overcome emotional obstacles, and provide them with a renewed sense of purpose. The list of benefits goes on.

Who wouldn’t want to come home every night to a woman who looks just like Cindy Landolt?

However, women also have the right to not pursue bodybuilding if such a lifestyle does not totally appeal to them. This seems obvious, yet this is not really at the heart of the problem. I don’t think too many women are forced to lift weights at the gym at gunpoint. But pressure (both overt and subtle) from a loved one can be just as coercive. The desire to please your partner will drive people to do almost anything. The same goes for the fear of losing a loved one – and by “losing,” I mean that person choosing to find a different lover, not death.

I understand why a guy would want a sexy muscle goddess for a girlfriend. Trust me, I daydream about this all the time! But, I’d like to think I would never cross that line and pressure my better half to torture herself at the gym just because I want the shape of her body to be more pleasing to my eye. But this is not about me being “holier than thou.” All I want to do is send a warning to those of you who might (or already have) cross that line, either intentionally or unintentionally.

There’s nothing malicious about wanting your partner to look and feel healthy. After all, don’t we all want to be with our loved ones for as long as possible? Of course we do. But this goes deeper than that. This is about the ethics of female muscle fandom. This is about being a decent human being.

No person is Human Clay. No person should ever feel obliged to do anything against their will for any reason whatsoever. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a muscular girlfriend. It’s quite another thing to use coercive measures to make that dream come true. Even if you’re a Gym Bro who thinks they have good intentions at heart, odds are not everyone around you will agree. Being a Reluctant Girlfriend is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Of course you want to look fabulous and sexy. But what are you willing to sacrifice in order to do that? And who is allowed to define what “fabulous and sexy” even means?

If I could snap my fingers and magically make a Sexy Powerful Muscle Goddess appear right before my very eyes, I wouldn’t think twice about doing it. But alas we don’t live in a universe where such miracles are possible. While it never hurts to dream, it can hurt the ones we love if we bully them into fulfilling our dreams – regardless if such a thing is even feasible in the first place.

At the end of the day, the awkward relationship between Gym Bro and Reluctant Girlfriend is probably never going to go away. It will always be here with us until the world comes to an end. Or until we discover a secret potion that miraculously transforms a humble bumpkin into Muscle Cinderella. If that ever happens, instead of a glass slipper, would the Handsome Prince go around town seeing whose torso is muscular enough to handle a weightlifting belt that was left behind?

In conclusion, we all want Cindy Landolt to be our girlfriend. But women who actually look like her are not so common. So accept that. Understand that we can’t always get what we want, just like The Rolling Stones once reminded us. But, as they also remind us, we get what we need:

A loving companion who joyfully goes to the gym with you but doesn’t want to lift super heavy. It may not fulfill all your dirty desires, but it’s much more realistic. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

The lesson to be learned is this: don’t pressure her to be a bodybuilder. Let her get her workout in, kiss her on the cheek, and tell her “I love you the way you are.” And if she’d rather stay at home and play Candy Crush Saga while you’re across town busting your tail at the squat rack, let her…even if you’d rather watch her bust her tail while jealous onlookers stare at you with envy in their hearts.

Let her be who she wants to be. Period.

That is how you live happily ever after.

This is the Moment When She is at the Peak of Her Power

Tina Nguyen is at her most powerful right here.

She stares straight ahead, her gaze can pierce through your soul. She’s exhausted. She’s fatigued. She’s determined. She’s ready.

With 65-pound dumbbells in each hand, hanging casually next to her hips, she takes in a deep breath and regards herself in the mirror – not out of vanity, but out of a concern for maintaining proper form and technique. She’s a professional in mind and spirit, though not in livelihood (yet).

With astonishing confidence, grace, and strength, she lifts one dumbbell up to her chest, the cold metal barely grazing her collarbone. She exhales and slowly lowers the heavy weight back to her side, returning it perfectly to where it previously was. Then she lifts the other dumbbell upward in the exact same manner, this time her other collarbone experiences the unforgiving touch of the frosty iron. All the while, curious onlookers can see large veins running down her hardened biceps as she powers through these lifts. It seems like with each repetition, the veins get more pronounced as her biceps grow larger and larger.

The blood rushing into her arms coincides with the blood rushing into the private areas of the males in close proximity. They are unable to concentrate on their own workouts because they are too distracted by hers.

But none of them would have it any other way.

Oh boy. Have you ever experienced a scenario similar to this? I know I have. Maybe not at my local gym – though there have been a few isolated incidents – but certainly while watching Internet videos of female bodybuilders lifting heavy weights. If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing such a beautiful phenomenon in recent days, drop whatever you are doing and conduct a few Google searches to whet your starving appetite.

For people who love female bodybuilders, athletes, weightlifters, and fitness models, there are few things that turn us on more than to watch our beloved ladies grind at the gym. Glamour photoshoots behind a pristine white backdrop are fine. So are professionally-done photo sessions taken on an immaculate white sandy beach. But few pieces of media can seriously contend with a video (even if it’s grainy and shot on an iPhone) that showcases a muscular woman laboring hard to become – or remain – a muscular woman.

Indeed, workout videos are our porn. This is nothing new. There already exists a blog post exploring this topic. However, what deserves further examination is a specific moment in these videos that particularly makes our hearts leap out of our chests:

The moment of muscle peak.

This is probably best exemplified in the above example of a female bodybuilder doing bicep curls. But it’s even more evident when she’s doing preacher curls. Preacher curls are, in case you are not familiar with exercise jargon – isolation lifts in which you place your arms against an incline bench (or pad) and lift either a barbell or dumbbell upward toward your chest, targeting specifically your biceps. Visually speaking, preacher curls make for excellent video fodder because you can noticeably see the participant’s biceps swelling up as he or she completes the lift.

When we see a muscle-bound woman’s face strain as she struggles to finish the final repetition of her grueling set, it’s difficult to watch this with zero physical reaction. How can your pulse not start to race, your heart beat a little faster, and blood not rush to your groin? I’d stop being such an adamant female muscle lover if such reactions ceased to take place inside me.

It is at this moment when her biceps are at its largest. “The Moment of Muscle Peak” is so arousing because it symbolizes in a single still frame why we love female bodybuilders so much: They had to earn their gorgeous muscles through hard work and hard work only. No shortcuts, no underserving gains, and certainly no free passes. She didn’t earn her muscles by paying a plastic surgeon to implant them underneath her skin. She may take drugs, but drugs alone do not produce large muscle mass. That only comes from expending sweat, energy, and burning more calories than some of us consume.

Here is the video that inspired me to write this post. It shows world-renowned Swiss female bodybuilder Jay Fuchs doing preacher curls at the gym. Follow her (or periodically revisit) her Instagram account if you don’t already. She completes a few repetitions of preacher curls with her left arm. We see the veins pop out of her skin. We see her bicep grow to its largest possible size. We see it expand and contract. We witness how tired she must be. We empathize with her struggle and admire how she is able to persevere through it. But we also notice how beautifully her bicep “jumps” up as she squeezes the dumbbell close to her chest. It’s as though it’s going to burst open. We are amazed how her skin is able to physically contain so much swollen flesh.

But alas, her muscles are able to expand and contract without her skin peeling open. What a miracle! After she is done with her set, she drops the dumbbell on the floor and flexes for her audience. We now see, in a classic sequence, the simple dynamic of “cause and effect.” We see her lifting weights at the gym. And now we see the results of her years of hard work!

How Miss Fuchs transformed herself into an Angelic Muscle Goddess isn’t a mystery. It’s not a secret. There’s no magic potion that made it happen. It’s all out in the open. The ways and means are as simple as it gets: Hard work, hard work, and more hard work. She has nothing to hide. She also has everything to gain. So do we.

Jay Fuch’s social media feed, as well as the feeds of hundreds of other beautiful muscular women around the globe, provides a simple yet provocatively arousing look into why some men love muscular women so damn much. “The Moment of Muscle Peak” isn’t just confined to when her muscles are actually at its largest. It’s the exact moment (or moments) when you symbolically get to witness what it is that separates a muscular woman from a “normal looking” woman. It’s the moment when it stops being all fun and games and, as the colloquialism goes, “shit gets real.”

Maybe it’s when Minna Pajulahti is attempting an impressive single deadlift. Or when Lisa Cross finishes her last squat. Perhaps it’s seeing Theresa Ivancik grunt her way toward completing a set of shoulder presses. Or seeing a female Olympic sprinter cross the finish line. Or a lady CrossFit athlete climbing up and down a rope.

It’s the moment when she’s at the peak of her power. When she’s actively doing the hard work necessary to transform herself into a better version of herself. It’s not for show. She’s not showing off for the camera or trying to put on a performance. She doesn’t care if she’s wearing makeup or if she looks “camera ready.” All of that is inconsequential nonsense. The only thing on her mind is finishing her set, breathing steadily, and moving on to the next lift. The rest will take care of itself. She doesn’t care one iota if her hair is unkempt or if she doesn’t quite look like a polished supermodel. After all, when you have muscles that big…who has the right to criticize you?

The Moment of Muscle Peak is when she is at her most unstoppable. It’s when we are helpless to do anything else but witness “true beauty” in action. Unlike a boring and passive Sleeping Beauty, a female bodybuilder busting her tail at the gym is a Wide Awake Muscle Queen Who Refuses to Take Shortcuts and Deserves Her Accolades. She ain’t no princess, sweetheart. She isn’t even a queen, despite the idiomatic expression. Instead, she’s a peasant. She’s Cinderella without the Fairy Godmother granting her temporary “princess status” until the clock strikes midnight.

She’s so damn beautiful because she’s a peasant who earned her regal status not by merely wearing a tiara, but by building up so much muscle on her body that you can’t help but mindlessly stare at her while you struggle to pick up your jaw off the floor.

The biceps on Monique Jones are enough to give me a heart attack.

A female bodybuilder isn’t at her most powerful when she’s got some hapless guy in a headlock or a scissor hold. Nor is she at the height of her authority when she has someone tied to a bed while she squeezes his balls until he begs her to stop. That is, in my humble opinion, a somewhat superficial form of expressing one’s power. Rather, she’s at the height of her power when she’s all alone in the weight room, with sweat dripping down her face, struggling to finish that one final rep before she can’t handle it anymore. Afterward, as she’s breathing hard like a racehorse and chugging down water to help her recover, she’s at her weakest. But in her weakness she finds her strength. She punishes her body so that it can emerge even more powerful than before. She’s drained of her energy for now, but not for very long. Eventually, she’ll refuel and rest up to the point where she can do it all again…this time harder and more strenuously than before.

Female bodybuilders are lone wolves. They aren’t lonely by choice, rather it’s a byproduct of the life they’ve chosen to lead. More often than not, her workouts are not made public. A short 30-second video clip posted on YouTube or Instagram doesn’t do justice to her full training regimen. It’s not even a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the time she’s all alone at the gym (or at least, she’s all alone in her own personal bubble) away from smartphone cameras or preying eyes. She grinds away for several hours a week in the privacy of her own little world. She spends an inordinate amount of time cooking unglamorous food that tastes the same but plays a crucial role in helping her build muscle mass. She’s constantly reading up on supplementation tips and making valuable contacts – both in-person and online – who can help her succeed at her dream of living life as a bodybuilder.

These lone wolves do have their moment in the spotlight, however. They do compete in bodybuilding shows. They do pose for sexy photo or video shoots. They do meet starry-eyed clients for muscle worship or wrestling sessions. They do walk out in public and see the stunned faces on complete strangers who were not expecting to randomly see a woman with so much muscle. When you’re an entrepreneurial female bodybuilder, it’s impossible to be kept a secret forever.

But once again, that’s just a drop in the proverbial bucket. The process it takes to be a bodybuilder isn’t for the faint of heart, nor is it terribly exciting day-in and day-out. But for those of us who do appreciate the arduous journey it takes to become a Divine Muscle Goddess, we cannot help but stare with our undivided attention as she’s lifting that heavy dumbbell. In that moment, she’s defying gravity, challenging our preconceived notions, and taking one step closer toward reaching her final destination. We can’t always describe why we love watching this; but we do regardless.

The Moment of Muscle Peak, therefore, has two meanings: It’s both the moment when her muscles are at its most swollen and strained; and it’s the moment when she’s at her most empowered. It’s both literal and figurative. When Jay Fuchs is isolating her biceps and lifting that dumbbell toward her beautiful chest, she’s showing us two sides of her personality. One side is her willingness to do the hard work necessary to develop large muscles. The other side is her devotion to striving toward an ideal.

And what is that ideal? She wants to be the best version of herself that she can possibly be. She refuses to settle for anything less than that. And why would she? What would be the point?

As fans of Miss Fuchs and countless others like her, we do not see any other point. Seriously. If you can think of a reason why Jay shouldn’t pursue her personal ideal, you can tell us after we’ve picked up our jaws off the floor.

Please Don’t Be a Jerk

Who would want to be a jerk toward Margie Martin?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please note that none of the women whose photos are featured in this blog post are women whom I’ve met for muscle worship sessions. I have no idea if any of these ladies even offer such services. I’m just sharing their images because I love looking at pictures of strong beautiful ladies! Thank you.

***

It is not too often that I use this platform – and I suppose my blog can be considered a “platform” of sorts – to chastise anyone. Maybe it’s my upbringing, where “calling people out” in a public manner just isn’t encouraged. Or maybe it’s because I value my readers and I don’t want to offend them when it’s not totally necessary.

Regardless, when an issue comes up that I feel is important enough to give attention to, I will do it. Not because it’s my “duty” or anything like that, but because I have values and I respect female bodybuilders.

I’ve met quite a few female bodybuilders over the past half-decade. By my count, I’ve seen 13 female bodybuilders (a few I’ve seen twice) for muscle worship sessions since 2013. Naturally, I am a very curious person when it comes to these female bodybuilders. So I like to ask questions about their training regimen, eating habits, travel schedule, weird experiences meeting with clients, funny anecdotes, and anything else that strikes my fancy.

But, it is the “weird experiences meeting with clients” that often reveal the most enlightening bits of information.

Not surprising, people are strange. Some clients want a female bodybuilder to punch them in the face until their noses bleed. Others want a female bodybuilder to whip them with a long piece of leather until red marks appear all over their skin. One FBB intimated a story of a gentleman who received sexual pleasure from having broken lightbulb shards spread across his chest while she steps on him with her high heels.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

However, one consistent story I keep hearing about is idiot people who email/text with FBBs about setting up an appointment but have no actual intentions of doing so. The narrative is predictable: Someone emails an FBB who is planning to travel to their city. They exchange a few messages agreeing on the terms of the appointment. Finally, they agree on a date and time to meet. The day arrives…and voilà! This person is a no-show.

They might insist in a frantic-sounding text that they’re running late or are lost and will get to the hotel as soon as possible. But that’s just a pack of lies. They never show up and never intended to show up in the first place. Hell, this person may not actually live in the area. So the FBB is left without a client and $350 (give or take) that she thought she’d earn for her services but will not.

Talk about disappointing. It’s like being stood up on a date. But instead of having a broken heart or a wounded ego, you’ve missed out on an opportunity to earn some much-needed cash. Meanwhile, the person leaving the FBB standing on the proverbial altar probably has no clue how irresponsible and inconsiderate they’ve just been. No damn clue whatsoever.

And does this happen often? You bet it does. I don’t know exactly how often, but often enough that session providers need to take precautionary measures to ensure it doesn’t happen. But no matter how thorough you are, there will always be dummies among us who manage to flake out when the spotlight becomes too bright.

Hm. Why would someone do this?

One theory is that some people get a sexual thrill from merely communicating with an FBB. They find muscular women to be mysterious, alluring, and erotically exciting. I agree with all this, but that’s no excuse to be a jerk. These jackasses pretend like they’re interested in paying for a muscle worship or wrestling session but are only doing so because they think it’s appealing to exchange empty emails with them.

These are lonely and insufferable buffoons who give the rest of us a bad name. I once met an FBB for a session who told me I was her only client during her stay in Seattle. She’d been in contact with four or five other guys…but all of them bailed out except for me. If it weren’t for yours truly, she would have spent her entire trip alone in her hotel room and would have lost a lot of money on air fare and hotel expenses. I was embarrassed to hear that. I apologized to her for the stupid behavior of my fellow Seattleites. She was gracious and told me I wasn’t to blame for any of this. She was right, but I still felt bad for her.

I understand that FBBs are incredible women who deserve our attention, respect, and awe. But that’s no excuse for stringing them along just because you find it thrilling to text with them a few times. Is that how pathetic you are? Seriously? Please.

One FBB told me of a jerk who lied to her about wanting to set up a wrestling appointment happened to live 3,000 miles away from the city she was at! She was visiting the West Coast and this idiot lived on the East Coast but insisted he was “just outside the hotel lobby” and “would be knocking on her door at any moment.” Complete and utter BS. I got angry when I heard this. I cannot imagine how angry she was at the time when it was happening to her.

Another theory is that too many people intend to set up a legitimate session with an FBB and simply chicken out when the day arrives. Whether it’s for moral or psychological reasons, they can’t bring themselves to actually walk into that hotel, take the elevator up to her room, and knock on her door. Cold feet happens to the best of us, including blind dates, brides, grooms, potential bank robbers (remember the beginning of “Dog Day Afternoon?”), terrorists, and would-be presidential candidates.

I am less upset at people like this because they, in good faith, actually wanted to meet an FBB/wrestler for an appointment. I understand that it can be nerve-wracking. I understand for many people with certain social/religious upbringings, doing something like this can be a giant leap that sounds great from a distance but becomes less desirable when the moment of truth comes. We’re all human and we all come from different cultural backgrounds.

But one should be honest with themselves. If you don’t have the internal fortitude to follow through with your promises, you should be aware of this and act accordingly. There’s a reason why so many session providers request a deposit and/or references. They want to know if you’re legitimate. They want to know if you’re trustworthy. They want assurance that you’re not a flake. Most of all, they want to know if you’re worth their time and effort.

I get it. You regard female bodybuilders to be angels on Earth. Divine. Ethereal. Majestic. Supernatural. Out-of-this-world. Celestial. Heavenly. Goddesses. Immortals among mortals. And so on and so forth.

Guess what? They’re human beings just like you and I. For them, providing sessions isn’t just a hobby. It’s business. It’s how many of them make their livelihood. It’s part of their job. You’re probably aware that the vast majority of professional bodybuilders (male and female) cannot make a viable living just from winning contests. They need other reliable sources of income to pay for food, rent, transportation, and other necessary living expenses.

So when you flake out, that’s sort of like your boss telling you that the three hours of overtime you worked yesterday won’t show up on your next paycheck. Nor will it ever show up on any future paycheck. You basically worked for free. That’s three hours that you can’t get back. How upset would that make you?

But I think the “chickening out” factor is relatively small. I think the first reason is far more prevalent, but I could be wrong about this. People are so captivated by muscular women that they must communicate with them because it’s the closest way they can interact with them without actually interacting with them. It’s like celebrity worship.

No, it’s not like celebrity worship. It is a form of celebrity worship. Maybe not for the general public, but for those of us who love muscular women, FBBs are our celebrities. We treat them just like others treat pro football players, pop singers, movie stars, and charismatic politicians. The thrill you get from spotting your favorite actor at a shopping mall in Beverly Hills is identical to the thrill you get from receiving text messages from your favorite FBB.

Female bodybuilders encounter so many flakes they can all fit into a box of breakfast cereal.

That, however, is no excuse to waste their time just because you get your jollies exchanging e-mails with them in your spare time. Do you have any idea how many e-mail messages session providers are inundated with every single day? Enough that many of them probably need a part-time secretary to read and respond to them all. One FBB told me she can tell from how well (or poorly) an e-mail is written whether this person is legitimate or not. Messages that are impolite, badly written, chock-full of spelling and grammatical errors, and incoherent are most likely from people who have no serious intent of following through with setting up an appointment.

You know what? I can believe that 100%. More often than not, they’re probably right.

The lesson to be learned is simple: Don’t be a jerk. Please. For the sake of session providers, those of us who respect and adore FBBs, and for yourself, do the decent thing and don’t waste people’s valuable time. It’s sad that such advice needs to be dished out when it should be obvious to most of us. But that’s the world we live in. What is obvious isn’t, which makes it not so obvious, I suppose.

Let’s end on a more positive note. Whether we’re talking about interacting with female bodybuilders, your next-door neighbors, or your in-laws, not being a jerk is not enough. You should treat everyone with the same considerations that you would like to receive. Be nice, and the world will smile back at you.

Errrr, at the very least, I will smile back at you!

Female Muscle on Demand

I demand to touch the arms of Tonia Moore. May I?

It ain’t easy being a female muscle fan. But do we have it harder than fans of more “mainstream” interests? Maybe, maybe not.

Yes, sports fans have the offseason they need to endure for a few months every year before their favorite team plays meaningful games again.

Like tropical fruit? You can’t necessarily get great tasting pineapple or grapefruit year-round. Enjoy a perfectly cooked (i.e., rare) New York Strip steak? You can’t buy it too often or else the contents in your bank account will get too low. There’s nothing wrong with eating a scoop of ice cream before going to bed, but if you do it too often you might need to invest in new pants and belts. Not a good trade-off, if you ask me.

Being a fan of anything in life obviously has its drawbacks. The biggest one being you can’t always be satiated 24-hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. All good things must come in moderation. In fact, the best things in life should be enjoyed sparingly in order for the novelty to not wear off.

Yet, being a female muscle fan puts one in a whole other boat. What we love is especially rare (and I’m not talking about how you like your steak cooked). Muscular women comprise a remarkably small percentage of the world’s population. The number of muscular women who offer wrestling/worship sessions is even smaller. And the number of muscular women who offer sessions and are willing to travel to major cities across the world is smaller than that.

And, the people who are female muscle fans, live within close proximity of major metropolitan cities, and have disposable cash to pay for sessions are…you guessed it. Limited. Do you live in the countryside? Too bad. Do you live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t afford $250 to $400 for an hour-long muscle worship appointment? Oh well.

Get the picture? It’s an issue of basic arithmetic. Wine aficionados can find reasonable quality vin at most grocery stores. Fans of classic movies can subscribe to channels that play Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford films seemingly on continuous loop. Even folks who are into kinkier stuff like BDSM can meet up with like-minded participants if they know how to do a basic Internet search.

But female muscle fans cannot experience their interests quite like the previously mentioned cohorts. Not by a long shot. Our tastes are more difficult to experience thanks to the simple principle of supply and demand. We have demands, but the supply is tragically short. Not inexistent, of course, but not readily available on the shelves like the newest iPhone or boxes of Wheaties.

I'd order the sex appeal of Isabelle Turell so fast the app might explode. — I’d order the sex appeal of Isabelle Turell so fast the app might explode.

At times like this, it makes one fantasize about having an app on your phone that delivers “female muscle on demand” much like how you can order a pizza, hail an Uber driver, or watch reruns of Game of Thrones on your big screen television. How would this hypothetical app work? Well, let’s put on our thinking caps for a moment and find out.

Let’s say you’re alone by yourself at home. Your significant other is away or your roommate is out painting the town red (whatever that means). You’re bored watching YouTube videos of animals doing tricks. You’ve run out of beer. It’s raining outside, so taking a leisurely walk is out of the question. The gym is about to close and the nearest bar just recently jacked up their prices on liquor. What are you to do with yourself?

You’re feeling “randy” but have no partner to help you relieve your pent-up tension. You can watch porn but that’s dull and mundane. Besides, most of it is complete garbage anyway. You’re secretly a fan of female bodybuilders, though. You love the feel of their rock hard muscles. You love playfully wrestling them and submitting to their superior strength. You want to touch their bodies and allow them to touch yours. You’re in a sensual mood and the only prescription is a big strong beautiful woman who’s ready to rock and roll. What do you do now?

Easy! You open the “Female Muscle on Demand” app on your smartphone and simply let its magic sweep you off your feet.

So, how would this app work? There are several possibilities:

One is for you to magically summon any female bodybuilder in the world to appear in the flesh (we’re going to ignore fundamental scientific laws here, in case you haven’t noticed) right before your eyes for only an hour or two. Do you want to hang out with Amber DeLuca? Simple! Just swipe the app (or tap the app, or however the darn thing works) and voila! Miss DeLuca will materialize out of thin air and you’ll be feeling her gorgeous pecs in no time.

Sucking on Angela Salvagno's gorgeous clit would be a deal breaker for me. — Sucking on Angela Salvagno’s gorgeous clit would be a deal breaker for me.

Could you ask for multiple real-life female bodybuilders to join your company? I suppose, but that’s still in the beta testing stage. Or maybe you can do that. Perhaps there’s a limit of ten FBBs per usage. Or fifteen. Or twenty. Or more than that. Who knows? Just make sure you have enough room in your cramped apartment to accommodate all these beautiful ladies.

So maybe you can ask Amber, Denise Masino, Lindsay Mulinazzi, Isabelle Turell, Brandi Mae Akers, and Lisa Cross to collectively join you for one hell of a sexy evening. Wow, that would be something else! I would download that app faster than a kid opening his presents on Christmas morning.

What would you do with these ladies in your living space? Well, I’m pretty sure you can adequately fill in the blank yourself. You can invite Deidre Pagnanelli over and treat her to a romantic candle-lit dinner of steak and lobster paired with a delectable bottle of fine wine. Or you can conjure up Victoria Dominguez and ask her to be your “mistress” for the evening who will act out every single naughty fantasy in your dirty little mind. Or you can summon Angela Salvagno and spend a few hours doing nothing but sucking on her big juicy clit. Or you could have all three over and engage in a full-out female muscle orgy where nothing is off the table. After all, it’s your app.

Oh boy. Yup, the scenarios you can come up with are sure endless!

Another possibility is for you to create a muscular woman from scratch. This option could be better than the first one – although that one is pretty damn incredible – because it really allows you to fulfill your fantasies to the max. You can choose from a long list of physical and personal characteristics and manufacture your own personal FBB who will be unique to your tastes.

Imagine that it’s like one of those mix and match monster flip books you used to peruse through when you were a little kid. You can assemble a beast with a centipede-like lower body with an orangutan midsection and the head of a serpent-goat. Or, the head of a tyrannosaurus rex with the midsection of a great white whale and the legs of a praying mantis. Whatever floats your boat. Remember being fascinated with those books growing up?

Wind the clock to the present day and imagine being able to do that with human flesh and bone. You can, with the tap of a few buttons, construct your very own female bodybuilder playmate to spend the evening with whenever you feel like it. Just open the app, find a spot with good Wi-Fi reception, and generate a woman with:

Biceps like Isabelle Turell
A chest like Theresa Ivancik
Abs like Cindy Landolt
A back like Jay Fuchs
Shoulders like Rene Campbell
A torso like Amber DeLuca
Glutes like Alina Popa
Legs like Tina Lockwood (back when she was in her peak condition, of course!)
Calves like Brenda Smith
A clit like Denise Masino
Labia like Angela Salvagno
A face like Deidre Pagnanelli
Sexy red hair like Lindsay Mulinazzi
Height like Maria Wattel (6 foot 2 inches)
A sultry deep voice like Kathy Connors
Intelligence and personality like Julie Germaine
“Bad girl” attitude like Brandi Mae Akers

Ooh. What a playmate she would be! Of course, the combinations are endless and everyone’s personal preferences will differ. And it may be more practical for the “Female Muscle on Demand” app to have a desktop version as well if we’re going to get this specific. Perhaps every user can have their favorite features “saved” so that the Female Muscle Aggregator (we’ll call this a sub-feature within the app itself) remembers what you like.

Just so we’re not being sexist, and in the spirit of accommodating as many genders and preferences as possible, there could also be a “Male Muscle on Demand” counterpart that ladies (and men who like men) can also utilize. Or maybe this is all consolidated in one app known as “Muscles on Demand.” Whatever works, I suppose.

Another option that users have is to customize which race/ethnicity you happen to prefer. Like Caucasian muscle? Ebony muscle? Asian muscle? Latina muscle? Middle Eastern muscle? Or a combination of a few of these? Well, I wouldn’t be against our hypothetical users having this option when navigating through our miraculous digital sexual fetish service.

Jay Fuch's sexy back? Yes, please! — Jay Fuch’s sexy back? Yes, please!

Well, well, well. This would certainly make being a female muscle fan much more fun. Come to think of it, this would go over well with people of every fetishistic color and stripe. Your “Muscles on Demand” creation could wear sexy frilly underwear, a kinky BDSM outfit (with the expected ensemble of handcuffs, whips, and chains), a revealing beach bikini, a Catholic school girl’s outfit (I won’t judge if that’s your cup of tea), a classy white slip, or a sensual black negligee. Maybe this is where users can actually suggest and design outfits that fulfill their deepest and darkest erotic fantasies. User-generated content is the wave of the future, is it not?

It sure is. So is the ability to customize whatever you damn please right up to the most minute detail. If you want your Muscle Fantasy to have big brawny arms, you can customize her biceps to be 18 inches in circumference…or 14 inches if you don’t want her to be that muscular. Or 20 inches if you don’t care about realism. Yikes. That could potentially get out of hand real quick. Once you go down this road, you could technically create a Dream Muscle Woman who defies scientific limitations and really gets your juices flowing (interpret that as you will).

But, what would the experience actually be like once your Muscle Fantasy is right before your eyes? Well, obviously it would be awesome for this person to look, feel, and sound like a real person.

Unlike virtual reality, the experience of meeting your Muscle on Demand playmate will be just like actual reality, not similar to existing inside a vast three-dimensional video game. So basically, it’s like a genuine muscle worship/wrestling session except you don’t need to travel, shell out $350 or wait around for a premiere FBB to come to your area.

Thus, one moment I could be sitting on my couch watching a soccer game I don’t care about and the next I could be feeling up Angela Salvagno’s gorgeous naked body. My head is jammed between her strong legs, sucking on her beautiful big clit, giving her orgasm after orgasm after orgasm after orgasm after orgasm. After she’s had enough climaxes, she returns the favor by flexing her enormous muscles until I am able to touch every single inch of her. Then, we make sweet love until we come together one final time. I empty myself into her, we kiss, we chat for a few moments, and she disappears until I choose to summon her again.

All this time, the real Angela Salvagno is peacefully enjoying her own life wherever she happens to be, totally unaware of what I just experienced with her avatar. So what happens between me and her digital self is nobody’s business except for…mine. She’s completely oblivious of my evening spent with “her,” as is the rest of the world. Because the version of Angela Salvagno I just made love to doesn’t actually exist. It’s just a realistic avatar conjured from my trusty app.

Ah, yes. How I wish this could come to pass! Alas, such a thing is not physically possible. Perhaps this is a product of my longing for something that’s not easily attainable. Or maybe a sign of the times; that we live in an age where what we want must be available to us immediately or else. I consider myself a patient person, but female muscle is so irresistible how can it not drive you crazy knowing you have to wait five to six months and spend a whole week’s worth of wages to be able to get your fix? I’m not a “female muscle junkie” by any stretch of the imagination, but what you desire is what you desire for a reason.

Why must beautiful women like Julie Germaine be so scarce?

Muscular women are sure scarce. However, as short in supply as they may be, they are available if you have the time, resources, and proximity necessary to meet them one-on-one. Then again, maybe this is part of their charm. Maybe the agonizing wait times and the steep price of admission are partly to explain why I find FBBs so alluring. I often wonder what it would be like if more “everyday women” were as muscular as competitive bodybuilders (or in this particular case, what it would be like for female muscle to be accessible to me on demand). Can you imagine how splendid it would be if you took the bus to work and 30-40 percent of the women riding with you had arms as big as Yaxeni Oriquen-Garcia? Whoa! Talk about living in a surreal parallel universe.

But, I am not so naïve to believe that my love for muscular women would not change one iota. Maybe the scarcity of big buff women is one of the chief reasons why I love them so darn much. If they were as common as 30-something hipster women in Seattle wearing Uggs and gray wool hats, I probably wouldn’t care as much if I saw one up close. Hm. Is that really true?

Maybe it is true. Or not. Either way, there are benefits to certain things in life being readily available “on demand” or “pretty damn close to on demand.” Clean water would be one example. Electricity would be another. On the other hand, as difficult as this may be to comprehend, certain things in life are better when they’re experienced infrequently.

The eager anticipation, butterflies in the stomach, ache of seeing your bank account slightly diminish, fluttering heartrate, joyous times of the experience itself, and the warm fuzzy memories you have of your time together are all part of the packaged deal. If these things happen too often I can see how they could lose their magic touch.

So for now, Female Muscle on Demand only exists in the wild recesses of my imagination. I can wager a guess that it also exists in the minds of many of my dear readers – or at least it does now. There may come a time when virtual reality becomes so technologically advanced that it can seamlessly mimic real life, but we are not quite there yet. I have no doubts that we may one day reach that pinnacle, but that day is not today. Many hurdles must be jumped over first before we can even begin to have that conversation. But that shouldn’t stop us from pondering those delicious “what if” questions.

What if <insert fantasy of your choice> were possible? Oh my goodness, the possibilities are endless, aren’t they?

Karen Zaremba: My Sentimental Favorite

Hand bras are the worst!

Every female muscle fan has “the one” who truly made them see the light. It’s not necessarily the first muscular woman they ever saw or the one they would consider to be their favorite. Personally, the first FBB I ever noticed was Lisa Marie Bickels, a former U.S. Marine who caught my attention more than ten years ago during my college years.

My current favorite is Denise Masino, a devilishly sexy siren with an endowment between her legs that can only be described as scrumptious. Miss Bickels isn’t close to being a favorite of mine and Miss Masino is someone I discovered later on. Thus, the subject of the woman who played a crucial role in my “female muscle awakening” is none other than Karen Zaremba.

Karen Zaremba was born on January 27, 1964 in Detroit, Michigan. Back then, Detroit was deserving of its nickname of The Motor City and the breeding ground of some of the most recognizable names in American pop music (Motown, anyone?). Today, Detroit resembles a Third World country, but that’s another story for another day. On that fateful day in the heartland of America, the world was introduced to a gorgeous young lass who would one day grow up to become one of the sexiest female bodybuilders the Universe has ever known.

Today, Karen resides in Clinton Township, which is less than 30 miles north of her birth town. So Karen didn’t scurry too far from the crib, as it were. I suppose there’s no reason why one should move far away from home unless there were extenuating circumstances. If you like where you live, why not stay there? Karen and her family obviously feel this way.

Like many beautiful female bodybuilders, Karen is the mother of two children and is happily married. Evidently, she never had any problem balancing her work/home life with her chosen profession of being a competitive bodybuilder and fitness model. Standing at a modest 5”2” and weighing 124 pounds (give or take), she describes herself as a “stay-at-home Mom” when she isn’t working in the fitness industry. Of course, many of the interviews that I’ve used to curate this information are several years old, so take this with a grain of salt.

Love those abs!

From what I can gather, Karen no longer competes and probably doesn’t participate in bodybuilding anymore. Like many FBBs, details about their personal lives are scant, making it a challenge to paint a complete picture of what she’s like. I am confident that whatever she’s doing now, she’s probably happy with her life and wouldn’t want things to be any other way.

Her contest history is as follows:

2007 – Europa Super Show: 8^th place, Lightweight

2006 – IFBB Motor City Pro Figure: 16^th place

2006 – IFBB Pittsburgh Pro Figure: 16^th place

2005 – NPC National Figure Championships: 2^nd place, Class A (earned her IFBB pro card)

2005 – Junior Nationals: 3^rd place, Class A

2005 – Junior USA: 3^rd place, Class A

2004 – Central States Figure championships: Short Class, Masters and Overall Winner

2003 – Michigan Novice Bodybuilding championships: Lightweight, Masters and Overall Winner

Of course, this might not reflect her full contest history, but my quick bit of Internet research reveals that this is pretty comprehensive. If you know of any further contests that Karen has participated in, please do not hesitate to let me know in the comments below.

As one can clearly see, her contest history isn’t remarkable or noteworthy. Pretty standard for someone who loves to compete but isn’t too committed to becoming an elite competitor. This is not meant to be a slight against her. This is just to say that when she was a competitive bodybuilder, she wasn’t someone you would have associated as being the best of the best.

Poetry in motion.

She came, she saw, she…participated. Her accomplishments are as modest as her objectives. She didn’t aim to be better than everybody else; she just wanted to see what she could do. Many competitors (both male and female) are not necessarily “in it to win it.” Many are in it for no other reason than to have fun, challenge one’s self, and meet new people while trying new things.

That’s an attitude we need to see more in our world.

But that’s not why she’s a sentimental favorite of mine. I discovered Karen in 2005 or 2006, so in other words a solid decade ago. Back then, I would have been 18 or 19 and Karen would’ve been 41 or 42. Think it’s unusual for a boy in his late teens to completely fall in love with a woman who’s more than twice his age? A woman who is nearly old enough to be his own mother? I certainly thought so at the time, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong or abnormal about it.

Why was there nothing unusual about this? Well, have you taken a good look at her?

Yowza!

Karen is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. She has an authentic look to her that’s difficult to explain but easy to see. Her dark hair is beautifully complemented by her olive complexion, a skin tone that perfectly accentuates her muscles. She’s legendary for her six-pack abdomen, which she is not shy about showing off to the camera. I briefly went through a stage of having a six-pack fetish. Can you possibly guess why?

Facially, she doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter Playboy Playmate or a nameless fashion model you see plastered across shopping mall corridors. It’s too clichéd to say she looks like the “girl next door” or the “hot mom next door,” but it’s sort of true!

What initially struck me about Karen, and it still strikes me today, is how effortlessly sexy she is. When she walks, her hips poetically bounce in a way that can make your heart stop. She’s very feminine, so much so you forget that all those negative stereotypes about female bodybuilders even exist. Of course, she’s a mother – which allows her to be called a certain idiotic acronym that I refuse to mention on this blog. Personally, I find muscle moms appealing, but there are certain misogynistic levels I refuse to lower myself to.

Baby got back!

Perhaps that’s at the root of my attraction to Karen Zaremba. She’s a muscular woman who transcends the “muscle chick” fetish. She isn’t just “beautiful for a female bodybuilder,” she’s “beautiful…period, end of story.” Karen forced me to view muscular women through a different lens. No longer were all FBBs big, oversized masculinized “women” who’ve vehemently rejected traditional femininity and womanhood. I may not have felt exactly that way toward FBBs at the time, but my worldview was limited during those years. Karen encouraged me to expand my horizons.

Then, the floodgates opened. I discovered Annie Rivieccio. Then Lisa Cross. Then Alina Popa, followed by Yvette Bova and Denise Masino and Deidre Pagnanelli. I found out about Michelle Maroldo and Denise Hoshor. And Brandi Mae Akers. Of course, Victoria Dominguez. And other women like Nikki Fuller, Debi Laszewski, Sondra Faas, Marina Lopez, Catherine Holland, Emery Miller, Gayle Moher, Lauren Powers, Shawn Tan, Julie Germaine, and newcomers like Shannon Courtney, Minna Pajulahti, Dani Reardon, and Sheronica Sade Henton. There are many more to name. We could go on for hours. I’m still discovering new beautiful ladies seemingly every single day.

But I never forgot my roots, as the saying goes. Karen Zaremba remains on the front of my mind and tucked away snuggly in my heart. She isn’t just one of my first discoveries…she remains one of the best and brightest. I have the feeling I’m going to feel the same way regardless of how many additional tens of thousands of muscular women I’m introduced to in the future.

But let’s return to Karen’s effortless sexiness. It cannot be understated. Karen doesn’t walk; she glides. She doesn’t smile; she glows. She doesn’t pose; she radiates. She doesn’t flex; she blossoms. She doesn’t impress; she transcends. She doesn’t compete as a bodybuilder; she elevates the ceiling of human potential. She isn’t just beautiful; she’s ethereal and magnanimous. Karen Zaremba exceeds your expectations yet doesn’t seem to be trying to do anything other than being herself.

That takes more than talent. That takes a flawless combination of natural gifts, determination, hard work, and instincts. No one can teach you how to be as angelic as Karen. Nor could she necessarily teach others the ropes. Some of us are more radiant and charismatic than others for reasons that cannot be rationally explained or easily transferrable.

Karen’s skin tone is the best.

Perhaps part of her appeal is her laidback Midwestern demeanor. Karen doesn’t boast the flashiness of an entitled California-bred pseudo-celebrity. Nor is she a snooty East Coaster who treats bodybuilding as her ticket to Broadway-style stardom. I am, of course, exaggerating and wildly stereotyping millions of people in the United States (which is trendy in the year 2016), but what cannot be denied is the refreshing authenticity that Karen brings to the table.

She doesn’t post selfies every single day on Instagram. In fact, I don’t think Miss Zaremba even has an Instagram account. When you research her, you don’t actually find a whole lot. This adds to her mystique. Because thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of video footage of Karen don’t exist, we can only witness a small slice of who she is. This allows us to fill in the blanks wherever we see fit.

So I can speculate that she’s modest, down-to-earth, and full of “small town charm” because…well, I feel like it. Is this based on extensive knowledge of her personality, lifestyle, and background? Nope! Our idealized version of people is what fuels our love for celebrities.

Karen Zaremba may not be a traditional celebrity, but in my heart she’s a glamorous superstar.

She comes across as a super chill lady who will just as likely bake you a batch of gingerbread cookies as she is to rapidly do 25 pullups as if it were no big deal. She’s a mom and she loves being a mom. She once was a muscular woman who also doesn’t mind being a loving wife and someone who would enthusiastically serve on her local PTA board. Once again, this is based on nothing but what exists in my imagination. But doesn’t this seem plausible?

For her, bodybuilding isn’t her life’s calling or integral to her business model. Doesn’t it seem like for Karen being a bodybuilder was a “neat” thing to do? She wasn’t in it for the money, the glitz, or the fame. She didn’t “brand” herself as a bad girl or a sexy muscle siren or feminist superhero. She just let herself be herself. She’s a mom, a wife, and a friendly neighbor who thinks having big muscles would be nifty. You rarely see that level of unpretentiousness in today’s narcissistic culture.

In other words, Karen never wanted to be a celebrity – even among the small subculture of female muscle fans. Having big muscles wasn’t her way of feeding her ego. It was her way of experiencing self-empowerment. All she wanted to be was the best version of herself. For me, that’s all I need.

Karen left just enough to the imagination…yet revealed enough to let us know what she got. Such a tease!

Just as any baseball or football player must eventually call it a career and “hang up the cleats,” Karen has now decided to forgo her muscles and become “normal-looking” again. I have no doubt that Karen still exercises to keep herself fit and trim, but from what I can gather (and she prefers to keep her personal life private, which is her right) she’s allowed her muscles to shrink. She’s now a former bodybuilder. She’s now a regular lady you see shopping for groceries at the supermarket on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. This isn’t disappointing or regrettable. She can do whatever she wants with her life.

But there is undeniably a small element of sadness at play here. It is a bit melancholy when a gorgeous FBB retires and relinquishes her muscularity. As a sports fan, you never want to see your favorite players withdraw from playing the game they love and ride off into the sunset back to civilian life. But time marches on and not everything lasts forever. There will be plenty of young up-and-coming Karen Zarembas who will take up her mantle. Heck, I’ve referenced many of them on this very blog.

So this is a celebration of a woman who leaves a legacy of making the world a more beautiful place, whether she has big muscles or not. Because of her, we now have stronger faith in the goodness of people and the potential of human achievement. Karen Zaremba never has to “prove” that she is gorgeous. She just is. She never hogs the spotlight and demands that people look at her. We look at her because we cannot help but look at her. That takes something special.

As an 18-year-old kid Karen made my heart leap out of my chest. She was more than twice my age and rarely ever did any nude modeling. She never did anything pornographic or overly sexual. She kept it classy. She kept things modest. You’ll never find a video of her sucking a porn star’s penis or masturbating with an oversized dildo. She never had to do any of those things to capture my attention, even all these years later.

She just had to be herself. And that was enough. And it still is.

Perhaps We Should Vote for a Female Bodybuilder for President

I'd vote Tina Jo Orban as "Best Legs" if such a category were to exist. — I’d vote Tina Jo Orban as “Best Legs” if such a category were to exist.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past two years, or if you live outside of the United States and you don’t particularly care what happens in this country, most of you should be aware that very soon we will be bringing this God-awful presidential election to a merciful end and will choose who our next Commander-in-Chief will be.

I refuse to even name the two candidates who are running for my nation’s highest public office on the grounds that both of them have received enough attention from people like you and I. So perhaps this post will remain relevant four, eight, or twelve years from now. Who knows?

If this excruciating and painful election cycle has taught us anything – and it has indeed taught us many valuable lessons about the state of my nation and politics in general – it’s that qualifications for the job don’t matter to the typical voter when it comes to selecting the next U.S. President. So, in an effort to not get too political and keep matters civil, I will lay out a tongue-in-cheek argument for why Americans (and people from other countries who are blessed to live in a representational democracy, or at least a country that practices such style of governance in theory) should decide to vote for a female bodybuilder for president on Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

I will admit that I am embarrassed as a U.S. citizen to subject the world to watching our political theater play out in all its horrifying glory. Let’s hope 2016 is just one of those “weird” years that we look back upon decades later and proudly declare that we were fortunate enough to have lived through it (for the most part) unscathed. After all, we could do worse. And odds are we will actually end up doing worse sooner or later.

But I digress. I am no political commentator, but in my opinion the most significant reason why U.S. politics sucks right now is because we expect our politicians to deliver on promises that were unrealistic to begin with…which then breeds contempt, more unrealistic expectations, and more extreme candidates who can only get elected if they continue to up-the-ante and foster a whole new set of stupid promises. This means personality tends to matter more than qualifications or knowledge about the job, which explains an awful lot.

However, a female bodybuilder lives in a completely different world than politicians – but can offer said politicians a lot of life lessons that could go a long way in generating better public policies.

Think about the world a female bodybuilder inhabits. She’s working in an industry that persistently is trying to weed her out of it. The Ms. Olympia is dead and buried and doesn’t appear to be coming back any time soon. Other competitions may rise out of the ashes and attempt to take its place, but that doesn’t change the fact that the IFBB isn’t too keen on allowing hypermuscular competitors to be the “face” of the female side of the sport. They’d rather more “audience friendly” fitness and bikini competitors take center stage over the bigger and buffer ladies who’ve worked harder to achieve their physiques.

So, right off the bat a female bodybuilder has to endure working in a profession where the chances of cultivating strong career prospects are becoming dimmer and slimmer as time marches on. Yet, money doesn’t fall from the skies and she has to make an income somehow. This is where things like personal training, one-on-one online consulting, fitness entrepreneurship, and ahem, offering wrestling or muscle worship sessions to paying customers (all under the table and away from the prying hands of tax collectors, of course!) fit into the picture. She may not necessarily want to do any or most of these things, but as I mentioned before, money doesn’t grow on trees and food won’t miraculously appear on the dinner table out of thin air. So, a female bodybuilder who wants to pursue bodybuilding as a profession – more or less – must adapt to her present circumstances or face the inevitable option of having to choose a different career path.

Another lovely and gorgeous Tina: Tina Chandler.

Adaptation isn’t easy or seamless, but it does happen. People who live in the real world adapt every single day of their lives. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today and sure as hell won’t work tomorrow, so it’s foolish to remain stilted in one’s ways of doing things. One must always look for the next best opportunity or face the consequences of becoming poor, irrelevant, or both. This requires understanding the bodybuilding industry well, knowing what customers want (if you get my drift), and being willing to forge a new pathway if the current ones leads to a dead end. I didn’t say it’s easy to do this, but it can be done. We can collectively name hundreds of female bodybuilders from all across the world who can testify to this.

Another aspect to female bodybuilding that’s important to realize is the independent nature of the sport. Unlike team sports like baseball, football (the one that features tackling, throwing, and catching), basketball, hockey, soccer, rugby, and others, bodybuilding isn’t a sport that consists of teams, teammates, and being dependent upon others to win games. It’s solely on the shoulders of each individual athlete.

Of course, it deserves to be said that every single top-level bodybuilder – male or female – has a large team of coaches, trainers, nutritional experts, doctors, and assistants who aid them on their journey to becoming an elite competitor. No man is an island, and perhaps no woman is an island either. So a female bodybuilder isn’t completely paddling a single canoe. But there’s no denying that bodybuilding is ruggedly individualistic in nature. The panel of judges that decides who wins and who doesn’t win only looks at the individual competitors, not who they have standing in their corner cheering them on.

Muhammad Ali is known as the greatest boxer of all time – not Muhammad Ali and his army of personal trainers, physicians, sparring partners, promoters, advisors, and so on. Though every top athlete has help from a team of professionals, but only one person is in the ring fighting against his or her opponent. And the last time I checked, Ali was the only one in that ring staring down his hapless challenger.

Bodybuilders of all stripes understand this reality intuitively. If they make a mistake, they alone must answer for it. They can’t blame a lazy teammate, idiotic coaching, or an overall poor supporting cast for being a perpetual loser. They only have themselves to blame if they placed 3^rd at last year’s competition but 10^th this year. That drop-off can have plenty of rational explanations (biased judging being a prominent one), but at the end of the day every single competitor is responsible for their own training, progress, dieting, and outcomes.

Which leads us to the next point…

Female bodybuilders aren’t striving to achieve a goal that exists only in the abstract. Rather, they bust their tails every day of their lives working toward a goal that’s specific, tangible, measurable, attainable, and very damn difficult to meet. There’s an element of poetic beauty integral to this reality, isn’t there?

If a new and up-and-coming female athlete looks at photos of Alina Popa, Debi Laszewski or Brigita Brezovac and says to herself, “I want to look like that one day,” guess what? She can! Granted, it won’t be easy and the journey from Point A to Point B will be arduous, tumultuous, and full of plenty of doubt. But nevertheless, one cannot deny that the goal can be met if she sets her mind to it and educates herself on what is necessary to get there.

Annie Rivieccio earns my vote for "Best Bicep Peak." — Annie Rivieccio earns my vote for “Best Bicep Peak.”

Unlike politicians who promise big and bold achievements that probably aren’t realistic and only will set their constituents up for disappointment, a female bodybuilder has a distinct goal in mind that’s specific and can accurately be visualized ahead of time. It doesn’t exist in a theoretical universe that looks great on paper or in a rousing speech but doesn’t actually work in real life. Bodybuilding is a sport where end results aren’t achieved by dumb luck or happenstance. It materializes when an athlete makes a definitive decision to take specific action toward achieving a precise goal.

Nobody will argue that it’ll be easy to look like Lisa Cross or Rene Campbell. That high degree of muscularity doesn’t come easily. But one cannot also argue that such objectives are impossible. They are quite possible to meet, albeit after one is eager to dramatically reorganize one’s lifestyle.

Point B isn’t a hypothetical reality that exists only in one’s mind. Building an impressive level of muscle mass is a concrete end that arises after participating in concrete means. Gaining x number of pounds of muscle or placing in the top five of a certain bodybuilding contest are measurable and quantifiable aims that are either achieved or not achieved. There is no middle ground. There is no ambiguity. Either it happened or it didn’t. Period.

And who is to blame if one sets out to gain bigger biceps and triceps and fails? You guessed it. The person who established these goals in the first place and nobody else.

One other facet of female bodybuilders that must be addressed is the fact that FBBs are, for the most part, not worried about being popular or widely accepted by society. A woman who chooses to pursue bodybuilding in any serious manner is opening herself up to a variety of different kinds of obstacles – many of which she would not face had she not decided to become a bodybuilder.

It’s no mystery that a woman with big muscles is an unusual sight to see. Simply put, these women are rare in our world. Yet, a small number of remarkable women are actively working to build big muscles despite the potential backlash that might come with it. Many will receive looks of repulsion or disgust. Accusations of being “too manly” or “becoming a man” will start to flood in. There will be those who will ask her “do you have to get that big?” Others will question her life choices and wonder if she’s hiding something.

But no matter what comes her way, a female bodybuilder must be tough-minded and relentless in the pursuit of her dreams. She must endure people looking at her differently. She must accept the fact trolls on the Internet will post nasty remarks about her. She knows the road to becoming a pro bodybuilder will be strenuous…but she does it regardless. That’s not easy to do. There aren’t too many of us in this world who are capable of breaking all those barriers, jumping over all those hurdles, and trudging through all those obstacles when the easier road is to not pursue bodybuilding in the first place.

She does what she wants to do knowing it won’t be popular with everyone. Yes, she will meet people along the way who will support her, but certainly that won’t be everybody. Doing the right thing – following your dreams – despite outside noise takes emotional and intellectual fortitude. Do you honestly believe some of our elected representatives share that same level of internal strength?

Catherine Holland could start a nuclear war over her physique.

The final point I’ll make (although I could go on further) is that a female bodybuilder possesses a deep understanding of how the world works and must apply this knowledge practically in the quest of her chosen profession. She needs to be an entrepreneur, agent, marketer, business manager, scheduler, public relations specialist, nutritionist, athletic trainer, and personal ambassador all at the same time. As a small fish in a big pond, an FBB’s success or failure wholly depends upon how well she understands her circumstances and how she can cultivate an accomplished career from it (or despite it).

In this respect, female bodybuilders earn what’s coming to them. They aren’t “given” success. Nobody votes for them to have large muscles or a chiseled physique. They have to expel blood, sweat, and tears day in and day out to achieve their bodies. Granted, a panel of judges does elect how she places at a competition, but that’s an exception. For the most part, she wouldn’t have been able to reach that point of being on that stage unless she put in the hard work beforehand. Besides, actual competing is only a small part of the rewards that come from bodybuilding.

The biggest reward is the personal satisfaction of knowing that you’ve accomplished something grand. Nobody can take that away from you. Your opponents may have more trophies than you, but what every single competitor has is the sense of triumphant pride that comes with pursuing a goal with manic obsession. Truly, an FBB earns her success. That’s how the real world operates.

Presidents, prime ministers, senators, representatives, governors, MPs, city councilmembers, mayors, and other positions of elected authority do not always share these same traits. It seems rather odd to have a system where the power to regulate, tax, create new laws, authorize war, or incarcerate citizens are given to people who get that job simply by winning a glorified popularity contest. Very strange, indeed. But, that’s the system we have until something better replaces it.

Here in the United States of America, we give the nuclear codes to people we wouldn’t trust to manage the local Burger King. We trust those who’ve never ran a business to regulate businesses. We ask people who’ve never served in the military to send young men and women they’ve never met to a foreign country and die for an ambiguous cause. To summarize, we elect people who don’t understand how the world works to decide how the world works.

Insanity.

However, ask I’ve just articulated, a female bodybuilder does understand how the world works. She has to in order to survive. She must understand how to relate to people. She knows what it’s like to be a businesswoman…because she essentially is a one-woman business. She does what she does regardless of how unpopular it might make her. At the end of the day, a female bodybuilder shares these characteristics:

Mental toughness
Adaptability
Entrepreneurial savviness
Focus
Intelligence
Knowledgeable about the real world
Grit
Strength – both physical and emotional
Ability to earn her success
Independence

As I’ve said before, the list can go on and on. But you get the idea. I’m not suggesting that we should actually elect current or former female bodybuilders to high positions of political power just because they happen to be current or former FBBs. However, what I do want to illustrate is that FBBs boast a unique perspective on life that cannot be easily replicated or transferred.

I'd appoint Nikki Fuller as my Secretary of Muscle. — I’d appoint Nikki Fuller as my Secretary of Muscle.

She’s earned her success. She’s forged her own path. She’s self-taught herself topics in areas like calisthenics, biology, science, nutrition, sports medicine, etc. She lives in an environment that can be cruel and adversarial toward her. She knows how to persevere through obstacles and come out better for it. She must adapt to her surroundings…or die refusing to do so.

That’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not for everyone. Certainly not people who’ve existed in an Ivy League-encrusted silver spoon-fed bubble for their entire lives. As Americans go to the polls on November 8 they should ask themselves, “How the hell did we get here in the first place?” It’s a perfectly valid question; one that doesn’t have any easy answers.

But perhaps the answer is simple. We, as a nation, don’t value the right things. We value what we want to hear, not what we should hear. We live in a fantasy world full of bright shiny objects, not in the real world where decisions have actual consequences.

Female bodybuilders, on the other hand, do not get to live in such a magical universe. They must always be on their toes. They cannot get lazy or entitled. They must continuously grind in order to reach the Promised Land – which nobody actually promised them at all. In short, female bodybuilders represent humanity at its best. FBBs don’t make empty promises about what they think they’ll do. They actually do it every single day of their lives.

I’d vote for that.