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The Paradoxes of Feminine Muscle

In a new book, the author Casey Johnston argues that pumping iron helped her “escape diet culture.” But a preoccupation with strength can take many forms.

Women, it was said, wanted not muscle but “tone,” which was thought to be achieved through “fat-melting” repetitions with rubber weights that didn’t exceed five to eight pounds or so, lest one grow “bulky.” This was standard ladies’-magazine fare in the two-thousands, when a body like Britney Spears’s could be accused of being too buff. As Michael Andor Brodeur, a lifter and classical-music critic, puts it, in his delightfully personal cultural history, “ Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle,” out in paperback this month, “Without good form, you invariably obliterate yourself,” an adage that reads as both blunt—in a “check yourself before you wreck yourself” sense—and philosophical. His own ideas of the male form were forged by eighties television and by a thickset phys-ed teacher whom he crushed on as a closeted youth, when he sneaked gay porn between the pages of muscle mags like Flex, the hetero-approved answer to the homoeroticism found in beefcake magazines of earlier decades.

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