Halfway through Ronnie Cramer’s 2001 documentary Highway Amazon, bottle blond Christine Fetzer speaks into a cordless phone. The camera is tight on her face, though by now we’ve seen over thirty minutes of her dense, sinuous body, including shots of her doing a dumbbell routine on the shoulder of a road beside bluffs of red sandstone. Even as she tours the country, she has to keep up her physique. After all, men at each of her stops—Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York; the list goes on—will pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the chance to wrestle a female bodybuilder. “It’s kind of an underground thing here, what I do,” she says into the phone. “People don’t believe you actually wrestle men on beds in hotel rooms.” In the next shot, a horizon is formed by the teal coverlet of a motel bed. Fetzer, wearing a black vinyl lingerie set, is on her feet, locked in a struggle with a weedy, olive-skinned young man who could have just walked out of a university chem lab. Her well-muscled arms are thicker than his, but he pulls her arm over his shoulder, spins his back into her, and gently rolls her onto the coverlet. The camera bounces. Moments later, they are both on the bed and she mounts his body, taking his head in a scissor hold between her thighs. For an instant before the shot cuts, her firm, rounded glutes jut out below his chin. This is the moment he has paid for: the erotic surrender. According to Fetzer, about 50 percent of these sessions will end with the client masturbating to climax as she stands out of reach, flexing.
Like most bodybuilders, Fetzer entered the sport believing she could make a living through contest winnings and sponsorships. But also like so many, she has found herself reliant on the thousands of men who lurk on forums and exchange photos of their favorite female bodybuilders, as well as hot takes, smut fiction, and reviews of “sessionettes” like Fetzer. This hobby, as it is commonly called, provides economic support for as much as half of all female bodybuilders. Without these men, there would be fewer women with the means to pay for gym memberships; spray tans; custom posing suits; choreographers; supplements; steroids, insulin, and human growth hormone (HGH); and, of course, treatments to counter the androgenic side effects. They are, by turns, reviled and welcomed. They are a lifeline. They are, in the parlance of the trade, schmoes.
Weird Flex
That women as nonconformist as Fetzer and her peers should depend on male intervention is less surprising when we understand their sport’s historical origins in the 1950s, when bikini or women’s “fitness” contests began to appear as side acts at male bodybuilding contests. Back then, these women more closely resembled pinups than today’s muscle-bound competitors. With few exceptions, female bodybuilders didn’t exist yet. This was the era when collegiate women played basketball on the half-court because running the full length was thought too strenuous. These pageants—for that is what they were—bore little resemblance to today’s bodybuilding competitions. While the entrants might cheekily flex a bicep onstage, it was understood that they were there to present trophies to the men, hang on their arms like ornaments, and otherwise service the male gaze. Muscles were not required or even wanted. What were required were bikinis, heels, makeup, and costume jewelry. The women’s function, like that of ring girls at a boxing match, was to affirm the tenuous heterosexuality of the all-male audience as they looked long upon slippery, shaven male bodies. Their feminine presence reflected a core anxiety of male bodybuilding: Is it gay to look at dudes? After all, by the 1930s, photographers were taking out advertisements in the back pages of physique magazines, offering “undraped”—read, nude—photographs of beefy men, and by the 1950s, homoerotic publications like Physique Pictorial were available on newsstands. It became so pervasive that in 1956, the mainstream fitness magazine Iron Man called for the eradication of “the homosexual element” that permeated physical culture, suggesting a ban on magazine advertisements for nude photographs. Similar worries would motivate bodybuilding kingpin Joe Weider when, in 1980, he decided that each cover of his flagship magazine Muscle & Fitness would feature both a man and a woman; a defense, he explained, against “the public’s lingering suspicion that bodybuilders were gay.”
The conundrum of the bodybuilder is that one’s career is often so poorly paid that it generally requires another career—or, more likely, gig—to support it.
But another thing drove Weider toward equality on the page: the dream of doubling his empire. Women were a market, after all. By 1983, the combined annual circulation of Muscle & Fitness, FLEX, and Shape—all published by Weider—had grown to one million. Furthermore, Muscle & Fitness, which began in 1940 as Your Physique, a mimeographed zine with very few ads, had become a full-color marketing vehicle for numerous Weider products: mass gainers and protein powders, exercise equipment, instructional videos, et al. In fact, before 1979, it exclusively advertised Weider products. All of this would have been enough for Weider to play kingmaker in a growing sport. The fact that his brother Ben ran the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation (later renamed the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness, and mystifyingly shortened to the IFBB in both instances), widely acknowledged to be the “only game in town,” seems almost gratuitous. That the American arm of the IFBB was, at least until 2017, a nonprofit is immaterial. The league was simply the black earth from which their crop grew and magazines the combine used to harvest it.
By the late 1980s, Joe and Ben Weider were worth an estimated $250 million. In 1993, anthropologist Alan Klein compared them to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, if he were to own 80 percent of football teams, plus Sports Illustrated and Sporting News. The completely integrated power structure of the IFBB and its amateur feeder organization, the National Physique Committee (NPC), headed by the brothers’ crony Jim Manion, is part of what made bodybuilding unlike any other sport. It meant the Weiders had the ability to make sure those athletes who brought them the greatest profit would win. When explaining the loss of Afro-Cuban phenom Sergio Oliva at the 1970 Mr. Olympia competition, Joe was blunt: “I put Oliva on the cover of my magazine, I sell x number of copies. I put Arnold [Schwarzenegger] on the cover, and I sell [three times] that.” This monopoly also gave the Weiders the power to freeze out athletes who displeased them, effectively ending their careers. In 1990, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon started his own bodybuilding league, the World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF), offering eyewatering contracts to lure top bodybuilders away from the IFBB. In retaliation, the Weiders eliminated from their magazines those who jumped ship, even persuading sponsors to cut ties as well. Unhappily for those athletes, the WBF lasted only two short years.
With such a juggernaut behind them, is it any wonder that the Weiders would take credit for launching women’s bodybuilding? When referring to his 1980 decision to put women on the cover of Muscle & Fitness, Joe Weider said, “I knew that if bodybuilding was to take off, we’d have to get women into it.” But they had already begun getting “into it” without his help. Three years earlier, in 1977, Henry McGhee Jr., the weight training director at a YMCA in Canton, Ohio, independently organized the Ohio Regional Women’s Physique Championship, the first true women’s bodybuilding competition—in the sense that things like facial beauty and breasts did not translate into medals. McGhee wanted competitors to be judged “like the men”: in terms of muscular development, symmetry, and presentation.
In 1980, the Ms. Olympia event was created by promoter George Snyder as a companion to the already famous Mr. Olympia. It was the first contest in which women posed like men, went barefoot like men, and wore no jewelry. In 1985, Ms. Olympia, now under Weider ownership, was held at the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden before an unprecedented crowd of over five thousand spectators. Five years later, 1990’s Ms. Olympia brought thirty entrants, the largest number ever seen. Yet by 2005, IFBB announcer and talking head Bob Cicherillo was complaining in FLEX Magazine, “Year after year, women’s bodybuilding has consistently lost money. One year, the Ms. Olympia sold 38 tickets . . . 38! So, the fans have spoken: from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t survive; nor can it survive.” What went wrong?
Muscular Creep
The conundrum of the bodybuilder is that one’s career is often so poorly paid that it generally requires another career—or, more likely, a series of gigs—to support it. In fact, the Weiders initially created Mr. Olympia with the aim of stanching attrition to more menial jobs. In its first year, 1965, the prize for first place was $1,000, or about $10,000 today, a sum that pales in comparison to current winnings. In 2023, for example, the top five male competitors received a combined $700,000, with $400,000 of that going to first place. The combined winnings of the top five female competitors in 2023 was just $95,000, with $50,000 going to first place. It’s not just that Ms. Olympia Andrea Shaw took home one-eighth of what her male counterpart did; the runners-up hardly took home anything. For either gender, only a tiny number of aspirants are ever able to make a living at what they love.
Nelson likens the sport to an addiction, and she believes the drug is “that moment of feeling true love, whether it was fakery or whatever” that happens onstage.
It makes sense, then, that the first thing Colette Nelson, two-time winner of the NPC USA Heavyweight Championships, told me over the phone was, “You gotta have a plan to get out. I think if you go into this sport thinking there’s some kind of rags to riches—it’s a hobby.” In the 1990s, Nelson and her boyfriend made their money onsite at competitions, offering hair, makeup, and tanning services to other hopefuls. They managed to make between $6,000 and $10,000 per show, but success like theirs is the exception to the rule. Even on a national scale, there is only ever room for a handful of businesses like Color by Colette. Furthermore, the work occupied a layer in what Nelson sees as almost a pyramid scheme built on the backs of hapless competitors, one which she believes preyed on “people’s desire to be loved, desire for some type of recognition.”
Unlike most sports, bodybuilding is not fostered by grade school and collegiate programs. Nor does it offer the familial support of figure skating or gymnastics; childhood does not mold the future athlete except, perhaps, psychologically. While the majority of bodybuilders start out as athletes of another stripe, the critical stage in their ontogenesis takes place in adulthood, and their careers peak much later than other athletes’. It’s a game of accrual rather than real-time performance. The average age of a Mr. Olympia winner is thirty-six; of a Ms. Olympia, thirty-two. Only shooting sports are comparable, because their accomplishment rests on acquired skill rather than the raw capabilities that fade with youth. (Equestrian events don’t count; the real athletes—equine—peak at fifteen or sixteen, like gymnasts, though this number has increased in recent years.) What this means is that any hopeful bodybuilder must commit to a long apprenticeship within the economic frame of the real world. One of my sources, fetish worker and former bodybuilder Brandi Mae Akers, put it this way, “You’re spending five to six hours a day training, doing cardio. I mean it’s really hard to have a life or a job or do anything else outside of that.”
In his 1993 anthropological study of male bodybuilders, Little Big Men, Alan Klein described four common ways his largely blue-collar subjects made a living: bill collecting, bouncing, bodyguarding, and beefcake. The first three of the four Bs require a physically threatening mien and are not typically available to women. Beefcake, however, knows no gender. Though it began, like bodybuilding, as a male genre with the homoerotic magazines of the 1950s, beefcake more or less realized gender parity in the VHS tapes of the 1990s and the online video clips and webcam sites of the 2000s, due in part to the economic pressures unique to female athletes, pressures that have grown along with the physiques themselves. Female bodybuilders did not start out as mass monsters. When the first Ms. Olympia, Rachel McLish, stepped onstage in 1980, she stood five feet, six-and-a-half inches tall, and weighed in at 130 pounds. Iris Kyle, who from 2001 to 2014 won first or second place—mostly first—was only half an inch taller but peaked in 2009 at a stupefying 165 pounds. In fact, if you lined up all the Ms. Olympia winners from 1980 to the present day, the overall pattern would be that of a matryoshka doll. This phenomenon, which I will call muscular creep, is the result of both athletes pushing the limits and judges mostly rewarding them for doing so, whatever the higher-ups might have to say.
In any event, as the standard for muscularity became increasingly difficult to achieve, competitors took more and more performance-enhancing drugs (PED) to keep up, something that both Nelson and Akers confessed was a factor in their own retirements from the sport. They simply didn’t want to take the quantities of drugs necessary to win, with good reason. Colette Nelson, who is now a nurse practitioner specializing in hormone replacement therapy, told me that a typical female bodybuilder will take between two hundred and four hundred milligrams of subcutaneous testosterone per week, two to four times the amount typically prescribed to trans men. On top of that, bodybuilders will stack another anabolic steroid such as Primobolan, Equipoise, or Deca-Dianabol. Insulin, which drives glucose into cells, including muscle cells, is also sometimes used. This is not what causes added financial pressure, however. The pink tax lies in managing the side effects of taking cross-sex hormones: laser depilation for body and facial hair, microneedling and platelet-rich plasma for hair loss, fat grafting for sunken cheeks, Botox for hypertrophied masseters. Perhaps even more troubling than the effects of anabolics are those of HGH. Taken to help cell growth and regeneration, HGH can cause acromegaly, the post-pubertal growth of cranial bones, leading to overdevelopment of the brow ridges, the jaw, and the nose—think of Andre the Giant, whose bones grew until his death—effectively masculinizing a woman’s face. This is what Nelson meant when she called PED use “a handshake with the devil.” But what compels someone to meet the devil at the crossroads?
The two major ingredients that seem to go into the making of just about every bodybuilder are a background in youth athletics and a core wound. As Nelson put it, “For every bodybuilder I’ve ever met, it comes from pain.” In her own case, it was a childhood diagnosis of type 1 diabetes that made her feel “broken.” Akers, too, has a story. In a 2010 interview on Real Sports, she told Bryant Gumbel:
My mother abandoned me when I was maybe about four or five. She was a prostitute and on and off drugs for the past twenty years. . . . I had no control, as a young kid, of my environment around me. With this, I’m able to control how my physique looks. I’m able to control my training in the gym. I’m able to control my body. For many, being able to make a living as a bodybuilder is an intoxicating dream.
This dream, this mirage, recurs again and again in bodybuilding media. Akers believes the illusion arises from the unique and bygone conditions of the 1990s and early 2000s. During that period, women could get paid sponsorships from gyms and supplement companies. They set up booths at industry expos, either representing a supplement brand or selling their own posters and 8 × 10s. They could bring in as much as $10,000 at larger events like Olympia Weekend. But after the dot-com boom, supplement sales moved online. Bodybuilding.com bought out hundreds of supplement companies, effectively eliminating most sponsorship opportunities. The posters and 8 × 10s were replaced by the jpeg. That Akers would have experienced this collapse as a bait-and-switch makes sense given the timing of her career, from 2000 to 2016, but even in the year 2000, there were much easier ways to make a living than bodybuilding. Nelson likens the sport to an addiction, and she believes the drug is “that moment of feeling true love, whether it was fakery or whatever” that happens onstage. But that doesn’t seem quite right either. Though I agree with her that it is compulsive, I would argue the thing that motivates bodybuilders is closer in nature to anorexia nervosa. After all, as Nelson herself admitted in our conversation, many female bodybuilders already have eating disorders, and many mistakenly believe that bodybuilding is a healthier alternative.
They are wrong. The period leading up to a show is called “prep,” and during this time the bodybuilder must maintain a caloric deficit while losing whatever is left of their body fat. The all-consuming level of control the process requires, combined with the physiological effects of starvation, often induce a submerged, numb state. For many, it is relieving. In a world of almost limitless variables, the bodybuilder only focuses on a few: macronutrients, repetitions, drugs. Everything else falls away. When I was prepping for my own first competition in 2015, in the much smaller Bikini category, my mother called to tell me that my grandfather had died. She wanted me to fly down to Texas for the funeral. I panicked. Although I knew that going was the right thing to do, the thought of being unable to control my eating struck terror in my heart. I was two weeks out from the show and had been reduced to eating tilapia, avocado, asparagus, and kale; to grinding out forty-five-minute cardio sessions on the elliptical; to going from grocer to grocer and buying out their distilled water because it was all I was allowed to drink. I was living in an alternate reality, and the death of my grandfather was an unwelcome impingement. I told my mother I couldn’t go. She offered to pay. I still refused. Only later did I learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger, while prepping for a show, had missed his own father’s funeral.
Only later did I learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger, while prepping for a show, had missed his own father’s funeral.
Still, I never took drugs. At that time, it wasn’t really required to compete in Bikini, although, ten years on, that’s changed. It’s easy for me to believe that had I used them and experienced androgenic side effects, I would’ve had the awareness and the willpower to stop. But such effects are insidious, often arriving so slowly that it is easy to rationalize them away. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous makes much of the “peculiar mental twist” that renders the alcoholic “without defense against the first drink.” Bodybuilders may fall prey to a similar mental twist, experiencing body dysmorphia that makes them size-blind and unaware of how they look to others. Nelson told me about an experience she had backstage with a woman whose face had been destroyed by PED use. As they stood side by side before the full-length mirror, the woman told her, “Look at how gorgeous we are.” Nelson was aghast. But even if, like Nelson and Akers, a woman is able to retire without permanent physical side effects, it doesn’t mean she emerges unscathed.
Akers told me she began producing fetish content after enrolling in college as a single mom. She’d tried doing some photoshoots for magazines but quickly realized there wasn’t any money in it. With the pressure of providing for her young son weighing on her, she started creating videos for the site Clips4sale. Five years later, she, like Christine Fetzer and so many others of her cohort, was doing fetish work in the flesh. “Sessions,” as they are called in the community, typically take place between a sessionette and a customer in rented hotel rooms and include private wrestling, lift-and-carry, posing, and muscle worship—which generally involves the customer applying oil to the sessionette’s muscles and feeling them up. Fetishistic wrestling is divided into two categories: fantasy and competitive. In the latter, the customer is allowed to really test their strength, but not all women offer it out of concern for their prime commodity, i.e., their bodies. There’s less risk of injury in fantasy wrestling, and it is less exhausting—an important consideration when one may have as many as six clients a day. Other delicacies include arm wrestling, tickle wrestling, and belly punching. Depending on the practitioner, and on the chemistry with the patron, these sessions may end in sexual favors or what is known in the hobby as “full service.”
Estimates on how many bodybuilders do fetish-for-pay vary wildly, but Nelson and Akers estimate that about half of female pros participate. In any event, private audiences with bodybuilders are more common than with, say, stage actors or jazz musicians, who might also make meager or inconsistent livings. Of course, bodybuilders possess a niche physique; to do fetish work, one has to be a fetish candidate, and specialized markets dovetail with financial need. But is it possible that bodybuilders are especially vulnerable? Both Nelson and Akers spoke of how self-absorbed their compatriots were, and Alan Klein wrote much in his monograph about the prevalence of narcissism among male bodybuilders. He interviewed one who admitted, when asked about hustling, “You have no idea how hard it is to stop. . . . It just makes you feel appreciated.” Of course, not everyone shares this sentiment. Colette Nelson, who admitted to testing the waters, found her patrons “so weird. You’re gonna pay me $700 to have me squat you and then you come all over my back. It’s just gross, man.”
Schmoe Money, Schmoe Problems
But who are the men who patronize female bodybuilders? Preconceptions abound. “If you picture that, like, pedophile-pervert-looking, sort of sick and fat, sitting behind the computer all [panting] like that, sweating and, you know, big, fat guy.” This is how Lee Priest, a retired Australian bodybuilder sitting in a power rack with his face half-consumed by a tribal tattoo, describes the archetype. The schmoe’s modus operandi, according to Priest, is to weasel his way backstage with a camera and a dubious press pass. A day or two later, “you’d see a girl in the gym or down in the park in her swimmers or a little tiny dress and high heels just walking back and forth, back and forth, and he’s fucking filming her. You know, how gullible. Poor girl.” While it spares their purity, Priest’s presumption that the women are being tricked condescends to their basic intelligence. After all, whether the photos will be published or further their career, they are getting paid for them.
Priest’s enmity toward schmoes makes sense, however. After all, he and his ilk have invested decades of their lives building a facade of muscle and strength. Some date petite women, as though to highlight their own bulk. Schmoes are the inverse, with some cultivating weakness in order to increase the erotic pull of strength. A good portion of fetish content features men of small stature being humiliated. One particularly potent example shows Kristina Nicole Mendoza, five foot five and 160 pounds of muscle, comparing her own massive legs to that of a diminutive male companion. To quantify his ignominy, she uses a measuring tape. Throughout the process, he is smiling. His system is likely flooding with adrenaline, heightening his arousal, and volunteering to be ridiculed gives him a sense of control. And then there’s the masochistic comfort of exposure, of hearing someone say what you’ve always suspected to be true. I once spoke to a woman with a humiliation kink who said that she appreciated outsourcing work (that is, self-criticism) that she always had to do herself. It was the emotional equivalent of hiring a maid.
A number of schmoes may be going undetected, passing as average bodybuilding fans.
Still, many schmoes work out, and, though the majority do, not all seem to want to be dominated. Some enjoy athletic bodies and vanilla sex. In an episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, the BBC journalist visits the bizarre sanctuary of female muscle advocate Charles Peeples. After a tour of the house, which has a fully equipped gym in the living room, they head over to a wooded area of the sixty-five-acre grounds to watch a video shoot. Every scene involves a female bodybuilder in a matching camo sports bra and booty shorts ambushing a man. Theroux volunteers to appear as an extra and have a woman crush him against a tree in a kind of fatal hug, which Peeples refers to as a “Kleenex moment.” Although Peeples is clearly into the idea of being overpowered by a woman, he carries a fair amount of muscle himself. At the end of the segment, he pinches the sleeve of Theroux’s polo shirt. “Work on these arms a little bit,” he says. “You still got some surplus space there.” A number of schmoes may be going undetected, passing as average bodybuilding fans. Whether the fetish market is bigger for women than men is untested, and opinions from the field are mixed. Colette Nelson believes muscle worship is just as prevalent in the gay community, while in Highway Amazon, Christine Fetzer estimated that there were “like four” males in the industry. Either way, the federations seem much more concerned about policing women than men.
In the decades since women first stepped onstage alongside male bodybuilders, the homophobia seems to have calmed—there have been hardly any women on the cover of Muscle & Fitness since the nineties—and been replaced by a kind of trans hysteria. In a 2019 interview, Cicherillo said, “The minute you put male hormones into the equation, it changes everything.” Fourteen years earlier, he’d predicted the category’s downfall. In the column “Chick on Chicks” in the September 2005 issue of Flex Magazine, he had this to say:
“It’s a niche market,” say its advocates. No, men’s bodybuilding has its niche market; women’s bodybuilding has no market; what little market it has is made up of schmoes and fetishists. Women’s bodybuilding is an oxymoron. Nothing in the term or the concept matches up. Beautiful, sexy and muscular do not make a harmonious package. Notice the hopeless desperate trend: when women’s bodybuilding became bestial and alienated all interest, women’s fitness had to be created to fill the gap. When that became too muscular and abandoned its audience, it had to be replaced with figure. What’s next, bikini contests?
Of course, Bikini was exactly what was next, one of the latest in a long line of categories added after efforts by the IFBB and the NPC to reign in muscularity failed. The first of these categories, Fitness, which involves a gymnastic or dance performance, was added in 1995, possibly in response to a debacle at the 1992 Ms. International. The favorite to win that year, Paula Bircumshaw, placed eighth, while the much smaller and conventionally pretty Anja Schreiner won, a choice that reflected an official move toward smaller physiques. Bircumshaw gave the judges—and Joe Weider—a piece of her mind onstage before receiving a standing ovation from the crowd of about four thousand. Afterwards, she was handed a two-year suspension. The year 2001 saw the debut of the Figure category, requiring a smaller physique, and in 2010, at last, Bikini. Finally, in 2012, a seeming death knell was sounded for the open division with the creation of Women’s Physique: essentially a rebrand of Women’s Bodybuilding, but with a muscularity ceiling and a ban on certain “masculine” poses. Two years later, the IFBB announced that they would no longer be holding the Ms. Olympia contest. The class was moribund. It simply wasn’t profitable.
Aerospace heir Jake Wood and his then-wife, bodybuilder Kristal Wood, disagreed. In response to the cancellation of Ms. Olympia, they created Wings of Strength, a subscription website that catered to schmoes. “The basic idea,” he said in a 2019 interview with Muscular Development, “was the same as any website like it. You go there, you pay your $17.99 a month membership, and you view all the photographs we have there, just thousands of female bodybuilders, and the first year we generated—our [gross] on that was just a little bit over one million dollars.” Unlike other subscription sites, a portion of Wings of Strength’s proceeds were diverted into a bodybuilding competition: the Rising Phoenix World Championships. It offered record-breaking prizes—first place took $50,000 cash and a muscle car—and it was sanctioned by the IFBB. But by 2019, pay sites like Wings of Strength were failing due to the rise of free pornography, Instagram, and OnlyFans. Wood planned to rework his model into a traffic-driven website and launch a media push, but the promised makeover never materialized: if you go to wingsofstrength.net today, the website barely loads. The Rising Phoenix World Championship endures, however, its main source of funding an open question. The organization did not respond to a request for comment, but there are speculations that the contest is being paid for out of Jake Wood’s pocket or subsidized by the Olympia Weekend, which Wood purchased in 2020 along with the rights to Muscle & Fitness and FLEX magazines. Whatever the case may be, female bodybuilding’s initial resurrection had the fetishists to thank.
Nobody would dare call Jake Wood a schmoe. The term is derogatory, and Wood, at six foot six and about 270 pounds (my estimate), doesn’t fit the stereotype. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that a solitary superfan is propping up an ailing sport, hoping the world will change. Charles Peeples, on Weird Weekends, shared his sentiment. “One of these days the rest of the world will wake up to this. The problem is that most of the world hasn’t seen it the way it should be seen.” But Peeples and Wood may be too late. After years of shifting judging standards, corruption, and scandals like Bircumshaw’s, few women care to compete anymore. In Maria R. Lowe’s 1998 sociological monograph Women of Steel, one of her informers pointed to attrition in the ranks: “Yeah [the rules have changed], and they’re kind of stuck going, ‘Oh, you mean I just spent the last some odd years and some odd thousand dollars and all of this—I’ve lowered my voice, I’ve grown hair on my chin, and all this stuff—for nothing.’” That was in the late nineties. Things have gotten much worse since. FLEX has been folded into Muscle & Fitness, which is in print only because of Wood’s charity. In the mid-2010s, by evading his NPC board members, Jim Manion managed to shutter the nonprofit, transfer the rights to the logo to himself, and reincarnate the amateur physique organization as a for-profit business, ushering in the extractive capitalism of corporate America. When I asked Brandi Mae Akers which brand of exploitation she preferred, she replied sagely, “Whether onstage or in the fetish [world], you’re still a commodity.” Luckily or unluckily, for women disappointed with the federations, the schmoes will be waiting with open arms.