The Way Legs Were

With the notable exception of the (then and now) freaky pair of legs that belonged to a certain Bev Francis, back in my formative years as a female muscle head, the only legs around were rarely as muscular as the majority of women who compete in the physique division today. However, it is, as Einstein once said, all relative, and at the time, the women I saw in the muscle magazines I obsessively bought were more than big enough to get my teenage eyes popping out of my head (among other things).

So today, courtesy as ever of the heroes who scan and upload images from those 1980s mainstream muscle magazines, a trip down memory lane, a bit of nostalgia for all those furtive purchases we made in newsagent’s all over the world and the women that made those purchases so urgent. Today, we remember the way legs were.

Rachel McLish

I don’t remember this image particularly, but it serves to indicate how little muscle (by today’s standards, and even, in some ways, by early 80s standards) it took for a woman to be ‘muscular’ back then. I arrived at the female muscle party just a little late for Rachel McLish in her competitive pomp, but it seems to me she actually got bigger after she stopped competing.

Carla Dunlap and Clare Furr

Brian Eno named-chacked Carla in a recent interview, provoking some bizarrely hysterical reactions from the female muscle brethren (more about that on FMS in the future). He says, I remember in the early 1980s when female bodybuilders first started appearing and there was one I really liked, Carla Dunlap. She was Ms Olympia or something like that. She was this amazing black woman, absolutely musclebound, beautiful. ‘Absolutely musclebound’, he says, and that’s exactly what Carla would have seemed to be at that time, not just to Eno but to me too. To her right, Clare Furr’s (slightly later) thighs seem positively other-worldly compared to Carla’s. ‘Absolutely musclebound’ back in the early to mid-80s could become ‘hardly musclebound’ almost overnight.

Tonya Knight and Mary Roberts

As I recall, images of women training like this one of Tonya squatting were far more numerous in the magazines of the 1980s, and only if you were lucky would there be the kind of ‘glamour shot’ the we can see Mary Roberts in here on the right. It sometimes came (again, this is as I recall, so don’t take this as gospel) at the beginning or end of a training photoset, I guess as a way of showing how the hard work pays off. I found, in general, that these shots were much more attention-grabbing, presumably because they were more unusual.

Marjo Selin

And gradually, legs got bigger. Compare the next few groups of images. I really can’t say if they are at all chronological (this post is simply not that well-researched!), let’s call it ‘legological’ or perhaps ‘podological’ (!). I just wanted to illustrate the point somehow. By the time you get to Jackie Paisley, who is (and I do know this) very much late 80s and into the early 90s, legs have, well, you can see for yourself, changed.

Lisa Lorio, Janet Tech and Juliette Bergmann in her early days.

Sue Gafner and Dorothy Herndon

Marie Mahabir, Rene Casella and Jackie Paisley

Sandy Riddell and Anja Langer

Two of my favourite pairs of legs of the period (among many). I was especially taken with Anja’s calves. Even today, as I look at the way they bulge outwards so that you can see them even when looking at her leg front on, they are magnificent, so at the time they would have been quite literally breathtaking.

Cory Everson

This image, for me, evokes a lot about that time in my female muscle life, not least the way the women in the magazines used to always seem to be glistening. The style of photography of the time, no doubt, nothing more, but I came to think of that sheen as the glow of health and vitality that only female bodybuilders possess. Impossible to post anything about the 80s without her, Cory is the epitome of female muscle in that decade, her legs as much as any part of her wondrous physique. Funny now to think that once upon a time I couldn’t imagine Cory and her contemporaries getting any bigger or better.

Enjoy!

Abs Week: Abs of Yesteryear

or THE ABS THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH ABS

Anja Langer

My first Abs Queen. Soon after I first got turned-on to female muscle, I saw an issue of Muscle & Fitness in my local newsagent with Anja on the cover in contest shape in a black bikini (very similar to the image on the right if that is not the image itself). I couldn’t have stopped myself buying it even if I’d wanted to. And of course the reason I bought it was so that I could masturbate while looking at her, but while I did plenty of that, I also remember spending a lot of time just looking at her, following the contours of her muscles with my eyes and thinking how perfect her body was. And thinking the most perfect part of her body was her stomach (I doubt I even knew they were called abs then).

Tonya Knight

I’m pretty sure that the reason for my reaction to Anja’s, Tonya’s, and countless other female bodybuilders’ abs in those first few years was that I had never seen anything like them before, and they were so different from the norm. This must have been the reason for the intensity of my physical response to them. Sure, I’d seen athletes, but they weren’t wearing bikinis and deliberately flexing. This was a completely new concept to me, and these were a completely new kind of woman.

Sharon Bruneau

A female muscle Etna, Sharon smoulders in the kind of abs-revealing swimsuit that seems to have gone right out of vogue. And I think that is a crying shame, because once upon a time, there was a teenage female muscle fan who used to jump for joy when he found one of his pin-ups in a magazine who was wearing one.

Sandy Riddell and Valerie Scott model two more examples.

Whether these swimsuits revealed as much of the pec area as they did the abs (like Sharon’s above) or revealed just about everything else (like Valerie’s) didn’t (and still doesn’t) matter to me. There just needs to be a space where the abs go. For what it’s worth, I reckon the abs-revealing swimsuit (there is probably a proper name but I don’t care what it is) died because there are simply not enough women in the world who look good in them to make it economically viable. Or something.

Juliette Bergmann and Marjo Selin

MAJOR teenage crushes. While my classmates pasted the lead singer of The Bangles (whatever her name was) to the inside of their locker doors, and I pretended to like her too, of course, back at home I was drooling over the likes of Juliette and Marjo. Not only did they have the sexy sexy abs (as well as other muscles) that I desired, they were just so EXOTIC. I still find the young Juliette’s unique beauty absolutely mouth-watering, and as for Marjo, I didn’t even know how to pronounce her name (Mar-Joe? Mar-Yo?) and it doesn’t get any more exotic than that.

Alphie Newman

To a boy from the suburbs of London, Alphie seemed to be the epitome of the all-American girl. An all-American girl with a six-pack and muscles everywhere else too. And what’s more she was more or less the same age as me, leading to all sorts of fantasies. Unfortunately, in the suburbs of London in the late 1980s, girls like Alphie were in short supply. My imagination, though, was limitless.

Tara Dodane and Marie Mahabir

Issues of muscle magazines with contest reports of female bodybuilding shows were always must-buys. These days female bodybuilding is a footnote in the general muscle media, but once upon a time there were full page pictures of all the top placing contestants and their big hair and ripped abs.

WPW Covers

Whether there were abs on the cover or not, WPW was always a must-buy, but here’s two examples of covers that would have got me even hotter under the collar than usual, from issues that were over ten years apart. On the left, female muscle pioneer Kay Baxter, and on the right an image of Karen Netterstrom that I reckon has become one of the iconic shots of female muscle fandom.

Christa Bauch and Charla Sedacca

And inside the covers of those WPW magazines, physiques the likes of which I had never imagined. They were so different from mainstream portrayals of ideal beauty, they were so lean, their muscles so defined, and for me they were so exciting to behold. In those days, you thought you might be the only one who found these women beautiful and sexy, leading to all kinds of confusion. It’s a better world for female muscle fans now that I can share my love of images like the ones of Christa and Charla with you.

Laura Creavalle and Negrita Jayde: Unforgettable

And to finish, back to the mainstream muscle media. Two images that I would have first come across in the mainstream muscle mags as a teenage boy and then rediscovered through the internet many many years later thanks to the efforts of the lovely people who scan. These images of Laura and Negrita were so familiar after so many years that I could almost smell the magazine when I saw them again. The kind of images from my youth that made me the female muscle fan I remain to this day.

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to vote for your favourite abs!

Unbuttoned/Unzipped of the Day

Let’s go back for a moment to the magazine years. The time when every issue of every major muscle mag contained pics of proper female bodybuilders. My female muscle lovin’ eye was always caught by images that are generally referred to these days as ‘Unbuttoned’ or ‘Unzipped’. As I remember, these images tended to be in Robert Kennedy’s Musclemag, always the racier of the major publications (maybe because it was Canadian) but I really can’t say with any certainty if that’s actually true or not.

Anyway, while Crockett and Tubbs were keeping Miami safe from crime, the muscle babes had big hair to go with their big muscles, and images like the ones below offered something a little different and a little more exciting than the usual training or posing pics, and not just because of those big bouffy 80s jackets with enormous collars. While displaying less than normal of the subject’s physique – the arms and shoulders were covered – at the same time the jackets were open, revealing a teasing glimpse of the bikini and the body underneath. As a result, my imagination was stimulated.

Marjo Selin and Cory Everson

This image of Marjo, in particular, seared itself into my brain, and many years later when I came across it again on the internet, it took me straight back to my teenage female muscle lovin’ days. Those abs looked as good as they had the first time, but its her sultry beauty and the no-nonsense hand on the hip that elevates this image to iconic levels. One of the great female muscle images, methinks.

I would, of course, imagine what the muscles I couldn’t see would look like, using those I could as a guide to size and definition. I would reckon, for example, that judging by Sue Gafner’s thighs and abs, her shoulders are pretty damned ripped. And I would imagine that Sue had just opened the jacket. And she had opened it just for me because she wanted me to see her magnificent body. And she wasn’t going to stop there. Opening the jacket was just the start. She was going to take it all off.

Sue Gafner

The criminally-underrated Sue Gafner stimulated my youthful imagination.

The only thing that could be better, I reasoned, would be the unbuttoned jacket minus the bikini top. And fortunately, I wasn’t alone in that last fantasy. Several years down the road and the magazine years were over, but the greatest of all female muscle mags, WPW, now had a website, and it was there that I found my fantasy come true, courtesy of the photographer, of course, but more importantly, courtesy of the sizzling Joan Bovino holding her denim jacket open to reveal her ripped tanned muscles beneath.

Joan Bovino

Fantasy made reality!

Thanks to the efforts of the people who scan images from the magazine years for the pics of Marjo, Cory and Sue. I’m afraid the FMS archive is noticeably lacking in any more Unbuttoned/Unzipped pics from that era, but fortunately, there are plenty more recent examples of this particular niche genre of female muscle image.

Welcome to Unbuttoned/Unzipped week!

Finn of the Day

Marjo Selin

This classic image of Marjo certainly takes this female muscle fan back to his teenage bedroom and all the sordid activities that went on there. At that time I couldn’t imagine a sexier or more sophisticated woman, and the fact that she seemed to appear in every edition of every muscle magazine around that time demonstrates that I wasn’t the only one who Marjo appealed to.

Having become the 1982 European Champ, and went on to stay at the top for the whole of that decade, competing in every Miss Olympia from then until 1989, when she hung up her posing suit.

Now, she lives in Maui, where she runs her own ‘fitness vacation’ business:

I would love to train you and help you achieve your own goals in health, fitness and wellness. I am on Maui and ready to teach you what to do. Whether you come by yourself or as a small group to visit the island, for just few days or for a longer fitness vacation, I can make personalized workout plans for you in my studio… and, we can go and do some beach fitness, too!

Please contact me, and we can create your own personal fitness vacation on Maui, Hawaii. I promise, you’ll get stronger, leaner, more confident, and you’ll do better in other sports and activities you love to do!

A vacation in paradise training everyday with Marjo? Where’s my piggy bank?

See if you can resist making a booking here

And to finish, some classic Marjo from the 1987 Miss Olympia

https://dailymotion.com/video/xp1i15?logo=0&hideInfos=1