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"never seen a major female actor put on that amount of muscle....." You evidently missed Linda Hamilton in the original "Terminator" in 1984. Natalie Portman showed some really nice abs in "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," in 2002.
Regarding a "culture shift," I think we'll all have to work to keep what we have now in the US, considering the growing attempts to "re-religionize" our country.
I don't see that happening any time soon. Most women I know still think that they need to either eat their way to a big butt or starve themselves for a slim figure. Its amazing to me how few women actually even consider lifting weights to get in shape
Natalie was not buff. And the She-Hulk CGI looked ridiculous. But maybe you have a point, I hope you are right.
Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Jessica Biel in Blade 3, Jada Pinkett Smith in The Matrix sequels and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow were all considerably more muscular than Natalie Portman in Thor.
If anything, I think that Thor and She-Hulk demonstrate a worrying trend - that roles requiring actresses to add muscle will instead rely on digital editing. Both actresses in those series put on a little bit of muscle and then CGI did the rest as opposed to the examples I listed where the actresses actually gained a significant amount of muscle.
All of the examples so far have been constrained to Hollywood. What about social media and internet as a cultural shift?
A person does not need to go to the movies to see examples of muscular women. Sites like this are not hard to find either.
Do consider, that we humans are tribal creatures. Yes, it is always helpful to see an example of something as possible. A very small minority of people will then try to achieve the possible. However, a greater majority of people will think to themselves, mostly unconsciously, “that person is of a different tribe.” Consider concert pianists, or Olympic athletes, or elite performers of any type. How often do you look at them and think, “now that I have seen that, I will go do it.” Highly unlikely.
Social science shows, again and again, people tend to be most similar to those friends they spend the most time with. That’s their tribe. It is just that simple.
It seems to me that the culture shift towards increased acceptance of strong, muscular women has been happening for quite a while now. Unfortunately, these sort of widespread societal changes move VERY slowly depending on the country it's happening in and the progress isn't particularly linear.
I think it's super interesting that in this past year, we had buff Natalie Portman for the new Thor movie, and the She-Hulk series both come out almost simultaneously. I don't think people fully realize the effect this will have in influencing how the culture sees female muscle.
It always seemed to be a sub-culture in its own little corner of the world, while society always had a "don't ask don't tell" attitude towards it. At least that's my own opinion, maybe I'm over analyzing. But nonetheless, we've never seen a major female actor put on that amount of muscle for a role, and everyone is talking about it and they actually like it! What does this say about a possible shifting 'new normal' standard for beauty that might be upon us?
I mean think about it, in the renaissance period and even after then, being fat and plump was the beauty standard, then at the turn of the century, peaking in the 20's, super slim pole-like body was the standard, then in the 50's more full figured was the standard, now it feels like we're shifting again, but toward what? Is it just me?
It's just you . Confirmation bias. Some of us were there in the 80s and 90s which seemed more of a Golden Age of femuscle/fitness in the mainstream/Hollywood/magazine worlds , at least where you know where to look. Since then we've actually regressed in my opinion in terms of mainstream acceptance. Citing Portman is a joke, Plenty of actresses have been more buff for roles. She isnt't.
The internet now allows us to follow similar tastes and access our interests immediately , but it is still niche.
"the internet now allows us....." If one is home or in "favorable places."
I was traveling for business in February, 2020, just before the pandemic shutdowns. I was in a motel and tried to use its wifi to access GwM. GwM was blocked as not being "family material." Same thing happened when I was traveling for business again in April, 2022, in a far more upscale hotel.
As others have said, it's just you. Confirmation bias is so much easier with the internet: social media, search engines and browsers latch on to your browsing habits and form algorithms that insure that if you are a fan of muscular women, that you will see buff women as the majority of your browsing material. This is multiplied exponentially when you are on fetish sites like this, where there are pictures of hundreds if not thousands of muscular women.
That sounds like a lot until you factor in that the global population is just shy of 8 billion people. Yes, more women are finding their ways into the weight room, and resistance training is more accepted by women and they are welcomed more into the weight room than they might have been in the 80s and 90s. That being said, the number of muscular women (and by "muscular" I am going by a metric of "muscular enough to get on GWM" physique,) is still relatively small. As a Crossfitter who trains in a box with some pretty fit men and women, while there are a few truly buff women at my gym, the majority of women (and men), while still being fit, don't have the muscular build of what you are accustomed to seeing through your regular browsing habits.
I know a lot of dudes here want buff women to be "the new normal," but I honestly don't think that will ever happen. To get builds like this, you have to train extensively hard, have strict dietary habits and recovery, and what a lot of schmoes I think don't want to ackowledge, you have to hop on the PED bandwagon, and women in general are far less likely to do the latter than men.
I'm also into board gaming: I regularly play games like Terraforming Mars, War of the Ring, Twilight Struggle and Spirit Island. The algorithms on social media and search engines are constantly showing me board game content, along with people who are into the hobby. But while I am exposed to many people online who are into those kinds of games, the number of people I would run into on the street who have ever heard of those games, much less played them, are slim.
One only has to remember the unnamed Disney exec who kept yelling, "Make her smaller! SMALLER!" at the She-Hulk CGI artists to know where "the Culture" is on FBBs.
"the internet now allows us....." If one is home or in "favorable places."
I was traveling for business in February, 2020, just before the pandemic shutdowns. I was in a motel and tried to use its wifi to access GwM. GwM was blocked as not being "family material." Same thing happened when I was traveling for business again in April, 2022, in a far more upscale hotel.
Facts. NGL, it's always weird af when that happens. I mean, I can understand it at 36,000 feet (~11,000m for the uninitiated), but at sea level? Really??
At any rate, like I said before, you young guys are lucky as hell and barely even realize it. You're goddamn right the culture has shifted as technology gives us more and more of what we want at our fingertips.
Yes the imaginary muscles of Natalie Portman and the cgi shehulk muscles are gonna make a difference
A couple of fantasy comic characters is hardly a sea change. It's more indicative of the ongoing Disney/Marvel purge of white male characters from their roster. Supremely muscled ladies have been evident in fairly popular mainstream sports like athletics and gymnastics for decades, I think the general populous gets exposed to a buff female physique fairly regularly nowadays and it isn't the kind of jawdropping occurrence it may have been 30/40 years ago.
I think a cultural shift is happening in the USA but taking a long time. US society is ever more exposed to buff women while watching WWE, MMA, Olympics, DWS, CrossFit Games for example. Celebrities like Alex Rodriguez are publicly dating buff women like Kathryne Padgett (no pics on GWM). And depending on where you live, more and more buff women seen on the streets and in the gyms. These typical buff women are not FBBs but women who lift weights to look good and get strong and healthy and probably do not take any PEDs. It’s not yet a stampede but the numbers are steadily increasing. The percent of buff women in society may eventually land around the same percent as buff men (which is also a small amount). However, I think only a tiny fraction of the buff women, that I refer to, aspire to be real FBBs. Parts of Europe and Canada at least are way ahead of the cultural shift in the US. Unfortunately, there are lots of societal, cultural and political forces working against the normalization of buff women in the US.
I see a change more in the gyms and fitness centers with more and more fit and muscular women. I think with all the divisions available for competitions there may be more interested in working out for a show not there is not just a bodybuilding division. With regard to Mighty Thor/She Hulk coming up, keep in mind we have seen mere seconds of Portman as Mighty Thor and She Hulk still has two more months for cg work, so I am waiting to see the final product. And if the writing is bad, who cares if they get the cg right.
Pop culture is reflecting what is in the world.
There have always been muscular women for the past 40 years and there are other actresses that reflect that, Elizabeth Shue and Angela Bassett for example, and we are just noticing it more
Around 20 years ago, I was watching a high school crew regatta. My office had a river view of the Potomac River, and I saw high school crew teams training on the river in the afternoon (the universities used the same boat house but trained in the morning before I got to the office). I asked a woman who was evidently the parent of a member of a girls' crew what they did in the winter when the river sometimes froze over (I don't think it does that much anymore). Her answer was simple: "Lift weights and run a lot." If anyone had suggested that the girls in my high school class of 1965 "lift weights and run a lot," he would have been jailed for endangering the health of minors; a coach who suggested that would have been fired before being held for trial. (My high school's girls' sports program consisted of field hockey and soccer in the fall, 6-girl [i.e., half-court, 3-on-3] basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring, and I doubt that they did any conditioning except for drills and practice. Girls also bowled, I think on a combined team. The high school now has 10 girls' and 12 boys' sports, not including cheerleading and bowling.)
Some followers of this thread might be old enough to remember when the longest running distance for women in the Olympics was 800 meters, the multi-event track event included only 5 events instead of 7, and the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon had to enter under her first initial to disguise the fact that she was a woman (and a race official tried to tackle her to remove her from the race when he realized what she was). This was because everyone "knew" that women who tried to run farther than half a mile would collapse and die, or never be able to bear children afterwards, or at least have their overall health permanently compromised. Title IX has nearly wiped out men's NCAA gymnastics, put a ceiling on the number of lacrosse teams, and probably reduced the number of teams in other sports, but it has opened up opportunities in women's sports and introduced American women to weightlifting and other serious training. It's not uncommon for American women Crossfitters to have gotten into the sport after college graduation because they had been active athletes and didn't want to become couch potatoes. And there are other opportunities for adult women to stay in shape and use their muscles.
So the fashion/Hollywood insistence on only stick-figure wimps, even for very physically capable characters, is probably a remnant culture. That hasn't made the extremes of women bodybuilding necessarily more palatable to more than a tiny niche (that I don't occupy; the first word that comes to my mind about competitively successful women bodybuilders is "grotesque," and I'm skeptical that they are either fit or healthy). The United States--like the rest of the world--has a growing obesity problem, physically fit individuals are a minority in both genders, and few jobs now require the level of fitness that generally prevailed when almost everyone was a farmer or a hard-working farm wife, or, a little later, engaged in heavy factory labor. But I suspect that the number of women with physically undemanding jobs who "work out" in various ways because they enjoy doing so, or want to avoid the detrimental health effects of obesity and inactivity, is closer to the number of men who do that for the same reason than it once was.
Crossfit is an interesting case in this regard. It started as a conditioning program for a California municipal fire department that might have included a few female firefighters, but probably not very many--that's a job that remains heavily, although by no means 100%, male.. Perhaps some contributors to this thread who are Crossfitters themselves can give us their best guess about the sex ratios in their boxes. I don't think the organization has statistics on the gender breakdown for people participating in Crossfit at boxes, and they can't have any data on people who download the "workout of the day" and do it home on their own. But it looks like about 109,000 men participated in the worldwide on-line Crossfit Open, in which people submit videos of themselves doing 4 standard routines, compared to about 80,000 women. (The number who registered is larger, over 137,000 vs. over 110,000; it excludes not only the considerable number who submitted no videos after registering but also those who didn't submit them for all four routines.) That's a male-female breakdown of about 58%-42%, which isn't a great disparity. Since the worldwide totals include misogynistic countries, the disparity might be less than in the U.S. (To determine that, it would be necessary to go through the whole list of 147,000 and tabulate them by country.)
I suppose the above needs editing, but I've already spent more time on it than I really should have.
I appreciate all the interesting perspective here. Thanks to all for taking the time.
It’s shifting at a snail’s pace. Step away from social media for a week, and you may notice that buff girls are still an anomaly. Now, will Thor and She-Hulk make a difference? Maybe. But, that depends on how well-received the characters are. Even still, they’re not exactly walking meat markets in terms of mass. They’re pretty much in the same “toned” ballpark the average woman tries to achieve.
Haha love this thread. I have to conclude confirmation bias after all I've read here. Nonetheless, my conclusion has to be this: I'm right, and also not right. Our culture has not really become more accepting of female muscle, but it has become more "accepting" in general, of all things.
Our culture in a nutshell has become "that's unusual, but to each their own". That's why someone with a bad buff betty on their arm can feel more secure now than then. Keep your perspectives coming!
I think it's super interesting that in this past year, we had buff Natalie Portman for the new Thor movie, and the She-Hulk series both come out almost simultaneously. I don't think people fully realize the effect this will have in influencing how the culture sees female muscle.
It always seemed to be a sub-culture in its own little corner of the world, while society always had a "don't ask don't tell" attitude towards it. At least that's my own opinion, maybe I'm over analyzing. But nonetheless, we've never seen a major female actor put on that amount of muscle for a role, and everyone is talking about it and they actually like it! What does this say about a possible shifting 'new normal' standard for beauty that might be upon us?
I mean think about it, in the renaissance period and even after then, being fat and plump was the beauty standard, then at the turn of the century, peaking in the 20's, super slim pole-like body was the standard, then in the 50's more full figured was the standard, now it feels like we're shifting again, but toward what? Is it just me?