DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Female athletes, no matter how great their achievements, are always given the added burden of having to simultaneously focus on their attractiveness. In the world of bodybuilding and muscle competitions, this expectation is most definitely applied to women who enter the sport. Some outside observers have found it odd and fascinating that women with such large muscles would don so much make up, have such styled hair, and wear these very expensive bejeweled bikinis. They see it as a way of straddling the feminine and the masculine. And surely, professional women bodybuilders do challenge conceptions of our gender binary system with their chiseled bodies and classically feminine accessories. However, what many may not realize is the extent to which professional competitors are critiqued by judges based on these factors.
In American culture, women’s bodies are commodified and classified. Bodybuilding may seem like an obvious extension of this practice; competitors train hard to perfect their bodies for experts to judge them and award prizes. It is more complex than that, especially when it comes to women’s participation. That fact that it requires extreme dedication to compete should be a no-brainer. However, women also are judged by their femininity, a quality that encompasses several aspects but is loosely defined and can vary from contest to contest. Competitors will be marked down if the judges are unsatisfied with their faces, hair, make up, skin tone, or outfit. Female bodybuilders also are expected to not be too muscular, even though the goal of competing in a bodybuilding competition should be to show off how shredded you are.
The duality of these feminine characteristics and the desire to be a strong, muscular woman is what piqued my interest in the subject. Female bodybuilding has been studied within academia for the ways in which it personifies and questions conventional ideas about gender performance, and I did in fact first learn about the topic within the classroom. As someone who has become increasingly more comfortable with my identity as a feminist and as a student of documentary filmmaking, Cutting Up became a passion project. I have struggled with my own self body image and the pressures of mainstream media’s promotion of the “ideal” body type. I was curious to learn how muscle competitions served as an allegory for patriarchal, hetero-normative society.
After interviewing my first participant, Cheryl Stoneham, and attending a Labor Day competition at Muscle Beach, I learned of a new angle – the divisions within which women compete are many, the boundaries somewhat subtle. However, the amount of women bodybuilders entering contests has decreased rapidly in the last few years, while many women are entering in the recently established Bikini division, which personifies a sexy, soft-bodied look. I saw a link between the popularity of the new Bikini division and the long-standing feminization of women bodybuilders.
Cutting Up weaves together interviews with Cheryl (who is a figure competitor, a less muscular look compared to bodybuilders), Cary Dinapoli (a bodybuilder), and Lenda Murray (a retired professional bodybuilder and 8x Ms. Olympia champ). The film also provides inside looks within competitors’ homes, footage from Muscle Beach, and a stylized posing routine featuring Cary.
I wanted to combat portraits of woman bodybuilders that cannot move beyond the spectacle of their bodies. I do not examine them as “freaks” or addicts. News coverage often looks at their choices as the extension of some kind of mental illness under which they are suffering. Other media featuring women bodybuilders in a serious light is hard to find. Pumping Iron II: The Women is sometimes cited, but I found their portrayals of women to be very sexualized.
The future of women’s bodybuilding is unclear, but the women featured in this documentary end their predictions with strong hope that figure and bodybuilding competitors will reclaim the stage. As a pleasant surprise that re-affirmed my goals for this project, a popular online message board for women muscle competitors, Siouxcountry.com, recently heard of Cutting Up by way of my funding campaign and have expressed great enthusiasm and support. To me, it shows that there really is a strong desire for their voices to be heard.
- Veronica Pinkham
