A note on female bodybuilding

Nancy and I have  recorded a podcast on her observations about male vs. female bodybuilding and another about why she is doing this at all.  We'll be posting this material over the next week at our podcast site.  Some of these conversations were in direct response to a comment Scott Bird had left on the podcast blog about what Nancy might think the future of female bodybuilding was in light of some recent trends.

Specifically, it is hard to get sponsorship as a female bodybuilder, although Nancy has done OK for limited amounts.  Further, the number of female competitors is quite small relative to men, and both sides of the sport are starting to be overshadowed by the female shape competition.

A simple synopsis of shape is that it consists of grown women adopting the pose of Barbie Dolls and executing quarter turns at the judges' cue.  It's somewhat remarkable that this sport has taken off at all.  It's the most boring thing to watch, ever.  Any version of bodybuilding is infinitely more interesting to watch.  The competitors actually do something in that sport.

However, an insight that came to me while I was at Nancy's show was that promoters are doing these shows as much for what the competitors personally bring to the table as for an exernal audience.  Competitors had to pay $50 per event with many of them competing in multiple events.  The shape competition easily had 30 competitors with each in an average of 2 events, dwarfing male and female bodybuilding.  That's $3K on shape alone.  For the evening show, there were probably two hundred audience seats that went for $30 dollars and another 150 at $20.  That's $9000 total.  So, competitor receipts from shape alone were about 1/3 the audience total.

Now, consider that most audience members were at this competition only because they knew someone there.  You realize that shape is taking over bodybuilding because it generates the most competitors who bring the most friends and family to watch them.  Shape doesn't have to have external appeal.

People claim female bodybuilding is dying because it does not have external appeal.  At the local level, I suspect it is dying because there are not enough competitors bringing enough friends and family to the shows.  Basically, there's no external appeal for any of it at the local level.

So, the question has to be why there are not more female bodybuilder competitors.  I suspect, as I mention to Nancy in one of our upcoming podcasts, it's because bodybuilding is based on a male ideal.  Most women don't want to try to attain that ideal, and large parts of it are unattainable anyway because men and women have different morphs no matter how much they chemically alter themselves. 

The women's sport has to find its own ideal.  It will be interesting to see if women like Nancy can help them find it.

Comments

[Scott]

I'll wait until I watch the podcast to find out Nancy's thoughts on the matter, but I tend to think that the shape competitions are 'winning' not because of the local audience, but because of the people watching from afar. It's far more common for women to see photos of a figure or fitness competitor and say 'I want to be like that' than it is to hear them say the same thing about a female bodybuilder.

I'm not suggesting that I agree with this; it's purely an observation.

[Bud Gibson]

I think you are right about what gets women to do it. I was just speculating on what keeps the promoters' engines running.