women throughout the world and history have always shown us. Women are workhorses in most of the developing world. !Kung women carry loads of a hundred pounds on their heads or backs for miles and miles. If the world's women went on strike, the world of work would effectively stop, and you cannot say that with certainty for the enterprises of men. For the vast majority of women, the injunction to be strong would ring silly. They are strong of necessity, by sweat and callus, and if they combined their strong ways with a better diet, clean water, and good medical care, they might prove a race of Jeanne Calments, the longest-lived person the earth has yet seen.
|
In the West, however, women have experienced a kind of contrapuntalism, a clashing of lifelines. Longevity has increased while the need for physical strength has declined. We are living longer. We are women, after all, and how sturdy our systems are. At the same time, we are demyosinated, with ever less seduction of the muscle tissue, which yearns to be wooed. The more we persist, the more we need muscle. But our world gives us little opportunity to obtain it naturally, and so we must seek it through artifice, discipline, and homily. We must give ourselves reasons to be powerful, and the more reasons we conjure, the better. You don't want to look muscular? You just want to look toned? But you're not a Gregorian chant; you're a century-in-waiting. Pray to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, for her huntswoman's quadriceps and her archer's orbed arms. You'll be happy to have them when gravity, ruthless gravity, starts fingering your merchandise and toying with your heart.
|
To understand a woman's profound need of muscle, it helps to consider the constituents of a nonexistent yet utilitarian couple, the Reference Woman and the Reference Man. This couple is a medical and political construct, a post-Hiroshima Atom and Eve. In the 1950s, under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission, scientists set out to determine the potential impact of nuclear radiation on the human body. They wanted to know how much alpha, beta, and gamma radiation the body could tolerate, and because different tissues react divergently to radiation, they had to come up with estimates of what substrates the average man and average woman were made. In the portraits that emerged, the Reference Hominids are both twenty-five years old. This is the age at which the body's various organs are thought to be at their peak size and performance and its metabolic set point is well estab-
|
|