Rough Draft

Edmund Adjei

Eng. 201

Greenlee Brown

Bodybuilding is one of the most versatile of all athletic activities. It can be used for a variety of purposes: getting stronger, improving looks, losing fat, strengthening weaknesses or preventing injuries. These bodies that countless bodybuilders create challenge the notion of health. In no way, do their bodies align with the notion of health. Nowadays, bodybuilders have achieved what was thought by many to be impossible. In my opinion, bodybuilding should only be taking to a certain extent, anything over, is putting your body at risk as well. In “Roxanne Edwards is Superhuman" by S. Adrian Massey III, the female bodybuilder Roxanne Edwards is referred to as superhuman. Things that weren’t even imagined to be possible are now standing within people in public. “Hard Bodies” by Stuart Ewen as well does well to depict the daily lifestyle of bodybuilders and what is going on in a bodybuilder’s mind. In “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture” by Heather Cassils, the bodybuilder Heather Cassils is seen as an art and not a body when it argues “I documented my body as it changed, taking four photos a day, from four vantage points. I collapsed 23 weeks of training into 23 seconds, creating a time-lapse video”. This shows that bodybuilding is seen as the impossible, “the over-achieved”, an art, to the extent that they challenge the notion of health.

Health is defined as a person’s mental or physical condition or rather, the state of being free from illness or injury. Factors that are most important in clearly defining the state of health through exercising are now put at risk. Healthy kidneys, healthy lungs, etc. These are all highly essential to the human body, yet bodybuilders again and again put it at risk and take drugs such as steroids and countless other supplements all to maintain their image. At that point, they are not increasing their healthiness but rather endangering it. This then leads to the conclusion that not every bodybuilder’s reasoning and motivation is healthiness. There are countless of reasons for bodybuilders. Take Heather Cassils for example, the purpose of her indulging her body in such activities was pure experimentation. In “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture” Heather Cassils mentions “I wanted this project to be a reflection of the value that is placed on the surface and what goes into constructing that surface. This is why I decided to take the steroids”. In essence she wanted to show people the whole concept of bodybuilding whether it be the consequences, the benefits, and etc. For Raymond H in “Hard Bodies” by Stuart Ewen his reasoning is straight-forward and simple. In “Hard Bodies” Ewen mentions what Raymond H. is trying to achieve “He is hoping to achieve the body he always wanted. Perhaps it is fitting that this quintessential, single, young, urban professional-whose life has become a circle of work, money culture, and the cultivation of an image-has turned himself, literally, into a piece of work.”. For the female bodybuilder Roxanne Edwards however, her reasoning is entirely different. In “Roxanne Edwards is Superhuman" by S. Adrian Massey III Roxanne goes ahead to state “What made me start working out is I wanted to look good naked. Now I look good naked. What makes you think that I’m gonna put clothes on it so that you can’t tell that I look good naked? Are you insane?”.

Growing up as a child, I always heard the saying “nothing comes easy in life”. I have come to see that this saying is true. For example, Roxanne Edwards had public repercussions once she began to get closer and closer to the body she wanted to achieve. In “Roxanne Edwards is Superhuman” Roxanne states “All I am is muscle and eyes and teeth and some abs. That’s it!”. She goes on to to say that she lost her breasts and it is now all muscle because women start off with their breasts as body fat. As Roxanne gets closer and closer to her end goal as a bodybuilder she begins to experience public repercussions such as not being categorized as a woman anymore. People begin to see her as a man and fear her when they see her in the street. With the photos taken of her on dismagazine, they depict her as out of place as if she doesn’t belong like a superhuman. She is neither seen as a woman nor a man however to her she is just expressing her femininity through her life or as Roxanne says in her interview, “femininity is not necessarily about the breast but how you be as a woman”.

Heather Cassils on the other hand experiences private repercussions. In “Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture” Heather Cassils states “It became difficult to sense my limits: what was too much weight? The muscles could handle it, but what about the stabilizing joints and tendons? This dysphoria spread to other parts of my life. I felt ungrounded and in flux -- like my inner compass was off. I also felt like shit. I was so tired all the time from all the heavy lifting. My joints ached constantly, and my muscles became so tight that my girlfriend had to take my t-shirt off at night because I was no longer flexible enough to do so myself.” At this point, one begins to ask themselves if it is even worth it anymore to continue on such a path. As Heather states in the article “Within the training I pushed past what I thought was humanly possible for my body and I reached new terrains of strength and power.”. Bodybuilders are pushing past the limits we thought humans had. They are challenging the whole notion of health, a concept thought to be completely understood by the world.

The relationship between a spectator like myself who looks at images of these people and the people themselves such as Roxanne Edwards and Heather Cassils is a strange relationship because it depends on the image or message that the bodybuilder is trying to send whether it is a motivational message or just showing it off to the world. When I first looked at Roxanne Edwards images of her body, I was shocked. Society has made it so that a woman having such a masculine body is not acceptable which is the root of my amazement. I imagine other spectators are frightened by the bodies created by these people because nobody thought it to be humanly possible. In “Hard Bodies” Ewen goes ahead to say that, “Health clubs thus can be seen as factories that produce the sorts of bodily objects that America values, with Nautilus machines standing in as the tools of mass production.” Bodybuilding at the stages of Roxanne Edwards, Heather Cassils, and etc are no longer aligned with the notions of health but have rather challenged the concept of health and as Ewen states are now building “bodily objects”.