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Times have changed; they're looking for a mixture of muscularity and femininity and you have to be able to have both and these girls have a hard time figuring that out. Kate, interview transcript, 2002
Since the First Women's World Bodybuilding Championship in Los Angeles in 1979,i the relationship between femininity and muscularity has been the central problematic of the sport. Throughout the 1980s and 90s female bodybuilding flourished, as did the size of the athletes. Early pioneers such as Bev Francis, Lenda Murray, Carla Dunlap, and Cory Everson pushed female muscularity way beyond the sport's initial beauty pageant boundaries. However, these gains did not occur without growing moral panic-to the extent that gender-bending bodies are now being attributed to the "death of women's bodybuilding as a spectator sport" (Williams 2000:105). The most recent responses from bodybuilding gatekeepers to the increased muscularity of female competitors include the formalization of "femininity" as a judging criterion and the erasure of serious reporting on women's bodybuilding competitions in the bodybuilding media. Wayne DeMilla, vice president of the International Federation of Bodybuilding (IFBB), explained the factors that forced these developments to Iron Man magazine:
We saw that as the physiques became more extreme, we couldn't market it. At the beginning of 2000, we sent out a criteria (sic) that the athletes had to come in with more of an emphasis on symmetry and muscularity and that the face would be judged. We also switched to weight divisions so that the smaller women wouldn't have to try and get big like the larger girls. The Sandwich 2001:12
DeMilla's explanation not only underscores the growing intolerance for female hypermuscularity and persistence of sexism within bodybuilding, but it also signals a much more widespread cultural abhorrence for female strength and muscularity. The decision by the IFBB to actively institute "femininity" as an official judging criterion, while masculinity remains implicit with muscularity in men's bodybuilding competition, mirrors shift within American politics toward an increasingly conservative ideology. These shifts can be understood as a response to the gains made by feminist and civil-rights movements over the past few decades. In this context, developments in the patriarchal institution of women's bodybuilding can be understood as part of a broader cultural effort to protect normative sex,...