Sthenolagniac: March 2010

It's the mid to late eighties. Print was the dominant medium for a teenage female muscle fan. And there were plenty of magazines available to feed my need for images of muscular women.
To begin with, I had to be content with the few pages devoted to women in a typical issue of 'Muscle & Fitness', 'Flex' or 'Musclemag International'.

While my friends lusted over (a pre-muscular) Madonna, Bananarama or Pepsi and Shirley; my teenage crushes were Cory Everson, Erika Mes, and above all, Anja Langer. They lusted over Linda Carter as Wonder Woman, I dreamed of Rachel McLish in that costume, or Tonya Knight as a real-life She-ra!

It's quite possible that one, or maybe more, of my school friends were secretly thinking the same as me, but even if they had been, there was no way on earth they were going to let their peer group in on their secret, and neither was I.

At some point, probably through an ad in another muscle magazine, I became aware that there were magazines that ONLY featured female bodybuilders, and from that point on I would regularly take the train from the suburbs to central London to pick up issues of 'Female Bodybuilding', and the peerless 'Women's Physique World'.

WPW was a revelation. The presentation of the women was different from the other magazines. The women always seemed to be in contest shape, ripped and pumped. And whereas other magazines only ever showed the women in bikinis, swimwear or training in the gym; in WPW they wore heels, skirts and dresses, even lingerie. It was female muscle with no concession to the smoother look favoured in men's bodybuilding magazines, but at the same time the women were presented as glamorous and feminine.

I was enamoured by these fantasy women...

Melissa Coates

Before her natural beauty was needlessly ruined by surgery, Melissa was a perfect ten

Zuzana Korinkova

Beauty and power from the Czech Republic

Natalia Murnikoviene

Such naughty eyes, and those legs!!!

Juliette Bergman

Abs of steel and deep, dark, sexy eyes

Cathy Le Francois

Muscularity and feminity. One of the most beautiful female bodybuilders ever

I collected issues of WPW like other adolescents collect porn. In fact, it WAS my porn, all the more so because I was still convinced that it was impossible to share with anyone else, no matter how close or trusted. So my collection was stashed away where nobody would find it. And my fetish remained something that could not be revealed for fear of ridicule, as though it was something that I should be ashamed of.