Where Are All the Hot Muscular Women in Pop Culture?

Love Lies Bleeding is a rarity for a number of reasons. The independent drama from director Rose Glass puts a gay couple front and center (with both parts played by queer women, Katy O’Brian and Kristen Stewart). It’s a blend of thriller, romantic drama and film noir, filtered through a surrealist lens and 1980s noir aesthetic. It’s the kind of film we’re told over and over again that they just don’t make anymore, although it’s doubtful we ever had one quite like this. The story of a gym owner and her bodybuilder lover who face the ire of the former’s violent criminal father is a thoroughly 2024 affair, highly ambitious and gloriously nasty, even with its callbacks to classic cinema and ‘80s sleaze. At its heart is Jackie (O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder whose passion for Lou (Stewart) is matched only by her hunger for steroids. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman’s lens views Jackie like a superhero from a silver age comic book, a pure fantasy of strength and allure whose body seems to expand with every shot of performance enhancers. Clothes rip from her like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. It’s a ferocious turn from the relative newcomer, matched in sexual intensity by Stewart, and the pair set the screen on fire as their love descends into a rabbit hole of murder, drugs and toxic femininity. To be blunt, it’s a blast, but it’s also kind of radical, if only for the sheer presence of O’Brian, a highly muscular woman whose brand of physicality is practically unheard of in pop culture, modern or otherwise. So, why can’t we have more of this?

Pop culture has long dictated beauty standards, with the past 110 years of Hollywood offering the most forceful definitions. Clara Bow made the svelte flapper form beloved. Everyone tried to replicate Audrey Hepburn’s gamine ballet body, then Marilyn Monroe’s showstopping curves. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the pendulum swing from BBLs and the appropriation of Black womanhood to the revival of heroin-chic thinness through the changes to the Kardashians’ bodies. The most fetishized forms seldom differ from the severe mold of thin and white, and haven’t for many years. Certainly, the idea of a woman being muscular has never been seen as a desirable or workable type.

Whenever a woman in the public eye has dared to do a few pull-ups, the media has roundly revolted. When Madonna got very buff during her disco and yoga era, the press dressed up their disgust and misogyny with “concern” that she was exercising too much. Some didn’t bother to conceal it, such as when TMZ described her as having “an overly worked-out pair of monstrously sculpted and bloodcurdling veiny corpse arms.” It’s tough to find any coverage of Demi Moore’s G.I. Jane—where she played a soldier who became the first woman to join the Navy SEALs—that doesn’t seem confused as to why she got muscled and “unsexy” for the part. Michelle Obama dealt with years of racist and sexist insults from right-wing losers because she had defined arms. Many female athletes have suffered similar fates, from Venus and Serena Williams to Aly Raisman and Simone Biles to Caster Semenya (often accompanied by transphobic bile as creeps try to claim any kind of muscle as “proof” of manhood).

The body standards we are smothered by are tied to a rigid binary. Men are to be strong alpha types with abs you could grate cheese on, while women must be small, meek and something to be won. This extends even to stories of “kickass” heroines who beat up dozens of guys at a time. The women of Marvel and DC don’t usually get to be muscular. They’re toned, sure, but they’re never close to what Katy O’Brian flexes in Love Lies Bleeding. Not even She-Hulk got to show off in her Disney+ series. A VFX artist at Industrial Light & Magic claimed (in a now-deleted tweet) that Marvel had demanded that the character be made smaller. You know that the industry is afraid of hot muscular women when not even Jennifer effing Walters gets to have delts.