I remember looking at an article on hamstrings an seeing a pic of a bodbybuilder's hamstrings, accompanied by a wide-looking super-muscular back. The pic was taken from the next down. My reaction was, "This guy's got some sick hamstring development". I checked out the other pics and then went back to that one. MuscleMag usually has a small caption of the bodybuilder's name.
Well, imagine my shock when that "guy" turned out to be Ms. Olympia, Iris Kyle. At first I thought it was a typo. But, upon a closer look at the pick, I saw the blue bikini straps, tied behind her neck.
8-time Mr. Olympia, Lee Haney said it best. This is supposed to be FEMALE bodybuilding. If it weren't for their long hair and breast implants (which often look like rocks), you wouldn't know these ladies were ladies.
This isn't about pleasing everyone. If you see a female bodybuilder and the first thing you think is "that's a big DUDE", there's a major problem.
With that said, some people just don't dig any semblance of muscle on a woman. I remember back in 2000, when buying a magazine, these two kids (either in their teen or early 20s) were talking about how "manly" the girl on the cover was, using a mimicking deep voice to lob their insults. One of them commented, "I don't like chicks like that; she could, like, break me in half". The real stunner to me was that the "chick" in question was Monica Brant-Peckham, a fitness competitor.
Then, there's the Entertainment Tonight show, which features some "fitness models" at a photo shoot. The mother of an old college buddy thought one of the girls "looked like a man". That girl was Stacey Lynn Boetto. Granted, her face does get a bit drawn, when she's lean and she looked considerably bigger on that show, than she appears in the magazine (she looks tiny in the pubs, except for those ridiculously-large implants), but I've never considered her to be manly-looking.
For the fitness/figure girls, it may just be the low bodyfat thing. What would also help is it many of them (at least the Caucasian ones) didn't have those strawberry-red faces, when they aren't tanned.
A simple equation: Fitness shows (from 80s and early 90s) - fitness rounds and evening gown rounds = figure shows.
Women don't have to be smart or athletic; they just have to stand there and look pretty. How ironic that, when fitness shows first arrived, people called the participants "T&A girls". Fitness competitors decried that, wanting to show that they were real athletes.
Then the real athletes (read former gymnasts) enter and start dominating the events. Now, fitness shows are diminishing, because women are doing figure shows, wanting to be what folks said they were from the get-go: T&A girls.
