Flex, Pecs and Sex: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel

"Muscles have really made a comeback in the movies." - Gene Siskel

Ah, if only it lasted!

Absolutely fascinating 1986 documentary that examined muscles at the movies.

The Twilight Phenomenon

Every time some guy (and here the term isn’t gender-neutral, it always does, in fact mean men) slams the Twilight phenomenon, I always felt like wincing just a little bit.

Not because I like the books, or it expresses an inmost fantasy of mine or something…in all honesty I read the first book on a plane to Toronto and I was amazed at how fast I forgot it afterward, like most mystery paperbacks. It was harmless, and expressed a common fantasy: the desire to be won over by someone with a possessive and slightly sinister affection. If you get your self-worth from other people adoring you, that’s very powerful.

As readers of this blog will probably know, Edward is too femmie for my tastes anyway, humorless, cynical and vain, he reminds me of a particularly (in retrospect) assholish boyfriend from Williamsburg. While some may see my dating a psedointellectual hipster from Brooklyn as the height of crappy judgment, all I have to say in my defense is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Rather, the reason I wince when men slam Twilight is because of the “unfortunate implications” in slamming a mostly female fantasy. I save any and all accusations of sexism for very rare occasions, for when I’m absolutely sure. Here, I’m absolutely sure: there’s a double-standard at work. A goofy female fantasy is seen as fluffy and embarrassing, but goofy male fantasies of virility and macho fighting do not receive criticism for precisely this reason.

Twilight is intimately associated with the female gender. I remember reading a few articles on computer science that bemoaned how few women were going into the field. The article sarcastically asked, “hey, why not put up a few Twilight posters in comp labs?”

(Incidentally, I always thought the problem with comp sci departments is their inability to creatively rebrand. Most biochemistry and genetics departments have been reborn with sexier-sounding names like “systems biology” and “molecular genetics and microbiology.” I can understand trying to get away from reminding people of the nightmarish Organic Chemistry, but still. And don’t ever call an MLS a degree in Library Science – they prefer Information Science, which considering the emphasis on database management over a physical building, that’s not a bad idea.)

You hate Twilight? Okay, fine, I hate James Bond. (Well, except maybe Pierce Brosnan. What a good looking piece of man.) The James Bond movies are the male version of Twilight: an embarrassingly immature fantasy.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting I was actually quite surprised to see a picture of Stephanie Meyer, who was considerably less fat than I was expecting. I guess her soul is fat.


There was one incredible element of the Twilight phenom: the gift of Taylor Lautner, who is one of the most beautiful men at the movies in a very, very long time, and who the directors have the good sense to keep shirtless all the time. Bella says, on first seeing him, “wow, you got buff!”

I can’t seriously believe she’d choose anybody over him. Just sayin’ is all.

The Original Muscle Growth Lovin' Femme

I love any response or appreciation to this blog that I can get, but the letters I most appreciate are from fellow femmes with a tooth for beefcake. I guess part of the reason I started this blog in the first place was to get in touch with a few and then say, "hey, I'm not crazy!"

I would estimate that any given time, at least 5 to 20 or so regular readers of muscle growth story websites like www.musclegrowth.org at any given time are women. Some of them keep their gender vague and others out-and-out pretend to be gay men, which has a libidinous element in and of itself for some, I suppose, the "yaoi" factor at work.


I speak from personal experience here because I used to do that very thing! Come to think of it (and this sounds like such a silly thing to be proud of) I was much, much better at pretending to be a guy than anything, as opposed to the usual "chick with a dick" gaypersonator. I suppose it's my brassy personality, or the little bit of the male brain in me thanks to my bisexuality.

At any rate, I really don't have much in the way of a right to call myself the Muscle Lovin' Femme. Why, compared to Jayne Mansfield, I'm a downright poser!

At any rate, in terms of femmes with a tooth for beefcake, the greatest has to be Jayne Mansfield, the only person that in real life that already looks like a zaftig drag queen version of herself.


Supposedly she had an IQ of 163, but our only source on that is Jayne herself. In showbiz, the most misleading of all statistics are the kind provided by stars themselves.

(I'm a little shy on giving any kind of statistic for myself, but I personally was a MENSA member for a few months. At least until I realized that I was basically paying dues to allow socially awkward older men to hit on me.)

After seeing a few of her movies and interviews, I find it a little ridiculous Jayne is that smart, which means one of two things: she either exaggerated her intelligence to be taken seriously...or she's so darn good at playing the ditzy blonde that a genius level intelligence would actually be underestimating her!

Incidentally, I was in fact a fifties blond bombshell for Halloween a few years ago, and the shade of blonde haircolor necessary to get the Jayne Mansfield/van Doren/Marylin look is actually called (I swear I am not making this up) "Playful Minx."


Anyway, Jayne Mansfield made it no secret that she was crazy for muscle guys. She always purred that she loved "big, strong men" and in real life was a regular at Mae West's bump n' grind physique revues. It was at one of these that she met and married former Mr. Universe and Mr. America Mickey Hargitay. Here was one of the trio of 50s blonde Bombshells that had the world at their feet, and she could have gone with any guy in the world, and she went with a good looking former Mr. Universe.

Ha ha! You go, Jayne!

It's no wonder Jayne found him irresistable. He was tall, good looking, and had that craaazy Danny Kaye style wavy hair.

Their offspring is Mariska Hargitay, of Law and Order: SVU fame. She became neither a sex symbol or a bodybuilder, so I guess that's one big strike against nature over nurture right there.

I Don't Remember Lemuria!

The John Cleves Symmes post got a good response, and so I thought I might devote some words to another idea at the fringe that time has discarded, as well as an interesting piece of forgotten Americana.

What was the Shaver Mystery? Oh brother, where to even begin…it was a mass movement that was one of the great controversies in the early days of science fiction fandom.

William Shaver was an indigent construction worker with what today looks like a clear-cut case of late-onset paranoid schizophrenia. While at a construction site he claimed the magnetic coil of a drill caused him to experience a vivid hallucination of a torture session at the center of the earth, and periodically he received hidden telepathic messages and even claimed that other mentalities, including one from 24,000 years ago, took control of his body periodically.

The jist of what Shaver came up with was that, thousands of years ago, the Titans, a superhuman race of giants, came to earth and created humans as a ro-race, “ro” meaning designed for work. Because of contamination from our sun, which causes aging and death, the Titans left the earth, leaving behind both their human creations and their wondrous cavern civilizations filled with machinery. The beings that remained in the caverns, the dero (short for destructive robots) took control of the Titans’ machinery because the solar poisons in their brains made them insane, and then used them to destroy all other life. Because of machines like telaugs and telepathy spy-rays, they periodically observe our thoughts from their secret caverns and place in us evil compulsions and aberrant behavior. They also spoke a hidden language called Mantong, evidence of which can be found everywhere as a root language spoken at the dawn of time.

Right here with William Shaver, we have almost all the elements of classic, almost textbook-precise schizophrenia:

• Irrational terror of poisons and contamination, especially in food and water;
• Themes of paranoia about hidden evil and conspiracy;
• Vivid hallucinations;
• Enemies that can observe a person’s thoughts and place evil compulsions;
• An obsession with identification of patterns;
• Figures that periodically take over a person’s body.

Because he had a little more panache than the average schizophrenic, apparently Ray Palmer, for reasons we can never understand, published “I Remember Lemuria!” in Astounding after rewriting Shaver’s crazed, energetic prose.

Read “I Remember Lemuria!” here.

Now here’s where it gets really weird.

Apparently, the publication of this story in 1940 started a wave of mass-hysteria, where dozens wrote in to confirm elements of Shaver’s story and to say they had similar experiences! What. The. Hell.

As a Psychology masters student, I took a special course exclusively on the identification and treatment of schizophrenia. One of the things we’re taught to identify are “ray” delusions. In many neighborhoods there is usually a person that has the typical profile of being isolated and elderly who experiences the delusion that someone, usually a neighbor, is observing their activities with a spy beam and hitting them with a ray that causes hair and teeth to fall out, food to be poisoned, milk to sour and meat to rot. No wonder something like the Shaver Mystery would really resonate.

Shaver Mystery clubs started to spring up all over the country, and Ray Palmer devoted much of Amazing Stories just to Shaver Mystery content. In other words, the Shaver Mystery became a mass hysteria that would eventually only be eclipsed by the UFO phenomenon, for which the Shaver Mystery paved the way. Worse, because Mystery-related stories were profitable, everybody was pushing Shaver for more Mystery content, especially his publisher, Ray Palmer.

Of all the people involved in the Shaver Mystery, Ray Palmer comes off as the least sympathetic. Harlan Ellison once backed Ray Palmer into a corner and got the editor to admit that he personally never believed a lick of it but it sold magazines. Palmer wanted Shaver to continually revisit his hallucinations so his magazine could make money, an “enabler” that exploited a crazy person and prevented him from getting healthy. Worse, there were all these fervent cultists of the Shaver Mystery that defend him unto death. Because of that, Shaver never had anyone in his life that told him how things really were, and there’s something sad about that.

In the meantime you get prose that’s just awkward and sloppy, like this…

They understood concept, and I came to realize that concept had become a frozen thing on Mu by comparison. The Nortans used the truth, for it was the right conceptual attack. Evil has no concept; it is a mad robot to detrimental force. When Evil has power and men must obey or die, then only is it to be feared. But sometimes men fight for Evil unknowingly.

I read the book, and I still have no idea what this means.

Or, looks obviously repetitive and insane to the point of meaninglessness, like this…

The direct need for a greater future for man is strengthening of the general mind by T forces, the growth of a better brain. No progress is truly progress unless man grows a better brain to grow a better brain. That is the pattern of progress—to grow a growth to grow, etc.

…and that’s just what we could read after Palmer edited them extensively!

In fact, I remember reading that Palmer cut out particularly weird and sexually deviant elements from Shaver’s manuscripts, like the obvious S&M of the Dero slave lairs, not to mention uncomfortable, weird stuff like (supposedly) the life machines that cause a woman’s pubic hair to grow three feet long. Palmer once had to excise a 50-page sex scene!

Not only that, but Shaver might have been one of history’s first recorded furries, in the pre-Don Bluth era. The hero’s girlfriend, “Jane” to his “Tarzan,” is a half-human girl with hooves and a luxurious tail that Shaver’s hero thinks is the sexiest feature on earth.

To his credit, however, Shaver was an apt pupil under Palmer with a sincere desire to improve, and the later Shaver Mystery stories were considerably more polished and professional. He did get better, but brother, this stuff was bad.

Having actually read the Shaver Mystery stories, the thing that jumps at me immediately is that they seem like perfectly serviceable, space opera stories where, like many other works of science fiction in the period, you can identify the geneology of its ideas (for instance the race of blonde telepathic giants and cave civilizations with secret knowledge comes from Bulwer-Lytton). Claiming that they’re true or once happened is as laughable as slapping “BASED ON A TRUE STORY” tag on the Star Wars movies.

There’s nothing in there that wouldn’t be able to be produced by someone working in the pulp magazines of the 1940s. It’s almost like reading the always-wrong Immanuel Velikovsky: there’s nowhere I can point to something and say, “a-ha, he anticipated something that someone from that era shouldn’t have been able to predict.”

Besides, this stuff is all too “fifties” to be a real look at an actual culture of the distant past. I mean, God help me…every time I pictured the characters, I imagined them dressed very much like Zap Brannigan from Futurama. The worst is the villain Lord Sathanas, who is too much of a cackling cartoon character, too much of a low-rent Ming the Merciless, to ever make anyone entertain the notion he ever really lived. Ultimately, I think that’s what ended the Shaver Mystery and its various clubs: it was far too "fifties" to be taken seriously, and crank theories are required to keep up with the times. Eventually, it was eclipsed by the UFO phenomenon that ironically, the Shaver Mystery played a role in creating.

Incidentally, Richard Shaver is often given credit for being the “inventor” of the UFO, just like Raymond L. Wallace is the creator of Bigfoot. I simply don’t see it. Much ado has been made of the “rollats” used as travel in the cave world as the prototype flying saucer, but my reading of the story shows them as nothing more than a glorified future space-car of the sort the Jetsons use; to compare vehicles of this sort to "flying saucers" is like calling Chinese "dragons" after their Western brethren: despite the nonexistent similarities, they're both called by the same name erroneously. In fact, in I Remember Lemuria! the actual means for interplanetary travel are the usual forties Flash Gordon-esque penisrockets.

The Un-Swayziest Day in History

Someone I had a crush on as a teenager is dead, which means that once again, all of you have to hear about it!

Dirty Dancing is the ultimate slumber party movie and its role in the culture can't be denied. Patrick Swayze was a dirty, intense beast, and my Dad, like nearly every Dad I know, hated him and was extremely upset I got into that movie all the while Mom looked on knowingly (she "got it" and Dad didn't). What's amazing is, with the death of John Hughes a month ago, it's like everyone associated with the slumber party film is dying off. I hope that the lady from Flashdance or Anthony Michael Hall are aware the Icy Scythe of Death is inexorably heading their way.

While writing this entry I was surprised to see he wasn't in Big Trouble in Little China, also called Big Redneck in Little China. It was such an utterly Swayzesque part I was amazed it wasn't him, as I remember, and I'll bet anything the script was written for him.

Some mention should be made of Roadhouse, which was so dead-on that it's totally sincere. The catch phrases from that movie have to be heard to be believed like "It's my way or the highway" or "You're my new Saturday night babe!"

I've wondered why it is that a lot of the movies my generation considers important such as the Hughes teenager movies, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, Flashdance, etc. and on the boys' aisle, Back to the Future, Terminator and Raiders of the Lost Ark, were made in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties.


Then it occurred to me: this was the beginning of the current era of movies, centered on the idea of the blockbuster and the big opening weekend. No wonder people of my generation have never heard of any movie before Jaws; Jaws was the beginning of the current moviegoing experience.

The Femme vs. Megan Wants a Millionaire

A while back, I took Howard Beale's advice and bashed my TV in with a Louisville slugger. I don't volunteer this information often because I don't want to be that person everybody knows or has met at some point that doesn't have a TV...and lets everyone know all the time they don't have a TV.

So a friendly blog reader pointed me in the direction of a new series that supposedly premiered recently, Megan Wants a Millionaire. Supposedly, it had a muscular millionaire that was a former male stripper. Now this definitely got my attention and I found the episode online.

If I were an editor of a women's fiction publishing house and a manuscript with a "millionaire/ex-male stripper" crossed my desk, I'd write UNREALISTIC in red ink and moved on to the next bit in the slush pile.

As for the show itself, I could only watch the opening five minutes. Watch it yourself here, if you're sadomasochistic. Not because it was a dating show, or even a reality show (reality shows aren't any worse than any other type of series in and of itself; they're just another kind of documentary) but because I very quickly came to loathe everyone on the series. In fact, I like to think I'm an open minded person. I've never walked out on a movie in my entire life. But this series was so bad I stopped after ten minutes.

First, our large breasted, blonde heroine's startling ambition to be a trophy wife. Yet another case of life imitating the Simpsons, with Megan as a real life talking Malibu Stacy doll and me as a real-life Lisa Simpson. I'd like to get a time machine, go back in time and introduce Megan's present day spray-on tanned self to the eleven year old girl she used to be that wanted to grow up to be an astronaut or scientist.

Also, the tiny accessory chihuahua is a little sad too. I'm no expert on "famous-for-being-famous skank" fashion, but is that even still trendy couture anymore?

Also, the thing I found the most interesting is how apparently all these series are interconnected, sort of like how the Fonz once visited Steve Urkel and there were regular Knotts Landing/Golden Girls crossovers. My jaw hit the floor when I saw Brett Michaels of all people had a reality series. Didn't he stop being famous 20 years ago, when Kurt Cobain smote all cock rock everywhere? Are they going to give a series to the guy that played Eddie Munster next? Frankly I find the idea of a series involving Brett Michaels revolting. I have a feeling if he kissed my hand, I would die 40 minutes later.

Finally, I have some personal experience with the sugar daddy type and they're all loathsome pervs with a patronizing attitude to younger women. Beats me why these millionaire guys would subject themselves to a series like this. I urge them to go to Miami Beach, the Sugar Daddy capital of the world. Or..heck, try any "newly hip" and "rediscovered" part of NYC, like Brooklyn Heights or Chelsea. I remember working at a bar when I was an undergraduate for a semester, and getting hit on by these older rich guys all the time.

Being young looking and short, when asked about myself and I talked about college, I got these snippy, infuriatingly patronizing little comments like "Aw, little honey, you don't need to worry about that sort of thing with me." Gah! Of course I had to smile and be nice, because you never tick off a customer. If a guy invited you to have drinks with him, your response was always supposed to be a noncommittal "We'll see." After a while, those "We'll sees" got more and more angry in tone.

I like playing Gene Siskel about as much as I'm sure everyone else loves to read it, but something about this series got under my skin. I suppose because one of the top priorities in my life is self-sufficiency and self-respect and I get very nervous about a lot of the girls of my generation. I get my sense of pride from working hard and accomplishing things, whereas a lot of them have a mentality that takes pride in not working and getting others to do things for them.

I'm often frightened, disappointed and startled at a diminishment that happens in girls around middle school and high school. Recently, I saw a friend of mine from elementary school again. As kids, she used to teach us card tricks and wanted to be a dog trainer. Now when I saw her, she looked down all the time and only spoke when her boyfriend asked her a direct question. I left that meeting wanting to cry.

Let me tell you about another recent encounter with an old friend: she had an apartment in the Heights, yet she had NO JOB, her toddler was more or less raised by the maid. It came up in conversation that she once dated a guy just so she could have money to get a tooth fixed. She used to say things like "I'm a Queen and I should be treated that way." When I told her I got my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, she scrunched her nose up as if she smelled something terrible and said, "Well, you always did like that sort of thing, Cristina..."

This is something I see going on around me all the friggin' time, a part of the world I live in, and...well, it frightens me. I guess there is one little upside to being a math and science nerd: I'm the first girl of my generation of my family to graduate high school before getting pregnant.

Children of the Eighties, Unite!

I have a cousin named "Teela."

Now, I can't prove it, but I suspect she was named after the female warrior action figure. After all, she was born at around the right time, and I can certainly confirm her parents are nuts enough to do something like that.

When I was five years old I remember I had a crush on He-Man, which is proof enough for me that a fascination with muscles and strength emerges extremely early in sexual development.

The animation for the actual series "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" was made with help of actual very limber and agile bodybuilders, both male and female, who were used to create a library of movements they could draw specific figures on later. This is why it seemed like every single person from that series, on that entire planet, was extremely built, from the major characters to the weird bird-beaked guards.

One of the interesting discoveries, according to a He-Man Fansite, are the mini-comics that came with the figures: they actually had He-Man as a massive, jungle-bred hero from a caveman tribe on their vaguely mesozoic planet. Have a look for yourself:


(You'd think that a sorceress would be more effective than having a jungle-man hero, but of course you'd be dead wrong. Interesting to know that the precedent of the Sorceress being totally useless and never doing anything interesting was already set from day one!)

Now, anyone that's ever read this blog knows about my thing for Tarzan, so this is actually an idea I can really get behind. It's much more original and far more "fantasy/science fiction" a concept than the cliche superhero idea that they ultimately used.

Still, I find it intriguing that the Masters of the Universe figures were so massively muscled, almost universally. It wasn't a statement on body image, because for one thing, you could always tell good from evil on the planet Eternia because if you were evil, you were hideous beyond reason, whereas if you were good, you were merely grotesque. Rather, I suspect the reason is because it's a body type that suggests heroic-style adventure. Anyway, everyone had to be hugely built, from a design point of view, because if you make this next figure slimmer, they'd look like a pansy next to his buddies. And how well would the toy sell then, eh?

Of course, it had to be looked at in the context of the times. This was the eighties, the Age of Arnold, when everything was pumped up.

For the record, I never owned any Masters figures (I had a few of the She-Ra dolls, including the peacock woman). I did collect the Jem dolls, mostly because they came with a cassette tape, and I remember occasionally using my brother's Man-E-Faces figure, which apparently every single kid in the United States owned (along with the two quick-changing Transformers).

One last thought: if you slip a Bon Jovi tape into a Teddy Ruxpin, the result is hilarious.