Fabio!

Fans of romance novels are a little embarrassed of Mr. “I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter.” He’s a joke we’re all so very tired of by now.

I guess the only thing I can compare it to is how lots of fans of Batman are embarrassed of Adam West, for associating something they want taken seriously with camp. Or how fans of punk rock are humiliated by Avril Lavigne co-opting the trappings of punk rebellion to wean girls off the Olsen Twins.

I haven’t met Fabio personally, but my uncle was a novel cover artist, and he did. It was always great to see him, first because he lived in Greenwich and it meant a trip into the city, and also because I always took away an armful of Choose Your Own Adventure books. He met Fabio a few times before the Fabster was famous, and said that he was a very nice, sweet guy, but a little on the dumb side.

I will admit, I always laughed at Fabio, but he gives me a lot to work with. One of my all-time favorite moments in recent history is when Fabio was asked who he wanted for President. His response? “Hillary, because I want a woman president, as I owe everything to women.” Another moment I heard about was how a woman once asked him for his autograph, and Fabio wrote, “Thanks for last night! – Fabio.”

Then there was Fabio’s slapfight with His Majesty the Queen George Clooney, which should have led to the greatest battle since Godzilla vs. Mothra.

Everyone I’ve ever met that’s into Fabio has been a little weird, like people that wear dragons on their t-shirts. At the library, one of my Christian co-workers had a musky, creepy kitty-litter/old person smell and had (I’m not making this up) a Fabio mousepad.

Still, there’s no denying Fabio is a good looking man with incredible muscles and a daring foreign accent. I will confess something here on the internet I’d never confess in real life: at age fourteen I went through a period where I was into Fabio. I actually had his CD, Fabio After Dark.

What can I say? I was fat (or at least I had enough neurosis and bad body image to think I was) and I had cokebottle glasses, and at lunch people threw things at me. I was basically the target audience for Fabio’s hauntingly erotic version of romance, where that muscular man of mystery softly crooned in his Italian accent things like:

“I can be vary shy when I first meet a woman. But I’ll always dream of learning her secrets. First I look into her eyes ... Thar is a quality in a woman’s eyes that show more than her physical being. It reveal her tanderness, and passion. Her inner beauty. I loff to take her anyplace I can devote all my attention to her. It can be a corner of our li’l ressrunt, it can be in front of my fireplace, [whispering] curled up, together.”

Then again, maybe there is something to Fabio:

RE: Fabio Bashing (sent to People magazine, November 2, 1993)

Quoted in LA Times, November 1993

I do not go to bed at night dreaming about the manager who wanted me to take dictation, the vice president who patted my fanny, the company CEO who called me granny when I began to turn gray, the lab manager who wanted to run his hands up my legs because he liked my nylons and "wanted some for his wife", the personnel director who wanted me to wear a tee shirt and the co-workers who planned to use spray bottles if I did, the department head who started rumors that cost me a job when I refused to sleep with him, or the vice president who had me leave one job because his friend liked the position I had created and wanted it for himself. These men do not inspire dreams, just disgust. Instead, I dream of Fabio.

Here’s the thing, though: Fabio is a real-life person, who farts in bed like everybody else. What the hell do you possibly SAY to something like that? How does a real person possibly live up to being a romantic fantasy?

The gay fascination with muscle guys

I’m a female muscle growth writer, which surprises a few guys, and I often get very bizarre comments like “Wow, I thought only men were into this!”

By far, the single question that annoyed me the most is, “Why do you think more men are into muscle men than women?”

There’s no way I can answer that question without acknowledging an absolutely outrageous premise, like “do you still like to beat children?” So many women like muscular men, or find them sexy, and so many gay men think visible veins are icky.

But hey, don’t listen to me, listen to science. Not a day goes by some behaviorist institute puts forward the idea that as a whole, women have a sexual preference for muscular men, and muscular males are more likely to have lots of previous female sexual partners than non-muscular brethren. Wow, now there’s some shocking results. Who did the survey, the Institute for Figuring Out Really Obvious Things? I guess science has dedicated itself to proving that High School actually happened.

But it is undeniable that the muscular male physique is seen as a fundamentally gay interest. This has led some to believe that there’s something hard-wired about loving muscle for gay men, or something about women that leads them to not like it – an idea that I reject. Rather, the current gay love of all things muscle is mutable and non-biological and had its basis on historical and cultural factors that are actually very recent.

When my mother was growing up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies, she knew a lot of gay men, and all of them, she said, were thin, harmless “fairies” that were bad at sports. There may be an element of stereotype in this, and it is one person’s subjective experience, and there may be class and regional factors in play, but it is true that the emphasis in gay culture was not on muscle. Prior to the 1980s, the most famous figures associated with homosexuality were Andy Warhol and David Bowie (who once famously said that he was a “closeted heterosexual”).

Good physiques have been valued since Ancient Greece, but the beginning of the modern gay fascination with muscle men starts in the 1980s with AIDS. It’s impossible to compare the horrifying devastation AIDS had on gay communities, especially before modern drugs were able to make AIDS something less than a total death sentence. AIDS is a wasting disease, and being muscular and built says, “hey, I’m healthy.” That’s when we start to see the gay fixation on bodybuilding. Gay gyms were not new to the 1980s, but their prominence and central role in gay culture was new, and the new desire for size and strength dovetailed nicely with traditional Western ideas about the male appearance.

Artist Roundup: A visit with David

Now check this out, this just never happens.

First, some Poser art that isn’t mind-destroyingly terrible. How about that, eh? I think Hell just froze over.

Visit David’s website here.

Wow, what a face! The most striking thing about him is, he’s extremely hunky in a way that makes you doubt what you’re seeing is possible, but realistic enough to know you can doubt what you’re seeing, if that makes sense at all. Damn!

Second, this is on a Geocities site. Wow, doesn’t that just bring back memories? Remember when the internet was actually pretty cool, and every nut with a conspiracy theory had a Geocities site? Yep, it actually took a little effort to get out and connect to other people. MySpace and Friendster killed the Geocities star.

It used to be fun to find a cool website where the Final-Fantasy obsessed webmaster would post her kitten pics and Gargoyles slashfic. Nowadays, the internet is barren of little gems like this website, and is all the poorer for it. In fact, with the rise of the social networking sites like MySpace (pronounced Mee-Spah-Chee), I’m inclined to think the Internet has jumped the shark.


Essentially, the whole David website is dedicated to a baby-blue eyed superhunk with the amusingly plain, unpretentious name of David. David raises the exact same questions Malibu Barbie does: like for instance, how can she be both a Flight Attendant and a Prima Ballerina? I won't deny, I got a little crush on David, with his built godlike physique and Yaklike chest hair. The best part is, he's so unreally large, yet possible, he activates the part of my brain inherited from our animal ancestors, who used to breed with males based on their size alone.

David's pretty much the only thing on the site, in various outfits like a guy playing with his poser doll, and obviously so much work has gone into creation of a fake alternate universe for him (see the below cover) that I suspect that David is the artist’s younger, handsomer, more successful, better endowed and (finally) stronger and shapelier dream alter-ego.

What’s especially worth noting are the pages about the guys that “inspired David.” While I thank him for bringing a few of these guys to my attention (that superhot 6’6” guy Lucille Ball hung around with is worth a post by himself!), it has the side-effect of dating the artist.

I don’t know this artist personally, but yet, I feel like I do.

He’s a Boomer, obviously; Dad was a war vet and then an underpaid wrenchslinger at a factory; Mom’s a homemaker, and he’s a towel-headed scamp accompanied by his dog, a slingshot in his back pocket, with hobbies that include stickball with the neighborhood kids, reading horror comics, Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novels, and finally, that brand-spanking new invention, television. Yep, after waiting the 60 seconds’ warm up time, that black and white giant twelve-incher showed images of Howdy-Doody, the Lone Ranger, and Captain Video...but also Tarzan and gladiator movies, that made little Davie Artist feel as if he only liked girls (voice becomes a whisper here) because he was supposed to.

Now the most absolutely unbelievable part about this whole site is the Cafepress store, which has to be seen to be believed. It features such gems as this Wanted Poster (for only $7.99!) Now, I’m hardly what you’d call a shy or reserved type by any means. In fact, my uptight, Christian ex-co-workers at the Library think I’m the Whore of Babylon. But still, even I’m too shy to possibly stick this bad boy on my office cubicle wall.

What’s even more impressive is how big the fan club is, around 1,500 members in the group as of this writing! All that, despite the fact the attention-grabbing pic that supposed to lure you into the club, looks a little like David’s wearing the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

They also have a thing about wanting some David fanfiction. Hey, what the hell! I just might write some...

Artist Roundup: Funbird

Now here's something you don't see everyday: today's artist, Funbird, is equally skilled as a writer. Now there's a Renaissance Man for you! He's also not very prolific, which I expect he does just to annoy me, because he knows how much I love his stuff.




You can always judge the success of an erotic writer by how well they can give you a new interest or fetish you didn't have before...or at least, make you aware of something that you didn't know you liked. In that respect, Funbird's "Emil Part 1" gave me a whole lot of things to love that are a part of my love of these kinds of stories even today: 1) a huge long tongue like a snake inside the mouth (the very idea of that is pretty exciting), 2) a muscular man with a youthful, handsome and almost girlishly beautiful face. Both those things have forever after been something I've looked for and found hot.

It's coming out day, for lurkers!

Are you a longtime or first-time lurker? Please show your appreciation and introduce yourself in the comment threads! Tell me what you like and love about muscle, guys, and the rest.

In the meantime, here's an absolutely jaw-dropping tight muscle stud bubble-ass video!

Maybe some of my guy readers can help me out with this...

I don’t have a penis, so I don’t really know, but when reading a muscle growth story, who is it that the average male reader identifies with and longs to be?

The reason I ask is because so many stories have their point of view character be a man that knows the guy that grows, and that leads me to believe the desire here isn’t to be a muscle stud themselves, but to worship and admire one as an object.

Who the “point of view” character in a story is, is usually pretty revealing. In psychology there’s a test called the Thematic Apperception Test. Usually a photograph is shown to the subject, which they have to tell a story about. Usually the pictures are ambiguous, and what the subject projects on them are very revealing. One big question of the test is, “who is the hero/heroine of the story?” All sorts of things can be learned from who the person the test-taker sees themselves in.

In a great many muscle growth stories, the point-of-view character is the muscle growth stud’s boyfriend or girlfriend. If the story is written first-person, they’re the narrator, and if it’s third person, it is through their eyes the events are described. The reason this is important is because the POV character represents the desires of the writer themselves.

With the exception of BIG DRAGON II, the events of my stories are usually told from the POV of the female character. I think it’s pretty obvious at this point to say that Morgan was a self-insertion, although I hope she was spunky and sexy enough that I can be forgiven for this. I’m way, way past my Goth phase, but a few of the things that happened to Morgan, like the incident where she whaled on a far larger Frat guy at a party, are actually derived from my own life.

Take a story I’m currently reading and enjoying, like “The Boy Kevin” or “The Office Boy” or “The Creation of a God” by Gideon. All are told from the point of view of a guy that is masterfully dominated by a far younger, handsomer muscle guy that’s obviously a sex object. The main character is older, less physically perfect, more like the audience themselves, and clearly expresses a wish to be a “sub,” to be dominated.

(This, by the way, is why fannish stories and internet erotic fiction will never get respect in the mainstream. Imagine on the nightly news, “The world is anxiously holding its breath today for the release of the latest masterpiece by Superfister69...”)

If everybody’s reading this and going, “well, no duh, honey,” I apologize, but it always seemed more logical to me that muscle growth stories reflects wish-fulfillment on the part of the writer themselves to grow strong and desirable.

Artist Roundup: SoaringShadow

Québecois artist Soaring Shadow specializes in sensual, sleek dragons and demons that are sexy and almost unaware of their own sex appeal.


Let me explain something about women: we generally are sexually fascinated to things that frighten us. This is why there are all sorts of romance novels about vampires and werewolves, and also why a show like GARGOYLES had a fanbase that was disproportionately female, and also why there’s a fascination with female fans for villains in books and television shows.

In fact, now that I give the matter some thought, that may also explain why I’m such a big fan of muscle guys. I’m five feet tall if I yawn and stretch, and every time I’m alone in an elevator with a guy over 6’, I find myself fingering the can of mace inside my purse.

Visit Soaring Shadow's gallery here.