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I just found a link to this killer essay
Sep. 29th, 2013 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rydra_wongCarrie Patrick: Of tiny pink dumbbells and fat chicks
Carrie Patrick talks about her personal history of lifting through illness and injury, and the extreme folly of thinking you can judge someone's level of effort or work by looking at them:
The amount of discipline, time, and effort that a person has put into their physical training does not always show.
(Which makes me all hells to the yeah, as a nearly-middle-aged dyspraxic climber who has fought ridiculously hard for every tiny bit of climbing skill I possess.)
Also:
I saw a picture on Facebook recently: a smoking hot woman, all abs and skintight shorts and straining bra, deadlifting multiple plates over the slogan “STRONG IS SEXY.” And inspiring as that visual might be, I couldn’t help asking myself … okay, if strong is sexy, why do all the people making “strong is sexy” images make sure to only show people who look like that? Why not, say, Sarah Robles? Holley Mangold? I’m pretty sure either of them could put any 20 randomly chosen Facebook commenters into a basket together and overhead-press them. Or getting away from international-class strength, there’s the ordinary schmuck like me who is certainly much stronger than the average woman who doesn’t lift, but also knows damn well what I’d get from the caring folks of the Internet if I put up a picture of my middle-aged ass deadlifting in spandex panties. No, Internet, we know what you mean when you tell us strong is sexy. You mean “looking like this is sexy.” And we’ve heard that one before, for any given value of “this.”
(Brief mentions of weight and weight loss.)
Carrie Patrick talks about her personal history of lifting through illness and injury, and the extreme folly of thinking you can judge someone's level of effort or work by looking at them:
The amount of discipline, time, and effort that a person has put into their physical training does not always show.
(Which makes me all hells to the yeah, as a nearly-middle-aged dyspraxic climber who has fought ridiculously hard for every tiny bit of climbing skill I possess.)
Also:
I saw a picture on Facebook recently: a smoking hot woman, all abs and skintight shorts and straining bra, deadlifting multiple plates over the slogan “STRONG IS SEXY.” And inspiring as that visual might be, I couldn’t help asking myself … okay, if strong is sexy, why do all the people making “strong is sexy” images make sure to only show people who look like that? Why not, say, Sarah Robles? Holley Mangold? I’m pretty sure either of them could put any 20 randomly chosen Facebook commenters into a basket together and overhead-press them. Or getting away from international-class strength, there’s the ordinary schmuck like me who is certainly much stronger than the average woman who doesn’t lift, but also knows damn well what I’d get from the caring folks of the Internet if I put up a picture of my middle-aged ass deadlifting in spandex panties. No, Internet, we know what you mean when you tell us strong is sexy. You mean “looking like this is sexy.” And we’ve heard that one before, for any given value of “this.”
(Brief mentions of weight and weight loss.)