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Vox
17-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
How America's ideal woman got jacked
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. A lot of people are getting jacked these days, and it's not just who you would think. For men, muscles have always been a symbol of brute strength and power. In our current era, that's manifesting in their desire to get as chiseled as possible with a strict regimen of lifting and proteinmaxxing. But lately, muscles have also become something of a cultural battleground for women — at a time when beauty standards are dramatically in flux. The feminine body type of the moment shifts with time, from curvy to skinny and back again, but rarely, if ever, is America's ideal woman overtly strong. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!) but to do cardio instead, so that they would burn calories. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become 'bulky' (the horror!). Three new books reckon with what it means for women to, at long last, begin to embrace strength. Casey Johnston's A Physical Education is a memoir exploring Johnston's journey from a thinness-obsessed runner to an empowered weight lifter. In How to Be Well, Amy Larocca explores the wellness imperative that pushes so many women today to relentlessly optimize their health. And in On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui explores the cultural symbolism of muscles and how they provide a way for us to think about who is allowed to be strong, and who we demand be weak. Strength training is, in theory, an empowering alternative to the pursuit of thinness. But what happens if all our old body neuroses from the skin-and-bone days transfers right on over to the new well-muscled ideal? How the thin woman became the well (and still thin) woman There is always a type of woman you are supposed to be, a hegemonic ideal who hovers just out of reach, impossible to ever quite achieve. While America's feminine ideals shift a little, writes Larocca in How to Be Well, these ideal women always have a few basic things in common: 'They are always very thin and they do not complain, no matter how many responsibilities are added to their list.' In the last 15 years, however, the ideal woman also became the 'well' woman, Larocca writes. This is a woman who, in addition to being thin, has relentlessly optimized her health: She is pure of microplastics and pesticides, she cold plunges and owns crystals, and her skin and body glow golden with utter, unimpregnable well-being. Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,' said Kate Moss in the heroin-chic '90s, espousing a sentiment that would carry through to the virulently anti-fat 2000s. In that era, women exercised not in order to be well, but, explicitly and vocally, to be thin. In the 2010s, the body ideal began to shift just a little. As the Kardashians began their long cultural dominance, pop culture began to decide that it was better to have a body with curves than to be rail thin. At the same time, the success of body positive activism started to mainstream the intoxicating idea that it might be possible to like your body even if it didn't look like the body of a supermodel. Marketers began to update their language accordingly. The ideal American woman has not always been well. For a long time, she was just skinny. By the mid-2010s, the body ideal for women was more or less as follows: You still had to be thin, but maybe not quite as thin as Kate Moss. As penance, however, you were no longer allowed to talk about how thin you wanted to be. 'It sometimes feels,' remarks Larocca, 'as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find 'skinny' and replace all with 'strong'; find 'beauty' and replace all with 'glow.'' Wellness-as-health-as-beauty got more popular in 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump sent affluent liberals searching for things they could control in an ever-more chaotic world. In 2020, the pandemic came and brought the new paradigm to everyone. Now, wellness was a way of enacting control over one's body in a time that was demonstrating very clearly that we humans could control very little. Johnston found her way to strength training early in the transition of beauty culture to wellness culture, in 2014. In some ways, her journey mirrored the culture's larger shift in rhetoric. She admits she first got interested in weight lifting because of its aesthetic promises — it looked like a fun way to get hot that didn't involve starving and sprinting herself into a calorie deficit, as she had been doing since college. Over time, however, she began to take satisfaction in being strong for its own sake. 'I felt the differences that came from investing in strength training before I really understood them,' she writes. 'I was so used to distrusting myself, and that distrust included my body. Where did that come from?' Johnston wasn't alone. In 2024, weight-lifting was the fastest-growing sport among American women. Millions of women are trying to up their protein intake and talking about their weight-lifting journeys. At a recent work meeting I attended, four women swapped protein tips while the one man in attendance stared in confusion. 'Everyone's getting yoked,' he said. Who gets to have muscles? Part of why so many women are strength training now is all of those new scientific studies demonstrating how important it is for women. But muscles aren't just about health, in the same way that wellness isn't either. 'Strength as a proxy for worthiness, ability, or success has interesting legs,' writes Tsui in On Muscle. This has historically applied to men. Tsui cites the many rituals of ancient cultures that involve lifting heavy things to prove one's manhood or political strength. In the modern world, Tsui describes a venture capitalist who prefers to invest his money with founders who are also athletes, on the grounds that they 'understand how to push themselves past the point of pain.' If strength is a proxy for male worthiness, American culture tends to get nervous when it shows up in unexpected places. 'When we say someone is too strong or too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often a comment on what we permit that person to be in society.' No woman is safe from being told that she is 'too muscular,' but some women are more likely to be targeted with that accusation than others. Dominant Black women athletes like Serena Williams and Simone Biles frequently face just such criticism, which ballet star Misty Copeland once described as 'code language for your skin is wrong.' The moral panic over trans women athletes, too, is built around the idea that trans women are too strong to be truly feminine. 'When a woman is deemed too muscular,' writes Tsui, 'it's often because her strength is perceived as taking away from someone else, or that her strength is somehow unseemly, unfair, or unnatural.' Instead, physical strength is seen as the natural property of men — specifically, conservative men. One 2023 study found that observers tend to assume that men with prominent upper body strength are right-wing. The stereotype might have emerged in part because we tend to see muscles as bodily and hence anti-intellectual, and conservatives tend to distrust intellectual elites. The binary follows a neat map of associations embedded below the level of conscious thought. Weight-lifting makes you strong, masculine, bodily, meatheaded, conservative. Cardio makes you small, feminine, intellectual, wiry, liberal. In real life, cardio and weight training both affect body shapes in strange and unpredictable ways, and they don't say anything about our political or intellectual goals. On the level of the symbol, though, the associations are strong — which is part of why it's so striking to see so many women start lifting weights. If strength among men codes as conservative, among women it codes as subversive, feminist, and a rejection of the male gaze. As weight lifting for women has become more mainstream, however, promoters have had to begin filing away at that last association. Perhaps that's part of why women's magazine articles urging women to strength train always come with an anxious assurance that, despite popular belief, weight training won't make you bulky and unfeminine. The optimization trap In A Physical Education, Johnston writes with relish about eating more to gain muscle mass. 'I had never deliberately gained weight before in my entire life,' she writes. Yet once she increases her daily calorie budget and muscle begins to pile on, she likes what she sees in the mirror: 'a god, radiant like a big, beautiful horse.' Body positivity or no, Johnston spends a surprising amount of time dwelling on how as she lifted more, her pants 'grew ever so slightly tighter in the legs and hips but fell away at the waist.' She writes extensively about how much more efficient weight lifting is at shrinking the waistline than cardio is, and she tracks cardios and macros with meticulous precision. Intuitive eating, or the process of eating what feels good to your body, she dismisses as 'circular doublespeak'; she's a woman who wants her every Cup Noodles logged and its nutritional content fully analyzed. In the bodybuilding world, food tracking is common and, at the elite level, necessary. Still, there's a tight parallel between Johnston's obsessive counting and Larocca's well woman, who follows her Oura sleep score with sleepless vigilance and wears a continuous glucose monitor to track her blood sugar even if she doesn't have diabetes. 'It feels irresponsible to be satisfied with 'fine,'' writes Larocca, and tracking biometrics promises to show a person how to optimize well beyond 'fine.' The seductive promise of going beyond fine is at the heart of the idea of the well woman. You might be basically healthy as you are, but is that really good enough? Can you really look after your children and loved ones if your health is just fine? Will you ever be beautiful enough or thin enough or pure enough at just fine? Wellness promises to get you there, in the same way that dieting promised to get you there in 1996. Of course, dieting hasn't stayed in 1996. It's currently rushing back into the mainstream with a vengeance. Fueled by the popularity of Ozempic, fat-shaming diet communities like SkinnyTok have begun to emerge, allowing users to share weight loss tips and 'tough love' instructions to one another to stop eating, much like the magazine voices that Johnston recalled internalizing as a college student driven to starve herself. Related The year of Ozempic bodies and Barbie Botox Strength training for women positions itself as a counterweight to communities like SkinnyTok. It's a world in which women are told in no uncertain terms that no matter what they do, they have to at least take in enough calories; a world that promises to make women bigger instead of smaller. Yet all the same, strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. A well woman can still obsess over the pesticides and microplastics in her groceries. A woman who strength trains can still obsess over whether or not she is eating correctly. There is always a way to be absolutely correct, and it always seems to be drifting farther and farther away from us. Strength training does not seem to be quite enough to break the hold that the need to optimize has over us, in the same way that wellness culture didn't either. We are driven to politicize and optimize the muscles of our human bodies along with everything else. But our muscles can also offer us more than their symbology. In On Muscles, Tsui quotes the happiness scholar Dacher Keltner, who argues that many of our emotions are 'about' our muscles: 'Joy, for example, which often involves jumping,' he says. 'Or love, which is about embracing, postural movements. Emotions are about action.' This idea goes back to Charles Darwin, who observed in 1872 that for both humans and animals, 'under a transport of Joy or of vivid Pleasure, there is a strong tendency to various purposeless movements, and to the utterance of various sounds.' We jump and laugh and clap with delight; dogs wriggle and bark and run in circles. When we come together to express joy as a community, we dance, jumping for joy all together as one. Our joy exists in and through and in relation to the movement of our muscles. That's a basic physical fact. We can't change it, no matter how much we optimize.
WIRED
23-04-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Muscle Memory Isn't What You Think It Is
Apr 23, 2025 7:00 AM In her new book, On Muscle , Bonnie Tsui investigates the other stuff our thews remember—like how to grow when you exercise. Photo-Illustration:We all want to know if and how we can come back to form after injury, illness, or a long hiatus. Muscles adapt in response to the environment: They grow when we put in the work and shrink when we stop. But what if we could help them remember how to grow? As a general rule, cell biologists don't enter their careers by running through the gauntlet of top-tier professional sports. But in the years that Adam Sharples played as a front-row forward in the UK's Rugby Football League, he found himself wondering about cell mechanisms that helped muscles to grow after different types of exercise. A front-row position in pro rugby means that you have to be, well, 'quite big,' as Adam puts it. 'I was in the gym lifting weights from the age of about 12, I think,' he says. He spent much of his teenage life in training. When he was 19, he was playing a Boxing Day match on soggy ground that was heavy underfoot. He'd just planted his foot when a player on the opposing team tackled him, torquing his upper body to the left. His right foot remained firmly stuck in the mud. 'That's when I tore my ACL, but I don't remember much about it. You should ask my dad,' Adam tells me with a wry smile. 'He could tell you down to the minute, in great detail: when it happened, how it happened.' (Sports, I'm reminded, has the remarkable capacity to be a love language.) The cover of On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui. Courtesy Algonquin Books Buy This Book At: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Adam took a year off from rugby and continued to study, completing his master's degree in human physiology. He'd always been curious about muscles and muscle growth, but the hiatus gave him time to think—pro rugby players, he was well aware, have notoriously short careers. That acknowledgment eventually led him to pursue a PhD in muscle cell biology. When we talk about muscle memory, most of the time we refer to the way our bodies seem to remember how to do things that we haven't done in some time—riding a bike, say, or doing a complicated dance we learned in childhood. When you learn and repeat certain movements over time, that movement pattern becomes refined and regular, and so does the firing pattern of neurons that control that movement. The memory of how to perform that action lives in our motor neurons, not in the actual muscles that are involved. But as Adam proceeded through his academic training, he became more and more interested in the question of whether muscle itself possesses a memory at the cellular and genetic level. Almost two decades later, Adam teaches and runs a lab at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. In 2018, his research group was the first in the world to show that human skeletal muscle possesses an epigenetic memory of muscle growth after exercise. Epigenetic refers to changes in gene expression that are caused by behavior and environment. The genes themselves aren't changed, but the way they work is. When you lift weights, for instance, small molecules called methyl groups detach from the outside of certain genes, making them more likely to turn on and produce proteins that affect muscle growth. Those changes persist; if you start lifting weights again, you'll add muscle mass more quickly than before. In other words, your muscles remember how to do it: They have a lasting molecular memory of past exercise that makes them primed to respond to exercise, even after a months-long pause. ( Cellular muscle memory, on the other hand, works a little differently than epigenetic muscle memory. Exercise stimulates muscle stem cells to contribute their nuclei to muscle growth and repair, and cellular muscle memory refers to when those nuclei stick around for a while in the muscle fibers—even after periods of inactivity—and help accelerate the return to growth once you start training again.) Athletes have always known this to be true, at least anecdotally. After periods of injury, as with a torn ACL, they notice that it's fairly easy to regain the muscle strength they lost. The joints, though, are another story. Adam took his reconstructed knee and ground through another year of pro rugby before retiring for good. In his academic work, he began to investigate the why behind his observations about muscle memory. In doing so, he found a way to grapple with what it means to age as an athlete, and as a human. 'Looking back, I was probably overtraining in the attempt to be the best I could be,' Adam says. 'Because if you can find the exercise that provides your muscle with the longest-lasting memory, or find the type of training that your muscle can respond better to the second time around—after an injury, say, or after taking some time off—then you can potentially reduce the amount of exercise you do for the same benefit.' He laughs. 'I could have saved myself some work, I suppose. I've got that hindsight now.' Excerpt adapted from On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters by Bonnie Tsui. Copyright © 2025 by Bonnie Tsui. Published by arrangement with Algonquin Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A. All rights reserved.
