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.
Nevertheless, strength training has begun to trend up among women. Recent high-profile research found that lifting weights significantly increases both lifespan and healthspan for women. In turn, wellness-focused women’s media — which is to say most women’s media — began publishing trend pieces admonishing women to step up their muscle game. One study from this February found that women’s participation rates in strength training are higher than ever before.
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 transfer 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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