Female bodybuilders, big and strong, are still no match for vile men

If a woman was big and strong enough, I figured, surely she would be safe from men. (The news was full of stories of violence against girls and women; the danger men posed seemed omnipresent.)

Of course, life has shown me all the ways my childhood hopes were wrong. Most recently, revelations from the real-life world of women’s competitive bodybuilding have driven home how naive I was.

Bodybuilding — in which men and women are judged not on strength but on the size and leanness of their physiques — challenges, perhaps more than any other competitive endeavor, so many notions about biology, gender, sexuality, racial genetics and the limits of the human body.

Turns out, muscles are still no match for the patriarchy. In “Built & Broken,” an investigation into the underbelly of the bodybuilding industry, my Post colleagues have rigorously documented the pressures female bodybuilders say they’ve endured in their pursuit of success.

Women have also said the abuse goes beyond photo shoots. In 2019, former Mr. Olympia Shawn Rhoden was charged in Utah with raping a female competitor, who considered him a mentor. (He pleaded not guilty and died in 2021, before the case could be resolved.) James Ayotte, a bodybuilding coach, has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, and of pressuring female athletes through dangerous drug and exercise protocols that have landed some of them in hospitals. (He, too, has denied wrongdoing.)

Yet for all this, the abuse of female bodybuilders has not elicited the same level of outrage as abuse scandals in other women’s sports, including gymnastics and soccer.

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