The New Ideal Of Beauty

“make a muscle, son.” A sunny summertime vision out of the Norman Rockwell past. Dad, middleaged, healthy and proud, wears the smile of a successful Little League coach. Bobby or Timmy or Pete, a freckle-faced 9 or 10, crooks his slim arm and strains to pop that first bicep. To the side is a Betty Crocker mom, beaming at her new young man. And off in the back, pug nose sniffing in disdain, is Kid Sis. “Boys’ games!” her elfin derision seems to say. “Showing you’re strong. Proving yourself. Making a muscle — eeeeeuuuuu!”

You’ve come a long way, sister. The gym classes you skipped at school now form a significant part of your adult entertainment. You are working hard, playing hard, making yourself hard and strong. The sports for which you were once only a cheerleader now serve as your after-work recreation and, thanks to Title IX, part of your school-age daughter’s curriculum. Spurred by feminism’s promise of physical, domestic and economic freedom, you have done what few generations of women have dared or chosen to do. You have made muscles — a body of them — and it shows. And you look great.

As a comely byproduct of the fitness phenomenon, women have begun literally to reshape themselves, and with themselves, the American notion of female beauty. At home or on the beach or by the office water cooler, a new form is emerging. It may be slimmer than before, but it is surely stronger. It may be massive or petite, but it is always graceful. The face, stripped of its old layers of makeup, looks more natural. The frame, deprived of some adipose tissue, looks more sinuous. It is a body made for motion: for long, purposeful strides across the backcourt, through the mall, into the boardroom. It is a body that speaks assurance, in itself and in the woman who, through will power and muscle power, has created it. It is not yet, and may never be, for everybody, but for many men this feminine physical assurance can be galvanizing; there can be an allure to equality. Women, liberated from the courtesan’s need to entice, have become more enticing. To be in condition is not only healthy, it is sexy — and inseparable from a strength of the self and the spirit.

There are aspects of the new woman in a rising generation of athletes and actresses: the powerful neck and shoulders of Dancer Sandahl Bergman, the huge forearm of Tennis Champ Martina Navratilova, the mesa-flat stomach of Actress Mariel Hemingway, the sinewy “thunder thighs” of Marathoner Gayle Olinekova, the eloquently articulated back muscles of Track Star Patrice Don nelly. But these are not changeable parts on the latest model of Barbie doll. The new body is to be seen and appreciated in the sum and the movement of its parts, the most important of which may be the brain that determined to shape them.

In the old days, when women’s shapes were expected to be either pillows or posts, today’s muscular woman might have been considered a freak. No more.

Says the 5-ft. 10½-in. Mariel, who played a budding track star in the movie Person al Best: “My height puts me really out there, so I exercise as much as possible.

With exercise you get strength and grace.

The strength makes you self-assured. The grace makes you more feminine.” At 5 ft. 7½ in. and 143 lbs., Navratilova is a Maillol sculpture with a ferocious court sense.

“I was born with this body,” she says.

“When I was two years old, I already had little biceps. As a kid in Czechoslovakia, I felt out of place. But the attitude toward women’s bodies has changed, and I grew into my body. Now I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

Across the world from Czechoslova kia, in Toronto, Olinekova had felt the same childhood alienation: “I was a me somorphic woman growing up in an endomorphic world. That look — fleshy and round with curves in all the right places — was a product of genes. You were born with it or you weren’t. Today’s beauty is heaven sent but earth improved. Women are making themselves stronger and appreciating it in other women. Two years ago, when I’d run down the street in my bikini, it was the men who’d be crashing their cars into telephone poles. Now the women look and go crazy. ‘Look at those legs!’ they shout. ‘Way to go!’ ” It is the way those aristocrats of physical culture, the modern and ballet dancers, have always gone. Says Impresario Paul Taylor: “The dancer’s body is superb as a functioning instrument to accomplish physical feats.” Deb bie Allen, who plays a dance teacher and serves as choreographer on the NBC-TV series Fame, sees dancing as “a precision art. Doing the things your body might not want to do keeps your mind alert and elevated.” And, as Choreographer Patricia Birch (Grease) notes, “other people are admiring dancers’ bodies to the point of emulating them. Muscles have become the status symbol of fitness.”

As a symbol of status, health or sex appeal, the strong body is a sensible goal — and not only for those women whose livelihoods depend on the rigorous care and feeding of their bodies. Jane Doe, as as well well as Jane Fonda, is making a good habit out of exercise, sport and weight lifting, and has the new body to prove it. Lisa Yeager, 23, is a secretary at an Atlanta bank and a cheerleader for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. “A well-toned body shows me that a woman cares enough about herself to improve herself. I exercise because it makes me feel good, not because of how men react to it.” Says Gail Eisen, 40, a producer at CBS News in New York and co-author of The Pilates Method of Physical and Mental Conditioning: “Just being thin isn’t pretty any more. Now beauty is the vibrancy of someone who’s got blood rushing through her body from exercise. To be beautiful you have to be healthy. And to be healthy you have to exercise.”

That is just what the physically active woman is doing, while maintaining a full-time successful career. Dr. Frances Conley, 42, is a Palo Alto, Calif., brain surgeon who trades in her scalpel for a javelin once a week. Beth Edens, 31, is usually on the move as a sales representative for a Houston printing company but still finds time to keep in shape with aerobic-exercise classes. “It’s mental health,” she says. “If it helps me physically, fine. But most of all it’s a release.”

ost nights after work, Chicago Secretary Doreen Dahlstrom, 24, goes to lift weights at the Diamond Gym. And what begins as an off-hours fancy can mature into a career, as proved by Becky Sheehan, 35, of Dayton. “I grew up thinking that to be attractive to men, I should be soft, feminine and caked in cosmetics,” she recalls. “But when I was 25, I took up tennis and got hooked. The arm muscles tennis built up looked pretty neat, I thought. So I started weight lifting. Now I teach aerobics and tennis, and I have a new idea of the attractive woman: me.”

Though the fitness craze is still mostly a middle-and upper-middle-class phenomenon, the fit look has nothing elitist about it. It represents an attainable ideal for all ages, races, walks of life. It requires little more than the will to work at them. Argues Body Builder Rachel McLish: “You have a simple choice of what to put on your bones: fat or muscle. Working out is a positive addiction.” It may also be the means to that elusive, seductive goal: a prolonged, vital youth. “The fitness business,” suggests Novelist-Critic Wilfrid Sheed, “is about sex and immortality. By toning up the system you can prolong youth, just about finesse middle age and then, when the time comes, go straight into senility.”

There are those who think senility, or at least softheadedness, may have already arrived with the strong and healthy look. “Women are in danger of turning in on themselves, becoming emotionally muscle-bound,” says Jon Wilkman, a Los Angeles producer of documentaries for cable TV. “We’ve entered an age of mental and physical narcissism. Originally, man built a strong body to do work. Now women are building their bodies just to look good. Is that enough? Does beauty stop at the skin line? For this kind of woman, it does. She will be sitting alone, in an empty room, with her perfect body.” Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker journalist and humorist, wonders whether this new ideal woman is only a media spin-off from the popularity of Jane Fonda and her bestselling Workout Book (see box page 75). “For the public good,” Trillin says, “the more people who can lift the end of a car off the ground in case of trouble, the better. But I’m not sure I see any other advantages to it. Speaking as one whose muscles don’t ripple, I feel confident in proclaiming that this too shall pass and that our natural inclination toward sloth will reassert itself.”

That would be just fine to many men, and not a few women, with more traditional ideas of female beauty. Insists Beverly Sills, the diva who now runs the New York City Opera: “There is a growing strength in women, but it’s in the forehead, not the forearm. Men will always be attracted to women with nice soft arms and a fleshy bosom.” Playboy magazine’s 1982 Playmate of the Year, Shannon Tweed, is about the same height and weight as Mariel Hemingway, but her contours are different — in the soft lines and curves that her beau, Publisher Hugh Hefner, finds so attractive. She will not try to change: “I think you can get too muscular. I’m not the jealous type, but I’d be jealous of a woman with drop-dead curves rather than of a woman with an athletic build. Somewhere there is a happy medium between Fonda and Dolly Parton.”

It may be a question of physical strength: men are supposed to have it, and women aren’t. “Anything that sweats, or has sweated, or is about to sweat does not interest me sexually,” says John McGrath, an Atlanta sportswriter. “I also have a hard time being attracted to anyone who can beat me up.” Paul Corkery, a Los Angeles novelist, thinks the strong woman is chasing form without the function: “It’s as if they’re all in training for the Olympics. They’re all muscled up with nowhere to go.”

Women can move proudly into the security of then-new bodies — they can jog into shape, lift weights for body tone, wear themselves out in the disco bliss of Jazzercise. But what about men? “Jazzercise is a blowout,” one Atlanta woman says. “Remember the first dances you went to, where all the girls ended up dancing with other girls because the boys couldn’t dance? So this gives me a chance to dance, which my husband hasn’t done since our wedding. But my husband still won’t dance. Come to think of it, I’m back to dancing with the girls. Haven’t made much progress in the past 25 years, have I?” Wendy May, 34, who teaches aerobics in Atlanta, might argue that progress comes first, then the education of the recalcitrant male: “The discovery is not that it’s sexy to be healthy but that it feels good. I think most men are frightened by muscles, maybe even by fitness. Now, though, I don’t think they have a choice. They may as well decide it’s sexy, because it’s here.”

The new body is here, and men may decide it is sexy for one basic reason: it can enhance sex. When Olivia Newton-John sold millions of records purring, “Let’s get physical,” she wasn’t talking only about pushups. A woman who is more aware of her physicality will probably be more aware of her sexuality. The inspiration of the fitness gurus was to set exercise to the disco beat and make the regimen fun; sex is, after all, a form of exercise for two. Says Helen Gurley Brown, who, as editor of Cosmopolitan, is paid to think about Topic A: “Women are becoming real sexual athletes now. Health gives women stamina that allows them to give full range to their sex drive.”

Patrice Donnelly, 32, is a professional athlete who displayed her acting ability and an intense sexuality in Personal Best. Her director, Robert Towne, says that Donnelly received mail from both men and women. “Patrice has the sleek active body I find beautiful,” says Towne. “Her grace matches any ballerina’s.” Donnelly runs two to four miles three times a week and lifts weights three times a week for three-hour sessions. The results show: her 5-ft. 8½-in., 127-lb. frame has only 8% body fat (a woman of average size carries about 20%). “Men have always loved my body,” says Donnelly. “My boyfriend loves to show it off. He’ll say to friends, ‘Hey, watch Patrice flex!’ But I exercise for the inside and the outside. The more athletic I am, the more feminine I feel.”

Where body prophets like Patrice Donnelly dare to tread, ingenious profiteers are sure to follow. The sexy-fit look has generated a booming business. Pop songs like Newton-John’s Physical and Diana Ross’s Work That Body scampered up the charts. Exercise records have broken out of the vanity-house ghetto: Mickey’s Mousercise has sold more than 350,000 copies. New magazines like Fit and New Body are preaching an enlightened narcissism. Fitness gurus, from Richard Simmons to Kathy Smith to that rock-hard perennial Jack LaLanne, start the TV day with exhortations to slim down and tone up. At the movies, the new actresses are quirky and resourceful, and so are the characters they play. “The old image of a star actress,” says Larry Mark, vice president of production at Paramount Pictures, “was of a beautiful woman lounging in her peignoir, popping bonbons while she painted her toenails. Now it’s a taut body in shorts doing jumping jacks. Juiciness is out; angularity is in.”

Actresses used to publish breathy memoirs; today they write about deep-breathing exercises. Victoria Principal, who plays J.R. Ewing’s saintly sister-in-law on Dallas, has been a fitness buff for years. “In my publicity photos they used to airbrush the muscles out of my arms,” says Principal, who jogs up a mountain three times a week. Now she has her revenge: The Body Principal is soon to hit the bookstores, where it will join the dozens of other glossy guides like Jane Fonda’s — on weight lifting and weight reducing, on holistic medicine and pregnancy therapy — that crowd the special display tables devoted to the fitness fashion.

The traditional glamour industries, which might have suffered when the new woman jogged back to nature, have found ways to adapt.

Says Actress Valerie Harper, who as TV’s Rhoda Morgenstern lost weight and grew muscles while the home audience watched: “Now you can buy $50,000 worth of the no-makeup look.” That look is an increasingly profitable part of the clothing industry: Danskin, leading manufacturer of tights and leotards, does about $100 million in sales annually. In the Sunbelt, where warm weather discourages women from buying next season’s Paris original, jock chic is rampant. With men and women flaunting tanned, exercised bodies, the fashion is sportswear: headbands, tank tops, jogging shorts and running shoes. In offices and at informal dinner parties, the high-casual look has become acceptable. Exercise togs appear in the windows of a Rodeo Drive boutique; and at night, on Sunset Strip, young prostitutes parade in gym shorts and leg warmers.

Even that last outpost of anorexia, the modeling agency, is being renovated into a new-woman spa. Observes Eileen Ford, who runs her own top agency in New York City: “Models used to look fragile, plucking their eyebrows and wearing pancake makeup. God, they looked terrible! Now I get girls in here who are so fit they’ve got legs like Muhammad Ah’. That’s not ideal either, but it’s part of the ’80s look: a firm body, healthy hair and skin, and a look of serene determination in the eyes. Today, health is beauty. You can’t have one without the other.”

It was not ever thus. Though a 3rd century A.D. Sicilian mosaic reveals an astonishing modern woman — bikini-clad and sporting a pair of barbells — women rarely exercised to keep themselves in shape or style. Too often they simply mutilated their bodies. For a thousand years Chinese women bound their feet so tightly that a natural “high heel” was formed, and toes were twisted irreversibly under the arch; African women used discs to form platypus lips; in Burma, tribeswomen encircled their necks with so many heavy metal rings that the vertebrae would separate. In the early 19th century, English fashion in female bodies was ethereal, emaciated; a tubercular fragility was considered attractive. Women subsisted on a diet of vinegar and belladonna to achieve the Pre-Raphaelite “fatal slimness.” The crowning, confining glory of Victoriana was the whalebone corset, which gave Actress Lillie Langtry her “ideal” 38-18-38 measurements, and which sometimes displaced internal organs. For some women, that was not enough: in pursuit of the hourglass figure they underwent surgical removal of their lower ribs.

A century ago, the present revolution began. Women took up three new sports: bicycling, roller skating and tennis. On the tennis court or the open road, there was a physical liberation of sorts. A few years later, when the movies were born, requiring motion, the images were available for all to see: the energy of the human figure, the equality of male and female movie stars, the athletic heroism of actresses like Pearl White and Annette Kellermann. From the new ideal of bodies in motion came an original 20th century figure: the energized woman, ready to express her potential in physical activity.

For the next 60 years, the movies would shape and reflect the evolving form of this new woman. The smart working-girl heroines of ’30s comedy — Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind

Russell, Jean Arthur — did not so much display their bodies as move comfortably in them, telegraphing their belief that they were a match for any man. In the ’40s and ’50s, the bazooka buxomness of Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield marked a reaction against equality; here was the milkmaid as sultry pinup. Now the hourglass is shattered. Says George Hurrell, the portrait photographer who for 60 years has celebrated Hollywood’s full-figured stars: “In the ’30s everything was round. It gave a body shape and shadow. Today, actresses are rid of hips and thighs and even busts.”

In the real world, equally obvious changes were taking hold. The twin demands of feminism and a new imperial economy paroled the American woman from her domestic cage. With the Pill, technology undermined conservative morality. Couples could have only as many children as they wanted, or no children at all. Freedom from the biological imperative has been followed by an economic imperative: earning her way, single or married. More than half of all American women — indeed, more than half the U.S. married mothers — are in the labor force. There a woman must collaborate and compete with men, as other men do, as a peer. She is dressing and shaping her body to fit the new fashion of equality.

With that fashion comes confidence.

Raquel Welch, striding the Broadway stage and looking sensational at 41, observes other women walking down Manhattan or Malibu streets. Says she: “I get the feeling that women enjoy being women more. The whole message is to be happy in your own skin.” Notes New York Times Op-Ed Page Editor Charlotte Curtis: “What is really strong about the new woman is her fearlessness. She’s standing up in a way she never used to.”

She is teaching her own daughters to stand even straighter and stronger. “Conceptions of beauty start in the family,” says Harvard Psychologist Jackie Zilbach, “and they start very young. Little girls tend to follow their mothers’ notions of beauty.” The previous generation of mothers had not put much store in exercise, for themselves or their children. But members of the Jane Fonda generation have remade their own bodies, and are encouraging their lithe young daughters to start from scratch. In Chicago, new mothers are flexing the arms and legs of their month-old babies in an infant aerobics course. By the time they grow up, after a youth of exercise and competition encouraged at home and at school, these girls will have acquired naturally the bodies their mothers fought to shape.

It can be argued that the strong woman is only this summer’s fashion, like Deely Bobbers and E.T., and that most women will soon tire of sweating themselves into fight ing shape. The disco beat at the local health club may begin to sound as monotonous as the old metronome; muscular aerobicians will resent being mistaken for football players; Jane Fonda will find herself another cause and let her deltoids go to flab. Throughout history, women have been alternately starved and stuffed, and no one can guarantee that next year’s body heroine won’t be Dolly Parton. But to imagine this is to ignore the strides the contemporary woman has taken in the past dozen years and the good sense she has shown in achieving her new status.

Medicine has made her more aware of how her body works. The fitness phenomenon has proved she has the capacity to make it work. Her new sense of self-assurance has convinced her that strength — of the body, mind and will — is beautiful.

That charming chauvinist Charles Baudelaire said that woman should employ artifice to “rise above nature.”

New York Poet Carol Muske, 35, takes a different view, and eloquently defends the strong, smart female. “Woman is nature,” Muske says, “Her body is like lightning:

it looks pleasing — and it can run a toaster. And her new beauty comes from the fact that there is no more shame, no hiding of the ‘mysteries’ of the female body. Now she can bare it, muscle it, do anything with, to, and for it she chooses. The new beauty is possibility — what women can become.”

— By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/ Los Angeles and Denise Worrell/ New York