MovieChat Forums > Pumping Iron (1977) Discussion > Do women find this attractive?

Do women find this attractive?


These guy are so over the top. Just asking.

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Depends on personal preferences. I personally love buff guys and especially big arms but they were a bit over the top. I think Arnold looked incredibly good with clothes on and when he wasnt pumped up.

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I find all the men in this documentary incredibly hot. Bodybuilders are gorgeous in my opinion.

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Well, the point of bodybuilding at the top professional levels is NOT what looks good in real, everyday life. That boat sailed a long time ago, like in the mid-1950s.

After that, with the rise of steroids and eventually other powerful anabolic substances, these guys have had to keep getting bigger and bigger and more and more defined in order to win competitions. In the earlier days there was a sense of aesthetics and artistry. Even the 1970s still had this sense. But nowadays it's about sheer grotesque size, together with extremely low, sickly, cadaver-like levels of body fat.

In more recent years, they created a "physique" division for guys who want to compete with a more normal beach-body type of appearance. But then some of those guys started getting too physically large for that division, but still not quite big enough for the regular bodybuilding division. So they created yet another division in between the two, known as "classic physique," which is supposed to harken back to bodybuilding of the 1970s.

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I believe women tend to find muscles hot... up to a certain point. Pretty much everyone likes looking at the young athletic body of their favorite type now and then, right? But modern steroid-ridden pro bodybuilders don't look like healthy young athletes, they don't look particularly like human beings!

That said, I saw this movie back in the day, saw it more than once, and I thought both young Schwarzenegger and young Ferrigno were very attractive men, although more for their personalities than their oversized bodies. Ferrigno came across as sweet and rather innocent, Schwarzenegger came across as clever and fun. Maybe they really were, back in the day.

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Putting aside whether or not women find bodybuilding and the contestants attractive, my problem is that many of these guys push so hard to become the best, that they ignore the very real dangers of side effects and injury.
Look at how many heart surgeries Arnold has had.

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I remember reading an article many years back. Several aspiring pro bodybuilders were asked would they continue to take steroids, HGH, etc if a) they were guaranteed to win the Mr Olympia at some point, but b) they would also drop dead within five years of that win. Almost all of them replied that they would. Madness.

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