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Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 19:29

In a majority of dictionaries, the definition of the word ‘genetics' is pretty simplistic.  The Oxford edition uses just one word to define it:  Inherited. Funk & Wagnalls tells us genetics "....deal with the interaction of the genes in producing the similarities and differences between individuals".  And Webster's definition of genetics is described as "the origin of something".   Any way you care to slice it, the understanding is, in general, that genetics are the basics of a beginning.

In virtually all sports, genetics play a pivotal role in determining an athlete's potential success and the suitability to a given athletic endeavor. If you are 7-2 and weigh 240 pounds, chances are your future won't be in powerlifting.  And conversely, if you happen to be 5-6, 240 pounds, the likelihood of playing center on a college basketball team is highly unlikely.

But in the world of bodybuilding genetics are much more pointedly defined.  It is an aspiring bodybuilder's genetics that are the building blocks for the guidelines of judging what is considered "the best" physique.

With genetics playing a role in virtually every aspect of the human makeup, the skeletal and muscular shapes are primary in what creates a beginning to what a bodybuilder will build on with years of progressive resistance training.

All the above-mentioned is common knowledge for any bodybuilder ranging from novice beginners to the most advanced competitors in the professional ranks.

Yet when it comes to the judgment of what is perceived as the best physique, ‘aesthetics' can play an often confusing role in what constitutes truly the best in a fully developed physique.

Unlike genetics, which any given bodybuilder can not control (unless he or she chooses their parents very carefully), aesthetics becomes an entirely different matter - of which can depend solely on those who judge bodybuilding events.

Again, the dictionaries are consistent in their description of the term.  The Oxford dictionary states that aesthetics is "the appreciation of beauty".....artistic, tasteful.  Webster is even more pointed as it relates that aesthetics is, "the science or that branch of philosophy which deals with the beautiful". And finally Funk & Wagnalls tells us aesthetics is "appreciating or loving the beautiful".

But haven't we always been told that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"?

Because genetics and aesthetics are both considered in the selection of idyllic physiques at a bodybuilding competition, the subjectivity of aesthetics is what has conspired to create an endless and inevitable controversy that is ongoing to this day.

I recall Dr. Al Thomas (the first writer who seriously explored the world of women's muscularity) waxing rhapsodic about how beautiful the muscular female was, and more pointedly, how the infinite variety of physiques gave virtually any woman a physical goal for which to aspire.  They were all beautiful in their own way, he would say.  And it's a shame that a contest has to rank their unique levels of muscular beauty.

Many individuals who have worked as writers and photographers over the past three decades have expressed the feeling that a female bodybuilder is merely a form of living art.  Yet the controversy over what "the best" female physique should "look like" rages on.

As Dr. Thomas would so accurately and succinctly point out about female muscular development in the early days of women's bodybuilding, and the perception viewed by the uninitiated was "........an almost unprecedented condition for women: a whole panoply of muscles that are developed, not just in calves as in some sprinters; or forearms, as in some tennis players; or shoulders, as in some swimmers.  From crown to toe, all the muscle systems were fully developed and in stark visual detail."

It was, to put it simply, a mindflogger.  A level of muscular development so historically, culturally, and

societally unusual that it literally caused a circuitry blow-out in the brain's ability to compartmentalize how "the appearance" was to be rationalized or even understood....let alone accepted.

So then, Dr. Thomas would ask, "Are these women androgynous caricatures of superwomen?"  "Androgyny" can be a term applied to a referent either pejoratively, in a way that is meant to convey pain, or as a simple statement of a referential truth or condition or fact.  Technically, weight training (bodybuilding) is known as "progressive resistance exercise".  Its chief distinction is progressiveness: the ever-grander progress onward and upward that one experiences as she overcomes progressively increased resistance loading of her muscle systems.  This principle is, of course, no less available to the female exerciser than to the male, though fewer females than males avail themselves of its many benefits because of socio-cultural pressures against progressively developed muscle in females.  As an imperative of her culture, female muscle in its ultimate fullness is considered ugly, masculine, and "androgynous" (in the term's pejorative meaning).

Put simply, a majority of our population has only seen the level of muscle a top female bodybuilder possesses on a male, i.e. it is therefore considered masculine.

Thomas finalizes, "This so-called "androgynous" muscle is nothing more unnatural or masculine than the inevitable and natural response (a response, that is, in nature) of muscle tissue to progressive resistance overloading - a wholly natural response of female muscle tissue, no less or more than male muscle tissue, to work loads (exercise loads) in nature."

What we have today is a hardy band of pioneering women busy challenging their physicality like no female has done before them.  And an accelerated evolution is under way with a little over 30 years under its proverbial weight belt as it relates to the competitive nature of bodybuilding competitions.

So, are ‘genetics' of continuing importance in this ongoing evolution? Absolutely.

Can ‘aesthetics' be considered a subjective decision by any given individual's preference?  Most definitely.

Are genetics and aesthetics closely linked?  Should they be? Is there not also a level of beauty associated with androgyny? The answer to those questions only comes when each of us becomes our own judge.

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