Discrimination against female bodybuilders?

Nine months ago, Rochester nurse Beth Mandyck won the Ms. Buffalo Bodybuilding competition. She capped off 2017 with two wins at national competitions, and her trainer told her to begin preparing for the 2018 Arnold Sports Festival.

However, Mandyck submitted formal complaints to the city of Colombus, alleging that the Arnold discriminates against women by not offering the same competitions for women as for men. She told The Columbus Dispatch.

“The Arnold is like everybody’s dream. When I went to look at it, I was aghast that there was no women’s bodybuilding. If there’s a category for men, why can’t there be a category for women?”

The Arnold hosts three men’s categories, one of which is bodybuilding, and six women’s categories. The closest comparisons to bodybuilding in the women’s categories are bikini and physique.

The Arnold stopped hosting women’s bodybuilding after 2013, when spokesman Brent LaLonde said that fewer and fewer women were participating. He also said as female bodybuilders grew larger, the event became “less appealing to the participants and the numbers started decreasing.”

LaLonde also wrote that Physique is “judged similarly and is very comparable to women’s bodybuilding.”

Mandyck begged to differ, saying that physique competitions are more “feminized” than bodybuilding, citing different poses and diminished emphasis on muscle definition.

Sandy Williamson is in change of women’s divisions in the National Bodybuilding Championships. She commented:

“When I first got into it, everybody wanted to be as big as they could. Now, it’s not there. Women just didn’t want to get that big anymore.”

This is certainly a difficult issue. However, ultimately the bodybuilding business comes down to what people are willing to pay to see. Even if this complaint somehow caused the Arnold to re-introduce women’s bodybuilding, as an independent business, the Arnold can’t be expected to sustain a practice that isn’t financially viable. Although the Arnold makes an excellent target for anger on this issue, the real change will have to come from a difference in fan mentality, what gets people excited.

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