Bliss for thousands of men around the world is giving in to a powerful woman.
Tough Bodybuilder Dames
Manhattan lawyers, doctors, and businessmen can board the subway in Midtown and be at bodybuilder Robin Parker’s Brooklyn loft in a matter of minutes. There they can wrestle her for an hour, get dressed again in their double-breasted suits, and be back at their desks barking orders before anybody knows they were gone. And many do. Robin, a raven-haired strongwoman who has been called the Sydney Biddle Barrows of wrestling, runs a stable of 50 shredded female athletes who, for fees of up to $500 an hour, are willing to show some of America’s most successful men who’s really the boss. The men, who the bodybuilders call schmoes, are part of a thriving international subculture that worships powerful women and whose idea of erotic bliss is to surrender to their overwhelming strength.
These bouts aren’t anything like the contests held in overheated high school gyms. It’s known as “fantasy,” “semi-competitive,” and “apartment” wrestling, and the goal isn’t to pin your opponent — the ladies are so massively muscled and fast it would be futile to try — but to spend the allotted hour being squeezed between their sculpted legs, kissing their biceps and stroking their extravagant calves.
Robin, who lives in a transitional neighborhood of factory lofts and loading docks, throws down the key to her loft in a sock — certainly causing culture shock in men who live in doorman buildings and suburban mansions — and shouts down to take the stairs to the fifth floor. Her rambling space is filled with computer equipment (with which she publishes a newsletter celebrating female strength and advertising the availability of different bodybuilders), state-of-the-art video equipment on which she tapes matches for the flourishing wrestling-video market, and, of course, a sea of wrestling mats.
As entrepreneurial as Robin is, she (like her associates) doesn’t fully understand her clients’ obsession with her body parts. But she isn’t complaining. Wrestling is a mainstay of women’s bodybuilding, a vital source of income for many of the athletes — the reason they’re able to spend eight hours a day pumping iron and popping steroids rather than working at K-mart.
The biggest, most shredded amazons — like Karla Nelsen, a five-foot-ten, 200-pound former high school track star — earn six-figure annual incomes flying between the United States, Europe, and the Middle East to wrestle men who treat them with religious awe. “When they pick me up at the airport, they’re trembling,” says Karla, referring to such customers as the Israeli who recently flew her from her home in Minneapolis to Tel Aviv for the weekend.
Tami Frazer, Robin’s houseguest during a recent visit I made to the loft, is a San Diego bodybuilder with an arresting Bride-of-Frankenstein hairdo. She thinks of her wrestling as a form of public service — a mental-health vacation for men at the top of the pyramid. “Most of them are very dominant in the workplace,” she says, referring to a clientele that runs the gamut from Park Avenue surgeons to Hollywood studio executives. “They want somebody who’s going to be in control completely. They like to know there’s nothing they can do to get out of a hold.”
Tami, who has the kind of body that would normally be off-limits to everybody except the captain of the football team, admits that none of her client relationships have blossomed into true love. She says she’s not attracted to men with scrawny chests and self-mocking senses of humor. “They can never have somebody like us,” she explains. “I used to date only male bodybuilders. Now I date athletic men and bodybuilders.”
“On a bad hair day, Robin could put me in a coma in a couple of seconds.”
The customers fall into three overlapping categories. There are the ex-jocks who see the wrestling as an end in itself, good exercise with an erotic touch. “Physically, it’s a better workout than playing basketball for three hours,” says John R., a New Jersey mortgage banker and an otherwise faithful husband and father who sneaks across the border once a month to wrestle Robin.
Then there are the muscle worshipers for whom women with biceps and bulging calves are as much an addiction as heroin or cocaine. “They need their little fix,” Robin laughs. For these men, Robin says, wrestling is “a cheap excuse for body contact.”
“Wrestling was the only way I could get my hands on them — literally,” admits Richard G., a Phoenix writer who once drove seven and a half hours to L. A. for a match. “When they’re close to contest shape, the quality of that muscle, the hardness, is unbelievable. It feels like polished marble.”
Finally, there’s a subculture within the wrestling subculture, the hard core, the guys still living at home with Mom whose idea of sexual ecstasy is to be cuddled in a bodybuilder’s massive arms or to be lifted over her head like a helpless baby. They include men like Bob C., a balding, millionaire Manhattan portfolio manager. “He was always a geek growing up. He didn’t date until he was 35,” says Doughdee Marie, a former Holiday on Ice stunt skater and Bob’s chief lifter. “He’s very shy. The real ones are very shy.”
The wrestlers usually wear G-strings or bikinis, as both Robin and Tami do on this occasion. For the right price, though, some girls can be persuaded to fight topless. Robin takes to the mat and goes into her competition posing routine — first flexing her swelling biceps, then spreading the lateral muscles of her back like wings. The posing is a way to both whet her opponent’s appetite and intimidate him with her strength. In this sport, seduction and intimidation are opposite sides of the same coin. “If it’s not covered by cloth, you can touch,” she says, inviting me onto the mat and warning me at the same time.
Just as Richard G. said, the hardness is unbelievable. Robin isn’t like your girlfriend would be if only she took exercise more seriously. She’s in a different league — “a tactile feast,” as she puts it. Her agency, Physical Cultural, can be reached at (718)875-3797.
And I visited her during the off-season, when she wasn’t even close to being in competition shape. Some schmoes might have asked for their money back. While they’re submissive in every other way, when it comes to their opponents’ physiques, they want them to be in competition shape — as vascular and sinewy, and with as little body fat, as humanly possible. That helps explain Karla Nelsen’s popularity. Not only is she huge, she’s also blessed with a medical condition known as lipodystrophy. Her body doesn’t store fat in traditional female trouble spots like the hips, thighs, and butt. Karla is obscenely shredded year-round, a comic-book superhero come to life. “There are no side effects,” she reports cheerfully.
The most puzzling aspect of wrestling, to the bodybuilders, is that they’re collecting bigger fees than top international call girls, yet they aren’t required to have sex with their customers. One reason for this seems to be that their clients share their belief that they’re not hookers, but goddesses who graciously condescend to allow the men to touch their muscles — but only until that golden day when they break through to the sport’s top tier and land an equipment contract with Reebok or Nike.
“The girls are world-class athletes,” asserts Ed Winick, a former carpet-cleaning executive who abandoned rugs to make wrestling videos and open a sports wrestling bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where Karla was scheduled to cut the opening ribbon. “It’s an honor to meet them.”
“I see them as sponsoring me,” says Robin, who was training at the time for the summer bodybuilding competitive season. “They see themselves as having a little part in it, and the satisfaction of seeing me do well.”
Maybe. But in my match against Robin, and particularly the one against Tami (whose delicious butt had a cameo role on TV’s “Silk Stalkings”), I was struck by how much of my mental energy was devoted not to wrestling, but to combating overexcitement. (The bathroom break is a common part of the wrestling ritual for many men.)
Some of the athletes are rumored to indulge their opponents in “manual release,” as masturbation is obliquely known. But it’s hard to get any of them to admit this. “They’re not even bodybuilders,” sniffs Dawn Whitham, a wrestler and world-record power lifter, dismissing those who perform this courtesy. “They’re fitness people.”
However, such men as Richard G., who helped form a Phoenix consortium to fly in ladies from such bodybuilding meccas as Miami and Venice, California, report they’ve been getting luckier lately. While there are no known incidents of full intercourse, the men attribute the ladies’ slipping morals to a tight-money economy and the fact that several consortium members are recently divorced and presumably hornier and pushier.
Indeed, a bout between David H., a newly single engineer and consortium member, and one of the sport’s divas took an unexpectedly intimate turn after, as David artlessly describes it, “I kind of got my finger caught in her bra.”
Perhaps it was because David’s high-school wrestling moves were proving tedious, or because his opponent had just had implants and was taking them for a test drive, but she hardly protested when he removed the garment while intimating that he would be wholly at her mercy if she used her nose cones as weapons.
The next thing David knew, he was trapped in a deadly body-scissors, his face crushed against the bodybuilder’s breasts, and her sturdy nipples with nowhere to go but in his mouth. “I took as much advantage of the situation as possible,” he says.
The most powerful weapon in a bodybuilder’s arsenal is the leg-scissors, in which she wraps her powerful gams around her adversary’s midsection, locks her ankles, and squeezes until he pleads for forgiveness. There’s also the head-scissors, in which she inserts his chicken neck between her steel-reinforced thighs and applies slowly mounting pressure, either from behind or while straddling his face, until he surrenders or passes out.
Some schmoes spend years — and thousands of dollars — in pursuit of the ultimate head-scissors, much the way surfers travel the globe looking for the perfect wave. Phoenix’s Richard C. recently spent a whole hour-long match imprisoned between Tami’s 26-inch thighs. “I like to be in a hold for a long time,” he explained unapologetically. “The slowing down of the circulation gives me a real high.”
Once a bodybuilder has her opponent in a head-scissors, the match is effectively over. Robin punished me for arm wrestling her to a standoff by wrapping her monumental thighs around my neck and squeezing. After just two or three seconds, I couldn’t take anymore and tapped on her leg — the universal signal of surrender. Fortunately, she relented. If she’d been having a bad hair day, she could have put me in a coma in another couple of seconds.
Safety comes first with these girls — the last thing their budding bodybuilding careers need is to have to answer questions from the county coroner — but some of them don’t know their own strength, and accidents can happen. Winick recently made the mistake of antagonizing Karla in the middle of shooting a video by telling her she didn’t know how to wrestle. “That was the end of me,” he recalls. “She got me in a head-scissors and knocked me out in about three seconds. It’s actually a good feeling when you come to.”
Lloyd B., a tough-minded Los Angeles millionaire investor, takes pride in having been squeezed by 37 women over the past decade — fitness champions, dancers, gymnasts, and circus aerialists in addition to bodybuilders — without finding one with the strength to make him succumb. That is, until he met Doughdee, that stunt skater whose lifting relationship with Bob C. allows her to see other men. The couple were introduced by Bill Wick, one of the shamans of women’s wrestling. Lloyd’s superior neck was inserted between what Bill reverently describes as Doughdee’s “pythonic pillars of passionate persuasion.” These thighs are said to be among the strongest on the planet — certainly on a petite, five-foot-two platinum blonde. Doughdee can crush an official N.F.L. football between them.
“I got to a four,” she says, on a personal squeeze scale of one to ten. “People can usually only take a two with me.”
Lloyd didn’t cry uncle, but that was only because he was incapable of making any sound at all. His fists were clenched and his eyes, while still open, were vacant. “I felt I was buried under 30 feet of sand,” the humbled businessman admitted later. “I could hear people screaming at me.”
“Doughdee said, ‘Oh my God! I killed him,’” Wick remembers.
“I said, ‘No, he’s just gone to scissors heaven. He’ll be back.’”
Lloyd spent the next two hours in recovery, combating a plethora of symptoms, including sweating, nausea, the profound need to evacuate his bowels, and extreme sleepiness. “It was a memorable experience,” he admits. “I wouldn’t call it positive.”
Men who worship women bodybuilders can usually trace their obsession back to a precise moment of sexual awakening in adolescence, or even childhood. For me, it came when I was taken hostage by a group of girls during a game of War when I was eight years old and felt rapture overcome me as they wrestled me to the ground and tied me up. After that came a succession of healthy, Irish mother’s helpers who let me stroke their farm-bred calves while they napped or watched TV.
For many future schmoes, the first crush was on a tomboy. “She maneuvered me into this deadly body-scissors that made all the other boys scream and give up,” Wick remembers of his nemesis — a ballet dancer who, like him, was a teenager. “She must have held me in that hold for ten minutes, and she just exhausted herself squeezing me. I think it turned her on. After that, we used to have little kissy sessions in the woods — she’d wrap her legs around me and kiss me. I began to equate female strength with pleasure.”
Wick is a hero and role model to many schmoes. Most of them grow up, marry women with disappointing muscles, and feed their obsession with female strength by following girls with big calves down the street, furtively checking out muscle magazines at newsstands, and channel surfing to see whether there are any female bodybuilding competitions on ESPN.
But Wick has spent his life following his bliss. When he got out of the Marines in the early seventies, he used his comb at training to teach women’s self-defense classes at the University of Northern Colorado, persuading all 35 of his students to test their leg-scissors on him. In later years he became a bodybuilding judge and was the first coach of the U.S. Women’s National Wrestling Team, in 1989.
“He has this impish charm which enabled him to get any woman to squeeze him,” marvels Dave Randall, a friend of Wick’s and a fellow connoisseur of strong women. “Bill is one of the few who got squeezed by Rachel Melish.” Melish was female bodybuilding’s original superstar, the first Ms. Olympia, who went on to a less notable career making B movies.
However, Wick’s most impressive conquest came in 1979, when he married Kay Baxter, for a time the world’s number two female bodybuilder. Baxter wasn’t only a woman of great strength but also a devoted wife and perfect hostess. “We used to have contests to see who could take Kay’s head-scissors the longest,” Randall remembers. “Kay loved to squeeze.”
Baxter’s most enduring contribution to the sport (she died in a car accident in 1988) may have been the wrestling videos that she made with her husband. It was the birth of a new art form. The idea came to Wick one day as he was play-wrestling with Baxter and flashed back to the old Steve Reeves movies in which the strongman victimizes a lion with his bare hands. “I thought, Why can’t you show off a woman’s muscles doing something other than just standing and posing? The something could be wrestling.” Wick volunteered for the role formerly played by the lion, and an industry was born.
Dozens of others followed Wick and Baxter into the field, and today there’s something for every schmo fetish. The offerings range from staid documentaries about seven-foot women to brawls between Chicago biker chicks in which all the blood is real. The problem with much of the product is that the directors are schmoes who got into the business as an excuse to meet strong women — they don’t know how to construct a plot. For example, even though Wick’s opponents are some of the most beautiful gymnasts, dancers, fitness models, and bodybuilders around, it gets boring watching him get his head squeezed like a tomato in tape after tape.
Winick’s videos suffer from the same problem. “Ed very often gets choked unconscious,” explains Larry Druss, who operates L. Scott Sales, a chain of 20 video stores around the country that specialize in wrestling videos. “They usually block it out because the girl’s going, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’”
Despite the amateurish quality of most of the work, Druss reports that business is booming. His mailing list runs to 40,000 names, and on stopovers in New York, European businessmen rush to his Midtown Manhattan store and go on spending sprees, dropping thousands of dollars during a single visit on tapes that sell for around $50 each. And when a new tape arrives, fights sometimes break out in the aisles between normally docile schmoes who want the same copy. Druss, who isn’t a schmo, has even gotten into producing. His video Female Muscle Lust, in which a couple of bodybuilders get carried away giving each other baby-oil massages, is one of the few erotic offerings on the market. “I’m probably the only person in the industry who’s a businessman,” he explains. “Everybody else is so hung up on their own product.”
Many of the bodybuilders get their start in wrestling through the videos. They are asked to star in tapes and quickly build a devoted following. “I would like to arrange a meeting,” a typically courteous schmo wrote Dawn after renting a motel room and watching “Dawn’s Most Awesome Workout” for six hours straight. “But I also want you to know that my greatest fear is going to be coming in my pants the moment I meet you.”
Indeed, Dawn gets so much fan mail that she sends out an information kit that reveals everything from her current percentage of body fat (seven) to her favorite color (teal). Dawn also shares the rather discouraging news that she’s happily married to a guy named Kevin. “He trains with me and is an accomplished martial artist,” she writes. Dawn says that Kevin also accompanies her to her “privates” and waits outside in case some schmo gets carried away and tries to perpetuate the relationship beyond the allotted hour.
She isn’t overreacting. Schmoes have been known to get carried away, and Dawn’s fans seem to have supernatural powers when it comes to finding out what gym she’s training in, interrupting her in the middle of her repetitions, and wanting to know how much weight she’s lifting at that moment. Another bodybuilder carries a gun to protect herself from the schmoes who threaten desperate measures if she refuses to give her hand in marriage. “There are about 15 of them I have to watch out for,” she says.
Another headache is opponents who want to work out their issues with women in the ring, who don’t understand that the point of the match is to lose. “You don’t realize how strong and fast someone like me is until you piss me off,” Dawn observes, recalling the opponent who got her in a choke hold. “I bounced the guy all over the place. It was like he was in a street fight.”
However, those in greatest peril from the athletes’ brute female strength aren’t angry men’s libbers but the bodybuilders’ own boyfriends — not when they’re fighting, but while fucking. One amazon, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her mate’s wounded manhood, reports that she literally broke his penis with her extraordinary pelvic muscles while they were having sex. “I squeezed real hard and it snapped,” she confides. “He screamed bloody murder. It took a year to heal. The doctors wanted to meet me.”
My match against Robin and Tami and my efforts on behalf of the “stronger sex” came to an unheroic end when Tami effortlessly lifted me off the ground, tossed me over her shoulder, and took me for a walk around Robin’s loft. While my primary reaction was embarrassment, for some men “lift and carry,” as the specialty is called, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. “It boils down to the fact that they’re helpless,” explains Robin, who sets her limit at 185 pounds.
The superstars of lift and carry are those athletes who can not only perform the fireman’s and cradle carries, or give their opponents piggyback rides — the three most common modes of transportation — but can also hoist men over their heads. Few women, even among the bodybuilders, are that strong. And those who are are richly compensated — perhaps none more so than Doughdee, whose strength has won her a lifestyle that even Ms. Olympia would envy.
Doughdee lives in a house in the Hollywood Hills with a fully equipped gym and a pool, all courtesy of Bob C., her New York portfolio manager. Doughdee’s only responsibility is to keep herself strong so she can lift Bob on his visits to the West Coast. Like many of Bob’s other investments, his relationship with Doughdee has paid out unexpected dividends. Through her, he’s met her circle of friends — a muscle-bound sorority that includes Power Ranger stunt doubles, a couple of American Gladiators, and Dot Jones, the six-foot-two 11-time world arm-wrestling champion. “I’ve given him a whole new life and a dream he would never have had with all the girls who love to lift him and hold him,” Doughdee says.
Doughdee and her companions spend their mornings lifting weights in her gym, practice their stunts for an upcoming TV pilot on the crash pads in her garden, and then retire to the swimming pool where Bob, the team’s unofficial trainer, awaits. “He offers to give massages to everybody,” says Tina Moretti, a member of the cast and a star of the eighties TV show “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” (GLOW). “He’s got great hands.”
In the evenings, Bob holds piano recitals. Tina describes as “empowering” the sight of a sea of athletic women in shorts and sneakers who would otherwise be at the gym, but who sit in reverent silence as Bob plays Chopin etudes.
But the most empowering day of the year, especially for Bob, is his birthday. That’s when his followers gather round the piano to lift not just their voices and champagne glasses, but also Bob, to Bob’s health. “It’s just us girls, and there’s usually 20 of us,” Doughdee reports. “We sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and pass him around.”
Sort of adds a whole new dimension to the film-fan question, “What about Bob?” … A little research let us confirm that “female session wrestling” continues to thrive today, now taking an internet approach, obviously. You can even find a facebook group, which, although perhaps dated in some way, still represents broad acceptance. … From female bodybuilding foundations, this evolution seems logical to us. Going one-on-one tends to be a most fundamental goal.
