In my fantasies as an empowered woman, I am Beyonce, a woman so super confident in her abundance of conditioned jelly she wrote a song celebrating its power. In Bey’s song, just as in her body, flesh and power strut their stuff together; you couldn’t imagine one existing without the other. Anyone who has watched the bootylicious star’s videos, or seen her minus 20lb and a sizeable chunk of her usual va-va-voom in Dreamgirls, will find to hard disagree that Beyonce wouldn’t be quite as, well, Beyonce without those thighs and that booty.

Crude, sexy, substantial and explicit, like the Williams sisters’, Bey’s muscles are part of her winning cocktail of assertiveness, confidence and above all strength. So it interests me that when we think about empowerment, we envisage this cocktail as a neatly packaged, teeny tiny, taut n toned size 8. It strikes me as something of a contradiction that while few of us would not prefer being stronger, many have adopted the mantra that we wouldn’t want to bulk up or look too muscular; we just want to get toned.

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I’m not making a judgement call on aesthetics – frankly, I find Madonna’s arms impressive but scary – but I am interested in why such a caricature song as Bootylicious could only be authentic when sung by queen Bey, one of only a few women in pop who can deliver the song’s message without irony because she does what it says on the tin. If more of us want to emulate the power of our female fantasy figures and give ourselves reasons to be powerful, perhaps it is worth asking whether strength brings forth muscles or do muscles bring forth strength? If female strength – like female muscle – carries an element of subversion which can disrupt the status quo, maybe we ought to seize the chance to become a comic book heroine, learning to harness the strength we have an innate capacity for and question the mentality that tells us to be neat and toned.

Here’s why: Ever since the retreat of religion during the Enlightenment, explanations for sexual inequality have been sought in biology. Thanks to our culture’s recent re-subscription to the cult of biological determinism, every aspect of inequality is being explained by the different genetic and hormonal make-up of men and women. Critics have rightly argued that this encourages a rigid and fatalistic view of supposedly fixed sex differences; a view which is organised around the assumption that masculinity and femininity are biologically, not culturally, constructed and mutually exclusive.

The mentality that tells women that they should be neat and toned, not strong and muscular is the same mentality that suggests that if men have comparatively greater power and status than women then that’s just the way things should be. If women were told that to be modest and discrete makes a mockery of our physical aptitude, that, like men, our bodies should be explicit and in-your-face with more status and power to boot, despite possessing a lower level of testosterone, an increase in strength would materialise seemingly without effort. Psychologists investigating the newly-fashionable “stereotype threat” have shown that being primed to believe that men should be macho and women should be dainty can conspire to make us weaker than we naturally are. The very existence of such stereotypes is enough to affect not just our aptitudes and abilities but even our ambitions too. One researcher concluded that individuals form their goals by assessing their own competence; both men and women will do this partly by drawing on cultural beliefs about male and female abilities, which demonstrates how the operation of stereotypes in our wider culture can constrain the choices we make in our real lives.


If recovery from Anorexia, one of the most disempowering and strength-zapping of illnesses, has taught me anything, it is that empowerment, like recovery, is a choice. Perceived female weakness is a cultural malaise that has found its way into our minds and bodies, but choosing to get strong and not just toned can transform our lives on every level. As Deepak Chopra poetically observes, “wisdom is not something you learn, it’s something you become.” As my body – and muscle – mass increased, I became aware of the subversive advantage that not having equal quantities of the designated “hormone of heroes and leaders” gives us. Female strength – like female muscle – might be seen as aggressive, disturbing and belittling, especially when it overtakes you on the running track or in the fast lane of the swimming pool, but far better that that strength be directed outward instead of inward, kicking culture in the nuts rather than beating ourselves down.


If our culture is determined to see the pursuit of power as peculiarly male and only suitable to males, if women want a stab at it we must be prepared to fight. A woman like Beyonce, whose strength is crude and obvious, will be more of a contender because she knows that it is our innate variability that carries our potential for change. Men might have more of the hormone needed to build muscle and strength, but they don’t have the monopoly on achievement and transcendence. Because there is nothing like feeling strong in your own skin to be able to look other challenges in the face and say, assertively, bring it on!

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Joanna Patricia Caveney

Joanna is a cold water enthusiast and self-identified psych-geek, she feeds her inner nerd with psychology books and lectures and can be found swimming all year round in water as cold as 1 degree.

Joanna is the Executive Editor of Pinkvox. To read more articles by Joanna click here