The New Ideal Of Beauty

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"make a muscle, son." A sunny summertime vision out of the Norman Rockwell past. Dad, middleaged, healthy and proud, wears the smile of a successful Little League coach. Bobby or Timmy or Pete, a freckle-faced 9 or 10, crooks his slim arm and strains to pop that first bicep. To the side is a Betty Crocker mom, beaming at her new young man. And off in the back, pug nose sniffing in disdain, is Kid Sis. "Boys' games!" her elfin derision seems to say. "Showing you're strong. Proving yourself. Making a muscle — eeeeeuuuuu!"

You've come a long way, sister. The gym classes you skipped at school now form a significant part of your adult entertainment. You are working hard, playing hard, making yourself hard and strong. The sports for which you were once only a cheerleader now serve as your after-work recreation and, thanks to Title IX, part of your school-age daughter's curriculum. Spurred by feminism's promise of physical, domestic and economic freedom, you have done what few generations of women have dared or chosen to do. You have made muscles — a body of them — and it shows. And you look great.

As a comely byproduct of the fitness phenomenon, women have begun literally to reshape themselves, and with themselves, the American notion of female beauty. At home or on the beach or by the office water cooler, a new form is emerging. It may be slimmer than before, but it is surely stronger. It may be massive or petite, but it is always graceful. The face, stripped of its old layers of makeup, looks more natural. The frame, deprived of some adipose tissue, looks more sinuous. It is a body made for motion: for long, purposeful strides across the backcourt, through the mall, into the boardroom. It is a body that speaks assurance, in itself and in the woman who, through will power and muscle power, has created it. It is not yet, and may never be, for everybody, but for many men this feminine physical assurance can be galvanizing; there can be an allure to equality. Women, liberated from the courtesan's need to entice, have become more enticing. To be in condition is not only healthy, it is sexy — and inseparable from a strength of the self and the spirit.

There are aspects of the new woman in a rising generation of athletes and actresses: the powerful neck and shoulders of Dancer Sandahl Bergman, the huge forearm of Tennis Champ Martina Navratilova, the mesa-flat stomach of Actress Mariel Hemingway, the sinewy "thunder thighs" of Marathoner Gayle Olinekova, the eloquently articulated back muscles of Track Star Patrice Don nelly. But these are not changeable parts on the latest model of Barbie doll. The new body is to be seen and appreciated in the sum and the movement of its parts, the most important of which may be the brain that determined to shape them.

In the old days, when women's shapes were expected to be either pillows or posts, today's muscular woman might have been considered a freak. No more.

Says the 5-ft. 10½-in. Mariel, who played a budding track star in the movie Person al Best: "My height puts me really out there, so I exercise as much as possible.

With exercise you get strength and grace.