For those of you who don’t know, non-lifter women have played a major role in the popularization of muscularity in popular culture. Perhaps the most important of those women was Mae West, a huge star on vaudeville, television, and movies who was essentially a singing version of the foul-mouthed, cone-chested blonde chick from Reno 911 and Bridesmaids if she could sing and had the merciless fashionista sense of Lada Gaga. West travelled everywhere with a “bodyguard” of bodybuilders intended to protect her from conservatives who wanted to hang a beating on her for being too liberated (and apparently she got a lot of threats). Those bodybuilders were always shirtless and on heavy display, so she paved the way for Arnold to make it into American movies by getting guys like hypercarnivore and BME Armand Tanny and pot-smoking Gold’s Gym Venice manager Zabo Koszewski onto American televisions on a weekly basis.
West apparently took most of her inspiration from Eva Tanguay, the buxom badass who was both best friends with Aleister Crowley and a multi-millionaire as she commanded the hearts, minds, and cocks of Americans.
