Tag Archives: Olympia

Two pioneers of self-ownership and unregulated
body modification died this month. Joe Weider, the
fitness-publishing mogul who brought professional bodybuilding from
the sideshow tent to the main stage (discovering
Arnold Schwarzenegger and creating a magazine empire along the
way) died March 23. He was 93. Shannon Larratt, founder of BMEzine,
the Internet’s largest crowdsourced guide to “extreme” body
modification, died on March 15 at age 39. If you’ve ever crushed on
a punkette with ;full
sleeves and gauged earlobes or shot a front
double biceps pose in the bathroom mirror, you have Weider and
Larratt to thank.
Today, Weider is best known for his magazines (Muscle &
Fitness, Flex, Shape) and his annual
bodybuilding and figure competition, the Mr. Olympia. But his
history with the sport goes back to the very beginning. When
Weider, along with his younger brother Ben, founded the
International Federation of Body Builders in 1946, many
people–even weightlifters
like York Barbell founder Bob Hoffman–thought muscularity for
its own sake was obscene. Nevertheless Weider stuck with his focus
on size, symmetry, and definition, turning bodybuilding into a
full-fledged sport. He and Ben, who died in 2008, also managed to
popularize it behind the Iron Curtain, traveling to the Soviet
Union multiple times between 1952 and 1988 to advocate for the
recognition of bodybuilding as a sport and for the inclusion of
Soviet athletes in the IFBB. Today, muscles are mainstream and the
USSR is dead. ;
Weider also had a history of fighting the U.S. government. A
charitable
interpretation of his clashes with the Feds is that Weider and
other supplement advocates were moving too fast for the FDA’s
liking. A less charitable interpretation is that
Weider ;mingled junk
science and the real thing, promising not only that protein
could make your muscles grow (which is true), but that his
brand of protein could
make your muscles grow a pound a day ;(un-uh). ;
As for Larratt: While many of the body
modification procedures he popularized predated him, it wasn’t
until he started BMEzine (NSFW)
in 1994 that practitioners from around the world had a central hub
for discussing their techniques. BMEZine is now a massive clearing
house for knowledge about how to modify the human body.
Participants run the gamut from tattoo and piercing junkies to
people who have drastically transformed everything from their faces
to their genitals. If I had to guess, I’d say at least half the
procedures and techniques covered on BMEzine–branding,
suspension, and scarification,
to name three not-unusual mods here in the states–are illegal to
perform. Yet people perform them anyway, and thanks to the
crowdsourced knowledge available on BMEzine, they know how to do so
with relative safety and precision. ;
Like Weider, Larratt also was in direct conflict with authority,
and his interaction ended him. In 2010 Larratt was diagnosed with
tubular aggregate myopathy. The disease apparently caused him
significant pain, which his doctors in Canada refused to
aggressively treat, thinking that he was addicted to pain
medication. In
his suicide note, Larratt wrote

I do believe that there were fundamental shortcomings in the way
both my condition and my pain was treated, and that the last few
years could have been much more pleasant if the pain had been more
aggressively managed. I believe this was in part because of the
prejudice of multiple doctors due to my appearance causing them to
stereotype me as drug seeking (and the simple reality is that it
can be hard to tell, and we are so cruel as to prefer to “punish”
the sick than to “reward” the mentally ill). I wish there was some
way to make those doctors understand the cruelty they enacted. A
patient should have the right to a pain free life, even if that
comes with some risk.
….
The last medical thing I want to mention is that I want to
strongly advocate for “right to die” legislation. Canada currently
has no such thing. It is my strong believe that if I had known that
there was a “safe”, pain-free way for me to go at a time of my
choosing, hopefully at home surrouded by love, it would have
brought me not just enormous peace, but I believe would have given
me strength to fight this even longer than I have. As Isaac Asimov
said, ;“No decent human being would allow an animal to
suffer without putting it out of its misery. It is only to human
beings that human beings are so cruel as to allow them to live on
in pain, in hopelessness, in living death, without moving a muscle
to help them.” ;And this is how I have felt for a long
time now, trapped in this nightmarish prison of pain. Losing my
motor skills hasn’t been fun either, but the pain is the worst
part. After writing that I can’t help but think of Keats. I really
do hope people will one day have as much right to control their
deaths as to control their lives — it is in many ways, the
fundamental human right, even more fundamental than thought and
self-expression.

The thread linking Weider and Larratt is a shared vision of
self-ownership that is in permanent conflict with the state and the
public health establishment. In that sense, the mass monsters
Weider championed–guys like Ronnie Coleman and Jay Cutler–are not
so different than the branded, scarred, and pierced-up misfits who
commune at BMEzine.com. … Read More