Behind every weak man there's a successful Amazon

Michael Laws - Sunday Star Times

ALL MEN have fantasies. I'd like to write "all men and women", but I'm being PC this week. I am excluding any satire/humour/mocking of any group that is not white, middle-aged, male and middle-class.

If a Pakistani TV3 satirist can get beaten up by Maori Television for being "racist" then I must be living each day in mortal peril. Just by breathing. So I'll confine this column to my type of men. First-born baby-boomers who went to boarding school and whose dads were schoolteachers. Who were useless at sport, are as sensitive as a tsunami and have a long litany of dating disasters.

Which places me – still – in a bloody large group. And every one of us has a matron fantasy, a scoring-the-winning-try fantasy and an insane desire to run a marathon. None of which will ever happen.

We also like bad girls. I suspect this is because we dated a whole lot of good girls who rejected us. Men like me like directness. Is there any point to my taking you out for dinner, or not? Not? Then I'll spend the money on some mag wheels and a magazine.

So it is that I came to appreciate the feminine form. And, being a sap, a feminine form that is hard and athletic, which sort of fits the whole boarding school/matron mantra too because, secretly, all men like strong women. We like to be weak: it is the inner essence of the secure male – and us insecure ones too.

That said, I was a little non-plussed when the Amazon returned home from the gym one day and announced that she was going to enter the surreal realm of bodybuilding and body sculpting. Naturally I assumed she meant as a spectator, helper or official.

But no – as a participant in the novice figure section. Apparently, this is the section for women who don't want to look like Serena Williams but still have enough flex to humiliate men like me. When she then told me the weights she'd been lifting, I whistled that was a lot of pounds. Kilos, she hissed back.

And so I watched this 40-year-old mother-of-five – still breastfeeding Theo – transform herself by dint of weights, running, diet and more protein than your average lion. Twelve months ago she was recovering from a caesarean and the size of a small garage. Ninety kilos to be exact.

Admittedly, that was before Theo was delivered – and the Amazon is a tall woman – but she had assumed the Kiwi principle of mateship. If you love me now, then you'll love me even more if there's more of me to love. They say men age better than women, but most of that gap is self-inflicted.

Not that I objected to her gym/run/diet scenario. After all, I'm your typical Kiwi male: anything for an easy life. And I'm a 52-year-old ug: it's not like I possess the high ground. I'm rodent skinny simply because my metabolism frets about everything. The key to losing weight is to worry. Too many Kiwis lead carefree lives. That's why we have so many fat bastards. People are just too happy.

Then again, women do need respite care from small children. We have three mini-dictators, aged four and under. It is difficult to expand your mind via Disney Playhouse or see a meaning to life's mystery when you're knee-deep in baby poo. And separating the warring satellites gets no recognition from the UN. Besides, who knew these cute kids could manufacture their own sewer outfalls?

The traditional working male is the lucky one. You escape domestica every morning and time your arrival home to miss feeding time.

I love my kids but I love them most when they're clean, fed and in that blissed-out post-bath state. Meanwhile, your partner complains that she hasn't had time to pee, let alone apply makeup.

Strangely enough, middle-aged males accept this. Maybe it's the testosterone depletion but the urge to roll around the floor naked with your frazzled partner – reeking of kiddie posit and smeared Vegemite – serves as a birth control all of its own. How people end up with huge families is beyond me.

Which is why I got such a shock the first time I saw the Amazon practising her poses in the spiral bikini. Wow! Where did that come from? And then all sorts of urges began to clamour and re-establish themselves.

Because bodybuilding is soft porn – even if it's also part freak show and part religious cult. There's an inherent exhibitionism that attracts and repels.

And if you're one of the partners then you appreciate that the glamour is most akin to ballroom dancing. It's great on the night but, jeez, who wants to labour that hard for one minute of stage time?

And the audience doesn't see the weird food that bodybuilders eat and their abandonment of anything with taste. They don't whiff the flatulence or witness the even more chronic constipation; the sweating out of all one's excess water, or the weights lifted until exhaustion; the literal painting of the body or the frenzied search for just the right hooker heels.

The end result is startling: 54 kilos of bone, muscle and sinew, with body fat down to 8%, can produce a glamour goddess and an impossible fantasy. And, even as a partner, there is sufficient boarding school in me to be intimidated.

That the Amazon has just started her bodybuilding career scares me even more. The sport is allegedly addictive and is peopled by twice as many women as men, even if it is run by the ossified hulks. It is especially popular with mature women who have gone cougar.

Meanwhile, we middle-aged slobs shift even more uncomfortably on our couches. Because that's the problem with fantasies. They were never meant to come to life.

Leonie Brookhammer won the novice figure section at the River City Classic last weekend. She competed at the NZ National Championships last night in Auckland and has also qualified for the 2010 Nationals.

mlaws@radio.live.co.nz