For her role as Jane Foster in Taika Waititi’s sequel, Portman said she was “asked to go as big as possible” – and she got it. According to her trainer Naomi Prendergast, she was doing 90-minute workouts at 4.30am. for 10 months to achieve her physique. Which Portman says was “really fun.” But then again, she’s an Oscar-winning actress. He drank the protein shakes. Lift the weights. And he took up arms. And, in fact, doesn’t it make sense? Finally, we have a female superhero who looks like she can throw giant hammers at bad guys’ heads. That the reaction was so celebratory is interesting. when it comes to physically strong women, this is usually not the case. The You Look Like A Man Instagram account documents the rude things people say to women in sports. “Leave the manhood to the men,” “you look like you’re sweating bacon grease,” “good luck with your arthritis,” and “guys don’t want to date their dads” are a few options. In the late Noughties, Madonna was raving about her muscular arms, with celebrity gossip website TMZ variously describing them as “bloody veiny corpse arms” and “incredibly muscular arms. [that] they appear to have been reassembled with the bony remains of a dead cow.’ Women are usually not allowed to deviate from the standard of ideal femininity. Madonna, of course, committed the double sin of being as physically strong as she was in her fifties. There is precedent for Natalie Portman’s arms. When Linda Hamilton first appeared on screen in Terminator 2, the first shot we see of her Sarah Connor is her glistening, taut, bulging biceps as she performs pull-ups on a metal bar. Her physical appearance, so different from women’s bodies in 1991, made viewers gasp. The love for Portman’s arms, however, comes at a time when attitudes toward female power are changing. More women are taking up weightlifting. There are 32.4 million posts under the hashtag #girlswholift on Instagram. There are many reasons to embrace it: in addition to helping you build muscle, it improves your cardiovascular health, bones and joints. Gunnar Peterson, Khloe Kardashian’s personal trainer, recommends lifting as the number one way to get lean. “Muscles pay for the party,” he says. “Muscles are constantly burning. “Lifting weights means that, post-workout, you’re burning calories at that higher rate than you would after a straight-up cardio workout.” Even the least likely Spice Girl to wear a sports bra does: “I’ve always been a bit scared of weights, but it turns out I love them. I even have these special gloves to wear!’ Victoria Beckham recently told Grazia. And yet, when it comes to cultural depictions of strong women, the fascination always seems to derive from the fact that they remain so rare. Or, as Holly Black writes in Elephant magazine: “The term ‘female strength’ is a heavy one … physical prowess is an accepted aspect of male gender roles, but it’s still surprisingly hard to find female equivalents.” Occasionally, it borders on fetishism. When Barack Obama left office, Vogue marked the occasion with a “farewell to Michelle Obama’s flawless bosom.” Her “extraordinarily toned” arms “were meant to represent much more than her personal dedication to fitness: they were also a physical reminder of her ability to roll up her sleeves and get things done” — apparently. A woman’s appearance remains the number one signifier of her worth in much of the world. It’s a fact that women continue to win Oscars for “shaping up” – gaining weight for roles or burying their faces in prosthetics. People cringe when celebrities like Adele and Rebel Wilson lose weight. A woman with muscular arms is a curiosity, but as long as she’s still beautiful, that’s okay. She hits the mark of acceptable femininity without undermining it in the most fundamental way – by making herself unattractive to men. In that sense, let’s be honest – Portman’s hands are basically pretty good marketing. And there is danger in that. Women already navigate a world full of Instagram-ready versions of female ideals. Trying to emulate them is both expensive and futile – in Naomi Wolf’s 90s feminist classic, The Beauty Myth, she wrote: “The ideal beauty is ideal because it doesn’t exist. action lies in the gap between desire and satisfaction… This space, in a consumer culture, is profitable.” The problem? Capitalism and patriarchy are a deadly combination. The never-ending quest to curate a perfect version of ourselves has only been enhanced by social media, which gives its users the illusion of autonomy while feeding them the exact trends. In her essay “Always be Optimizing,” New York writer Jia Tolentino describes the tyranny of life as a woman under late capitalism, stuck on a hamster wheel chasing a rigid ideal. Barre classes – an expensive, efficient, strenuous and results-based form of exercise – may be making women feel good for the wrong reasons, she suggests. “What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life.” Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (StudioCanal/Shutterstock) But what if changing our relationship with feminine power became a way to free ourselves from some of these things? Author Casey Johnston took up weightlifting after realizing she could “get strong much more easily and quickly than I could have ever imagined. and that weightlifting could be the most fun and valid form of exercise I’ve ever tried.” In one of her Ask a Swole Woman columns for Vice (now continuing in the She’s a Beast Substack newsletter), she gives liberating advice to her readers. Someone wants to know how to lose weight. Johnston rephrases the question. He writes, “What I want for you is a kinder, more generous, and more expansive goal than the ‘lose weight’ goal that the world keeps trying to give us.” If you follow her philosophy, becoming physically strong can be about asserting one’s authority and taking care of one’s self, in a culture that pushes women the other way. This sense of meaning and empowerment is something Poorna Bell, author, journalist and strength athlete, echoes. She recently won the 2022 Sports Performance Book of the Year for Stronger, her memoir about her journey to being able to deadlift twice her body weight. She wrote on Instagram that “powerlifting is not just a sport for me, it’s a metaphor for life. And it gave me reason and purpose in my body, in a world that tries to rob me of both.” In fact, Portman would agree. “To have that reaction and to be seen as big, you realize, ‘Oh, this must be so different, to walk in the world like this,’” she said. “It’s so wild to feel strong for the first time in my life.” In a world where women’s bodily autonomy is no longer guaranteed, it seems almost radical. “Thor: Love and Thunder” is now in theaters
