The Paradoxes of Feminine Muscle

The photo op is an emblem of a discarded time. Taken in 1991, during the second annual Great American Workout, a fitness event hosted on the South Lawn of the White House, it shows President George H. W. Bush with a hundred-and-thirty-five-pound barbell hanging in his grasp. He is flanked by two bodybuilders, only one of whom, a man of lesser renown, assists the grimacing leader of the free world, who is looking ever the country-club veteran in a polo and a pastel windbreaker. The other bodybuilder, grinning and finger-gunning at the camera, is a man we know well, an Austrian indispensable to the American consciousness, referred to by mononym: Arnold.