Humping Iron

Halfway through Ronnie Cramer’s 2001 documentary Highway Amazon, bottle blond Christine Fetzer speaks into a cordless phone. The camera is tight on her face, though by now we’ve seen over thirty minutes of her dense, sinuous body, including shots of her doing a dumbbell routine on the shoulder of a road beside bluffs of red sandstone. Even as she tours the country, she has to keep up her physique. After all, men at each of her stops—Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, New York; the list goes on—will pay hundreds of dollars an hour for the chance to wrestle a female bodybuilder. “It’s kind of an underground thing here, what I do,” she says into the phone. “People don’t believe you actually wrestle men on beds in hotel rooms.” In the next shot, a horizon is formed by the teal coverlet of a motel bed. Fetzer, wearing a black vinyl lingerie set, is on her feet, locked in a struggle with a weedy, olive-skinned young man who could have just walked out of a university chem lab. Her well-muscled arms are thicker than his, but he pulls her arm over his shoulder, spins his back into her, and gently rolls her onto the coverlet. The camera bounces. Moments later, they are both on the bed and she mounts his body, taking his head in a scissor hold between her thighs. For an instant before the shot cuts, her firm, rounded glutes jut out below his chin. This is the moment he has paid for: the erotic surrender. According to Fetzer, about 50 percent of these sessions will end with the client masturbating to climax as she stands out of reach, flexing.