Amazons International # 35 ************************** Contents: Emish: The Amazon Chronicles Date of Transmission: 30.12.93 ************************************************************** [This issue of Amazons International is a special edition entirely dedicated to Emish's Amazon Chronicles. -- Ed.] ************************************************************** Date: 25 Oct 93 20:54:39 EDT From: Emish <72162.261@CompuServe.COM> Subject: The Amazon Chronicles THE AMAZON CHRONICLES Everyone seems to have his or her own idealizations when it comes to the men or women in our lives. For example, what attracts me to a woman is not at all typical; it's not the TV ideal of big boobs, a come-hither-look, or a Pepsodent smile. I happen to be addicted to . . . . "Amazons," the kind of woman you're more likely to see on The American Gladiators than on a soap opera. Ever since I was a little kid I have been drawn to women who were probably taller than me, who were at least as strong as myself, and who were well-muscled in a sculpted, clearly defined way. Athletic Amazons who could wrestle with me and hold their own; strong women who possessed pride, integrity, courageousness, and self-assertiveness. Heroic women, whose athletic muscularity set them apart from all the rest. This predilection causes me to look at women differently than most men do. If you'll watch carefully, you will notice that most men's eyes flick from a woman's face to breasts to legs to ass. But when I'm checking out a woman, my eyes move from arms (biceps) to legs (calves) to shoulders (deltoids) and then to face . I'm obviously looking for signs of muscularity, and this aspect of female body-type is highly symbolic. The muscularity is, to me, a psychological metaphor; a confirmation of those Amazonian characteristics that I prize. Then, too, an Amazon's well-muscled body, together with her overall presence, suggests to me the promise of power -- what the woman is capable of doing with me, to me, and for me. It also defines what can and cannot be done to her! Now I realize that this preoccupation with the physicality of women suggests that I view women very one-dimensionally, in a sexual context only. The sexuality aspect is, of course, vital to me. But my appreciation for women is, I hope, fairly balanced, not just sexually fixated. With me, it has always been a case of the erotic juxtaposition of clearly defined muscularity AND the subtle gestures and attitude of femininity that have attracted me. The well-developed bicep merely gets my attention! Some of this orientation, particularly my marked preference for female muscularity, is probably the result of some still deeply hidden psychological imprints that reveal themselves mostly within this seemingly unusual context. Likewise, the attraction to "erotic-combat" is my own unique way of physically manifesting a much deeper psychological state, one that I'm still not certain I fully understand. But I do have some ideas! Closer to the surface, I'm certain that these predilections at least partly evolved from a series of school-yard wrestles with a tomboy named Cathy when I was only nine, partly from an unusual childhood relationship with our family maid, and the rest due to the rather unconventional attitude of my mother -- a feminist and Amazon in her own right. Let's begin with my mother's contribution to my Amazon orientation. My mother was a strikingly attractive, adventurous, athletic woman who had been a top-seeded tennis player and a platform diver during her university years. And, yes, she did indeed fit my body-type fetish of being tall and smoothly muscled. Is that a coincidence -- hmm-mmm? After my father was called up as a reserve officer at the beginning of World War II, mom had to serve as both mother and father during the nearly three and a half years he was overseas. I was only 13 years old when my dad was called up, and my mom was determined that my younger brother and I wouldn't suffer from not having a father around to teach us "male things." So it was mother who played touch-football with my brother and me in the backyard, who taught us tennis, played catch, and who even taught me the "manly art of self-defense" after I'd been whupped by a school bully. Since she didn't think it was right to beat on someone with your fists, she decided to teach me some wrestling holds and tricks that I could use defensively. So she bought an instruction book, and I learned about self-defense by practicing mostly on our maid Sadie! Sadie was a young "negro" girl who acted as a live-in maid and nanny for my brother and myself. She was quite a beauty in her own way. Her dark, coffee-colored skin seemed to accentuate the etched muscularity of her small (5'2") but strongly built body. Sadie grew up on a small share-cropping farm, and had worked the fields until she moved to the city, where she started working for my parents. The hard field work had given her a lot of raw strength, a powerfully sinewed back and great biceps. Unlike many African American females, who often have overly well-developed upper bodies but whose legs are usually too skinny, Sadie's legs were quite powerfully built. . . much like Jackie Joyner's, the black female Olympic track and field champion. This young black woman came into my life at a most impressionable age, and was truly responsible for leading me through the doorway of adolescent sexuality. The fact that my mother actually encouraged me to "work out" with Sadie boggles my mind to this very day. But my wrestling sessions with Sadie actually began several months before the self-defense instructions. They began in the swimming pool in our backyard, where Sadie served as the playtime lifeguard for my brother and I. It was always great fun for me to try to "duck" Sadie when she was in the pool with us. Those struggles, particularly when I would be behind her, plastered against her with my arms around her in a reverse bear hug and my legs scissoring one of her thighs, would quite often produce a throbbing hard-on! As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time trying to get Sadie into the pool. So Sadie and I wrestled in my mother's instructional sessions and struggled together whenever I could get her in the swimming pool. She was obviously heavier and much stronger than me . . . but I always gave a pretty good account of myself, and made our struggles last as long as possible. And these hot and heavy tussles were responsible for a lot of teenage erections and night-time pillow humpings! There's no doubt but that Sadie knew perfectly well what was going on, and did not seem to mind the fact that she was turning me on, so long as I was cool and my parents didn't find out. HOWEVER, my mother was no dummy, and, after catching me humping Sadie's thigh like a junkyard dog during one of our practice sessions, mother decided I'd learned enough self-defense. She had a little talk with me, a longer talk with Sadie, and from then on Sadie became my ex-wrestling partner . . . and all too soon departed from our household! OK, here's where it gets interesting from a psycho-erotic point of view. When my mother decided that I was too old and too pubescently horny to be wrestling with our nanny and put a stop to our practice bouts, I was furious! And in my anger I wanted to get back at her. I remember, as clearly as if it were only yesterday, concocting an elaborate fantasy of having Sadie challenge my mother to do battle. Sadie would fight my mother as my Champion. If she won, Sadie would take me away with her to her jungle kingdom where I would rule with her for ever after, and we would "wrestle" for ever and ever. But somehow as I first projected that fantasy out onto the screen of my mind, it just didn't play right. My mother would get beaten up by the younger, stronger Sadie. But somehow that idea was not as satisfying as I'd first imagined it would be. And so in one of the earliest metamorphoses of this pubescent oedipal fantasy, I conveniently transmogrified my mother into Sheena, Queen of The Jungle, and Sadie into an Amazon Princess. The fact that my mother so closely resembled the comic book Sheena character certainly helped the fantasy projection! According to some psychologists, this is a basic construct that many young boys use to play out their oedipus complexes . . . (a boy's unconscious sexual desire for his mother!) Actually, it wasn't until my mother was in her eighties that I had the nerve to share any of this early wrestling fixation with her. And she absolutely blew my mind. She told me that she knew all about my predilection for muscular females . . . and she was also quite aware of the oedipal aspects of my wrestling fantasies! It was my mother who reminded me that at about five or six years of age I'd blundered into their bedroom one morning when she and my father were having sex, and that I'd asked if she and my father were "fighting." Hm-mmm, it must have looked to my five-year-old eyes as if they were engaged in combat, must have even sounded like they were wrestling. Could it be that this episode was the trigger to the "erotic combat" imprint? What I also didn't know, until that conversation, was that my mother had once found my collection of old Irving Klaw photos of the famous "girlie-magazine" model Betty Page wrestling with another very muscular girl. She discovered this stash in my room, under the mattress, just before I left for the Marine Corps at eighteeen. When she saw my embarrassment at hearing THAT news, she promptly said: "Hey, whatever turns you on. At least it wasn't whips and chains!" This from my eighty-three year old mother, who had lived and learned about life more fully than I'd supposed. There was also in that same stash some torn out pages from a couple of books that I'd discovered when I was sixteen, one entitled "The Golden Spur," and the other "Wolf Woman." That first book, written in 1933, had three pages of vivid description about two women -- an Arabian slavegirl versus an American heiress -- in a long, hard fought battle. Most importantly, for me, the description dwelled upon "the unexpected muscularity" of the American heiress. "Wolf Woman" was published in the late 1930's, and was about this half-breed girl who worked as a fishing and hunting guide at a remote Canadian lake. The description of her was as . . . "a tall, sinewy, sunbronzed half-Indian girl; athletic, broad-shouldered, lithe-hipped, with splendidly muscled arms hewn by hours of swinging an axe and paddling a canoe." The pages I'd torn out described a furious wrestling match she had with a young English Lord. By the time she and this London dandy were finished, their clothing was "in tatters, their bodies sweat-wet, and their muscles flexed and swollen to the limit." She won the battle, too. That book's description actually set the tone for most of my own writing of erotic combat stories over the years. It was, to me, a classic! Anyway, my mother had put two and two together when she found my erotic fantasy stash. But wise old gal that she was (plus the fact that parents did NOT discuss sex with their children in those days), she decided to leave well enough alone and say nothing. But she did share with me all those years later that after seeing the hidden material she realized why I spent so much time wrestling around with Sadie in my puberty years. But, actually, the stage was set for my Amazon wrestling adventures much earlier than my hot and heavy bouts with Sadie. It was one particular after-school wrestling match with a girl named Cathy that probably did it for me, way back at the age of ten. Cathy, the tomboy daughter of a local Catholic college coach, was a year older than me and was my first female wrestling partner! Cathy was tall for her age -- lithe-bodied and firmly muscled. She had that kind of sharply etched, clearly defined sinewiness that ballet dancers often develop. She was the first girl I ever remember having biceps. And she also had sort of a washboarded muscularity down her belly, sculpting her abdominals. It may seem like a strange imprint, but I've always been turned on by a well-muscled belly ever since then. A bicep/abdominal fetish? Hm-mmmmm. Nowadays, almost any female bodybuilder has that kind of abs and sculpted biceps. But not when I was a youngster. Viva la change! For whatever her reason, Cathy picked me as her "playmate," the first time we noticed one another at recess at the beginning of the new school year. Our relationship began by her deftly tripping me as I walked by. Next time it was grabbing my arm and twisting me off my feet, then pouncing upon me. She and I began wrestling there on the ground. It was a very short-lived battle as I remember it, and she won. But our struggles had produced a very strange feeling within me . . . one that I hadn't experienced before! The next day . . . same thing! However, this time we lay there face to face, all tangled together, and strained for several minutes before I admitted defeat. And that hardlocked straining and squirming gave me the first hard-on I'd ever had from wrestling with a girl! I LOVED the sensation. And I sure wanted lots more of THAT kind of wrestling. Back in my late 30's, I spent a few sessions with a psychotherapist, mostly because of a lot of anxiety I was feeling in a job I had at the time. I was very open with him about my predilection, hoping that he might shed some light on the whole thing. His feeling was that the wrestling had more to do with my mother and I (that Oedipus complex stuff again!) while the preoccupation with female muscularity had to do with the way I handled my "adolescent homoerotic and homosexual impulses". Hm-mmm, well my only such "impulse" was at around eleven when a fat little neighbor kid talked me into us mutually jerking each other off. But that was, at most, a decidedly uncomfortable and guilt-provoking event that was never repeated. The psychotherapist also felt that it was possible that I'd fixated in my early childhood on some young male with a beautifully muscled body, and handled that homoerotic reaction by transforming the boy into a girl in my memory and fantasies. But I don't remember ever being sexually attracted to another male, regardless of their having muscles or not. I can't even remember being sexually attracted to muscular Cathy! It was just a case of when we wrestled I got turned-on. And we wrestled a lot! But at nine years old, for gosh sakes, its simply a strange, wonderful sensual feeling that you want more of . . . not a "sexual attraction!" I will, however, (despite the shrink's suggestions to the contrary) always feel that Cathy's intricately sculpted muscularity was the major imprint for that particular "fetish". . . whatever else it may be symbolic of in a deeper psychological sense. Those wrestles with Cathy, with our seemingly endless straining and squirming (which would so often result in a sensual-erotic reaction) became the parameter for the way in which I like to wrestle with my Amazon lovers. It's not the kind of fast, Greco-Roman wrestling style that I enjoy. Rather, it is the almost slow-motion straining in a hold -- almost any hold or grip that will insure that I can explore my opponent's female strength, and that will accentuate the feeling of my being held captive within the powerfully muscled limbs of my Amazon mat-mate. I do not, however, enjoy being just a pinned and passive victim in these matches, for as often as not I will at some point become the "top" rather than remain as the "bottom." You might say that I'm process-oriented when it comes to wrestling. It's the doing (the straining), rather than who wins. But the feeling of being captured within the strong embrace of muscular female limbs is really at the core of my delight in erotic combat. There is still another aspect of my predilection, one that I'm not so certain as to how it came about. This is the voyeuristic aspect. I have already mentioned my teenage stash of erotic material. Well, I have always collected such material; ranging from photos and cartoon-stories to the old German 16mm films, and currently the superbly filmed video offerings from such companies as Premier Productions. Watching some of these videos, with their female bodybuilder/wrestlers (often nude-muscled) in tightly interlocked action just sends me into ballistic orbit! But why? I've tried to figure out precisely how I am reacting to these images . . . or to the textual descriptions in stories. Am I engaging in transference, where I "become" one of the combatants? Am I simply delighting, aesthetically, in the ripple and play of beautifully developed female muscles? Does experiencing the pressure of a pair of powerful Amazon thighs scissored around my head remind me of my own birth-trauma? Well, I don't know. Perhaps this is one reason that I'm still more or less "in the closet" about discussing my predilection or fantasy material collection with most people. I have almost always shown wrestling films or video tapes to my lovers . . . at a certain point in our sexual relationship. Very seldom have I ever gotten a negative response, and mostly the comment is: "Oh, so that's what you like to do. OK . . . I'll try it!" And what more could I ask than that? But, in general, I'm still hesitant to discuss this subject with others. So there you have it . . . the slow, steady progression of events that led to my life-long predilection for muscular women who like to "wrestle." Interwoven with this unusual psycho-sexual fixation is my deep appreciation for all of those more acceptable characteristics that make a woman a woman. Certainly not all of my Amazons have had the kind of clearly defined muscularity that I love so much. Not all of them have enjoyed wrestling. But when I've had my druthers, the women in my life have indeed fit comfortably into my special "thing" for Amazons! Like Thomas Gramstad says, in his Amazons International electronic magazine . . . "a hard woman is good to find." ADDENDUM: Thomas . . . . hope my "Amazon Chronicles" psychological profile fits into the general theme of Amazons International. Some pretty personal stuff being written, and I share it so that others "out there" will feel less alienated about their own predilections. Until I discovered that there were others who responded to what I responded to, etc. I really felt awfully alone . . . and that is no way to go through life. And of course that is one reason that I so appreciate what you are doing with Amazons International. I am absolutely delighted to be a part of it all. Emish ********************************************************** * Amazons International * * Thomas Gramstad, editor: thomas@smaug.uio.no * * Administravia: amazons-request@math.uio.no * * Submissions: amazons@math.uio.no * ********************************************************** "A Hard Woman is Good to Find" -- The Valkyries