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ost nights after work, Chicago Secretary Doreen Dahlstrom, 24, goes to lift weights at the Diamond Gym. And what begins as an off-hours fancy can mature into a career, as proved by Becky Sheehan, 35, of Dayton. "I grew up thinking that to be attractive to men, I should be soft, feminine and caked in cosmetics," she recalls. "But when I was 25, I took up tennis and got hooked. The arm muscles tennis built up looked pretty neat, I thought. So I started weight lifting. Now I teach aerobics and tennis, and I have a new idea of the attractive woman: me."
Though the fitness craze is still mostly a middle-and upper-middle-class phenomenon, the fit look has nothing elitist about it. It represents an attainable ideal for all ages, races, walks of life. It requires little more than the will to work at them. Argues Body Builder Rachel McLish: "You have a simple choice of what to put on your bones: fat or muscle. Working out is a positive addiction." It may also be the means to that elusive, seductive goal: a prolonged, vital youth. "The fitness business," suggests Novelist-Critic Wilfrid Sheed, "is about sex and immortality. By toning up the system you can prolong youth, just about finesse middle age and then, when the time comes, go straight into senility."
There are those who think senility, or at least softheadedness, may have already arrived with the strong and healthy look. "Women are in danger of turning in on themselves, becoming emotionally muscle-bound," says Jon Wilkman, a Los Angeles producer of documentaries for cable TV. "We've entered an age of mental and physical narcissism. Originally, man built a strong body to do work. Now women are building their bodies just to look good. Is that enough? Does beauty stop at the skin line? For this kind of woman, it does. She will be sitting alone, in an empty room, with her perfect body." Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker journalist and humorist, wonders whether this new ideal woman is only a media spin-off from the popularity of Jane Fonda and her bestselling Workout Book (see box page 75). "For the public good," Trillin says, "the more people who can lift the end of a car off the ground in case of trouble, the better. But I'm not sure I see any other advantages to it. Speaking as one whose muscles don't ripple, I feel confident in proclaiming that this too shall pass and that our natural inclination toward sloth will reassert itself."
That would be just fine to many men, and not a few women, with more traditional ideas of female beauty. Insists Beverly Sills, the diva who now runs the New York City Opera: "There is a growing strength in women, but it's in the forehead, not the forearm. Men will always be attracted to women with nice soft arms and a fleshy bosom." Playboy magazine's 1982 Playmate of the Year, Shannon Tweed, is about the same height and weight as Mariel Hemingway, but her contours are different — in the soft lines and curves that her beau, Publisher Hugh Hefner, finds so attractive. She will not try to change: "I think you can get too muscular. I'm not the jealous type, but I'd be jealous of a woman with drop-dead curves rather than of a woman with an athletic build. Somewhere there is a happy medium between Fonda and Dolly Parton."