Body and Health Perfection

           Have you ever walked into the gym just for a quick run on the treadmill or the bicycle and just watched all the people who have been there for hours going as hard as they could? Lifting weights that are heavier than you? People who eat, sleep, and live at the gym? People view working out as a form of discipline over their bodies and a lot of the time reaching a specific body goal. Having good health doesn’t necessarily mean a person has to body build or work out every single day; it’s someone taking care of themself physically, mentally and emotionally as well as having a good diet, hygiene and being successfully comfortable with a good paying job. Although they illustrate health and perfection differently, two portrayals are Roxanne Edwards and Heather Cassils.

            When focusing in on Roxanne Edwards and Heather Cassils, the question of whether there is a single form of health comes to mind. Roxanne Edwards is a woman body builder who views body building to be about nothing but absolute failure because there’s always more to achieve. In her interview, “Roxanne Edwards is superhuman” by S. Adrian Massey, there is a discussion about how people view women to physically look which is usually a thin flat stomach, big breasts and an hourglass figure, and Roxanne Edward’s addresses her pride in who she is and what she looks like. After being asked if she felt herself to be considered superhuman by her appearance and her lifestyle, she elaborates on how she views herself to be a different kind of a woman, and she just wants to be socially accepted. She says, “I wear my strength outward. Many women are strong but they choose to keep that shit to themselves,” and she later talks about femininity being about how someone carries themselves using drag queens as an example of true femininity. “I learned from drag queens how to walk in heels. They taught me a lot about what it’s like to be feminine.”  

            “If it comes to me and some chick who’s lighter, not saying she’s white, but just lighter than me, and we’re the same size, we’re the same look, and I have better muscles, she’s probably going to get picked better than me. She’s marketable, she’s more acceptable to be mass marketed.” She then asserts herself and states her reasoning for being so determined in the body building world; it’s not about defining herself, but showing other women that they can define themselves in any way that they want to. This is significant because Heather Cassils, a transgender person, purpose is to achieve a body that cannot be characterized as a man or woman.

            Heather Cassils is a physical trainer and uses working as a social experiment to see what a woman’s body can be pushed to become, and to explore what it’s like to be a transgender in modern society. In the article “Cuts” by Heather Cassils, she talks about what she had to do in order to achieve “a confusing body that ruptured expectation”, including hiring a bodybuilding coach, nutritionist, and although she is against steroids, steroid use. This is essential and connects to Roxanne Edwards as Cassils uses steroids as a last option to reach her best, and Roxanne has the attitude that whatever can benefit her, steroids in this case, she will use and she really doesn’t care about it.