Back in the old days, when men were men and women were in the kitchen, terms like biceps, triceps, bench press and dead lift were exclusively associated with the male of the species. But not anymore. There's a revolution taking place in the gyms of America and at the forefront, leading the charge, is Lisa Lyon, the world's first Woman's Body-building Champion. Diminutive in stature (she stands 5'3" and weighs only 105 pounds), Lisa can dead-lift 225 pounds, bench-press 120 pounds and squat 265 pounds, two and a half times her own weight. And, as evidenced by her long list of credits (every talk show from Donahue to Snyder, several TV specials on women's body building, numerous athletic competitions and a book, Body Magic, to be published by Bantam), Lisa is hoping that all of this will catch on big. "I honestly think we need a new definition of female beauty for the Eighties," says Lisa, "and a high-tech body that's not only beautiful but useful as well, may be it." A cum laude graduate of UCLA, which she followed with a three-year stint as a story analyst for American International Pictures in Hollywood, Lisa first entered the world of body building four years ago, when a series of traumatic experiences caused her to seek an outlet for her aggressions. "I was studying kendo," she recalls, "and my classmates were all men. The more seriously they took me, the more I was getting beat up, so I realized that I needed to be stronger." To achieve that end, she started lifting weights on a special program devised by bodybuilder Franco Columbu, who, says Lisa, "thought I was joking at first. But then I started to see my body changing and moved to Gold's Gym. Again, I was practically the only woman, but the men at the gym loved the idea that a woman was in there doing it, so they were very helpful." Outside the gym, however, reactions to Lisa vary. "People think that because I'm strong I like to dominate men. I don't want to dominate. I like rough trade. I don't like sissies," she told a writer for SohoNews. After four years of work, Lisa has achieved her goal--a sort of animal aesthetic, as she says--where muscularity shows but is not cumbersome. "If you looked at a cougar," she says, "you wouldn't say ooh, that looks so masculine because it's so muscular. You'd say that's a very good-looking cat, perceiving that muscularity is not masculine or intrinsically sexual. I want to be seen as a well-developed human animal."
