Is there a gap between our private desires and the ones we are brave enough to share? Not for Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, a young Arnie equated weightlifting with ejaculating. “It’s as satisfying to me as coming,” he declares with a grin.
Schwarzenegger and fellow shredded action star Dolph Lundgren are central to actor, playwright and poet Rosy Carrick’s latest show, Musclebound. She was captivated by them as an adolescent and, a while ago, revisited Masters of the Universe, starring Lundgren as He-Man. During a torture scene where Lundgren is stripped almost naked, and has his oiled-up, hairless body whipped by his enemies, something struck her.
In the pantheon of 80s action films, muscular men are “presented in a way that usually only women are presented, displaying their body in all of its glory”. The films invite viewers to objectify men, yet never rob the men of their power while doing so. What intrigued her about the torture scenes is that “it’s a performance of weakness that comes from an intrinsic place of power”, Carrick says. In her own sex life, she found she was “giving a performance of power of the sort you only need to do if actually, you don’t have that much power”.
In Musclebound, Carrick explores how the erotic feelings sparked by He-Man forced her to confront the truth about her own life. She realised she had barriers to having honest conversations about sex and relationships with her teenage daughter, Olive. At the time, Olive was navigating her first romance and looking to her mum for guidance. “I was 19 when I had Olive, so there have always been points while she’s growing up that I remember what I was like at that age.”
While there has been progress in attitudes to sex since Carrick was her daughter’s age, with “more of an emphasis on sex positivity and pleasure” now, Olive’s concerns sounded familiar. The sex education she relayed from school focused on penetrative heterosexual intercourse; her friends weren’t talking about how sexual experiences actually made them feel, and Olive expressed concerns about being “used” by boys.
“It took me back to the first time I was having sex – which was a pretty lacklustre experience,” says Carrick. Sex with someone else wasn’t the same as masturbation, yet there was a sense that being “good at sex” meant enjoying it. “When it comes to heterosexual sex, there’s still this imbalance,” says Carrick. “We’re socialised to put our feelings second, and to look sexy while doing it.”
Mother and daughter always had a close and honest relationship, but Olive was raising issues that Carrick hadn’t resolved for herself. On stage, she had always talked openly about sex and masturbation. “But I’d been omitting how important it was to me to be the sexiest person I knew, the most amazing sexual partner,” Carrick says. “I started to interrogate what value that kind of sexual power has if it relies on someone else to grant it to you.”
For the show, Carrick explored other 80s action films, attended Comic-Con to meet Lundgren and even flew to the US to attend Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding tournament, the Arnold Classic. Much as she had spent hours performing sexiness, bodybuilders “spend hours doing gruelling work to create their bodies … in order to literally objectify themselves in front of a row of judges”. But whereas the work Schwarzenegger does to his body makes him more powerful, Carrick felt the opposite. “When you’re making a big effort to be sexy, as I always was, there comes a point where you start feeling resentful about it.”
As the show builds, Carrick sheds her bravado and reveals her biggest secret. “I was so scared when I was first doing the show – I was taking anti-anxiety tablets, I wasn’t sleeping. The shame was so great,” she says. But she knew she had to talk about it. “Talking about it is normalising it. But it still makes me quite emotional when I say it.”
She has the support of her co-star, Olive – or rather, a celebrity cameo in the form of young Courteney Cox, Lundgren’s Masters of the Universe co-star, who pops up on screen throughout. Carrick debated including Olive in the show. “Writing about my own experience is one thing, but writing about hers is another.” However, Olive told her not to worry. “It was such an amazing gift,” Carrick says, and it made her realise how central Olive’s questions had been to her personal epiphany. “There is some two-way mothering between us, so I wanted to credit her with that.”
While making the show, Carrick considered the sexual lessons we should pass on to our daughters. Now, she has answers: “Be truthful. Prioritise your own pleasure in a society that tells you to do otherwise. And be shameless about it.”
