Ms. Lyon would become one of the world’s most famous female bodybuilders, although she considered herself less an athlete than an artist. She turned her body into a living sculpture while performing at art galleries and museums, and while posing for photographers including Marcus Leatherdale,Through her pictures and performances, she said, she hoped to champion a strong yet graceful new standard of beauty, one in which a woman’s body was “neither masculine nor feminine, but feline.
Ms. Lyon had taken up bodybuilding in the mid-1970s, intending to improve her upper-body strength after a few years competing in kendo, the Japanese martial art, while studying at the University of California at Los Angeles. . A meeting with Schwarzenegger led Ms. Lyon to Gold’s Gym, the center of the American bodybuilding scene , where she began working out six days a week.“A lot of the men bodybuilders there resented being invaded by a woman,” she told The Post in 1981. “They thought I’d be in the way, and they thought I wasn’t serious. Some, I’m sure, thought I was there to pick up guys, not weights. And some just wanted to watch me in a sexual way.
While many of her peers had bulky physiques with pecs and lats that seemed on the verge of bursting, Ms. Lyon’s figure was less intimidating. She was more svelte than brawny — comic book artist Frank Miller would later cite her as a visual inspiration for his Marvel Comics character Elektra, an expert assassin — and immediately attracted Mapplethorpe’s attention when they met in 1980 at a loft party in Manhattan.Over the next few years, Mapplethorpe took dozens of black-and-white pictures of Ms.
“My childhood was dark,” she said in an interview for the Mapplethorpe book, describing struggles with recurring nightmares that she tried to treat with rituals that included “counting, touching things” and “running round the house three times counterclockwise.” She later told Spy magazine that she was “diagnosed as manic” when she was 16, and would attempt to treat the condition with the drug PCP, which can cause hallucinations.Ms.
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