Calf Crazy
We interrupt your regularly scheduled depressing, bitter, and disgusted pleas for sanity with this blog posting about the legendarily massively muscular calves of Asian women!
It should be noted this post stems from some conversations and observations I had offline while living in Asia. I personally think muscular calves and a toned fit physique is attractive, but I’m not obsessed, or am I… The world just doesn’t make as much sense as it use to, but I keep trying to find an underlying reason. I keep hoping things can be made better.
Although I’m not proud of it, I spent considerable time and energy carefully researching this topic online and will now pass on the fruits of my labour to the blogosphere and those people who regularly end up on my blog while googling for such phrases as “huge Korean calves” or “gigantic calf muscles“. Someone has to give the splogs some competition. You shouldn’t go any further if you are exceptionally squeamish.
I’ve brazenly liberated a number of images. I claim no copyright what so ever for them, if anyone wants an image removed I will gladly do so. However since I plan to attribute source whenever possible and give them free PR and incoming traffic in the form of a link, I don’t expect too many complaints. I’ve also re-sized the images and possibly re-cropped them, not to remove someone’s watermark, but to make them fit in better with the text of this posting.
First up is Amy Yanagisawa who appears to be of Japanese ancestry but is an American citizen. She has also gotten married since she began her career as a fitness competitor. She also seems to have appeared in some movies. She doesn’t have her own personal website currently. I don’t recall where I got the photo from but I don’t think it was the site in the watermark.
Another Japanese woman apparently known for the size the muscles in her legs is Yumi Sekine. She is a bodybuilder from Japan. At one time she had her own website perhaps, but I was unable to access it. It could be banned in China or it could be just down. This picture came from FTVideo.com which stands for “Fast Twitching Video” and that site is up. You can purchase an entire movie of Ms. Sekine from them if you so desire.
Pictured next is Min Young Kim. She appears to be a Korean-American. Her name is very common, so once I found these pictures I had a difficult time finding them again. She may have had a website at one time but now it is gone. She often just goes by Min Kim or possibly even Min Yung Kim. If you want to know more about Ms. Kim, get googling or perhaps read this interview.
Next up is Jin who seems to model for CollegeShape.com. I found this picture by using Yahoo Image Search I believe. Although not always, sometimes, I have better luck doing image searches here than in Google. Steve Keller seemed to think Jin’s calves were particularly disproportionate to the size of the rest of her.
Although perhaps lacking the pure mass of Jin, Sandy Vu may be even more famous for the size of her calves. She doesn’t have her own webpage. I’m not sure where I picked up this tidbit of information, but I believe she recently moved South to California, whether this means more or less pictures of her online showing off her calves I don’t know.
Femflex is another adult oriented website that derives its income from pictures of women’s muscles. I’m not sure how much a site like this makes, but given that there are many of them it must be enough to cover costs and live off of, but it is definitely a niche market. See I learned something doing my MBA.
The last professional model, fitness competitor, and/or body builder I turned up is Tess Yong. This may be another Korean-American name. The picture was taken by Bill Dobbins. He seems to have a more artistic style, but none the less seems to specialize in taking pictures of women. Furthermore that seems to be his primary source of income both in print and online.
Tess Yong used to have her own website and personal training business based out of Hawaii, but that seems to have disappeared from the internet or have been deemed subversive by the Communist Party of China. I suspect it is the former. There is still some information about her online however.
Another source for less professional photos and even more numerous text descriptions are blogs. The number of women who complain online about their body is probably over 50% of the women online. So doing a Technorati search for “my calves are too big” or “I have huge calves” yields more than one or two results.
The only photo I liberated from a blog was taken by someone who seems to be under the impression her calves are excessively large. The angle of the photo and even more so the manipulation of her calf with her other hand make it seem perhaps larger than it is. Women put more pressure on themselves and each other than men do. The fashion industry, Hollywood, and the rags they call women’s magazines don’t help matters either. Some men prefer women that aren’t waifs. Of course the body image of female bodybuilders is also not the norm or average, but there is nothing wrong with a normal healthy body that isn’t a size 2 or whatever. If all you have to complain about is the size of your calves, you should really stop and realize just how lucky you are to have that as your biggest problem, physically and mentally.
A number of Asian women have also blogged about the size of their calves or in one case, those of a classmate: [snip]
After installing some script from MyBlogLog I noticed how many people were clicking on the links I had collected, I decided to delete them. I mean they are just normal people who blog, they don’t need people bothering them, especially via my blog. I wasn’t trying to cause any problems, this whole posting just snowballed… I don’t usually try to cause problems, I’m just pathetically honest.
There another afternoon killed blogging about women’s calf muscles. I should have spent the time looking for a job. I always think I can just whip up a blog posting, but it often ends up taking a lot longer than I thought it would. This time I had already found all the images and links before I started. I just had to put it all together and make it sound and look OK. I’m not likely to do a companion piece on women’s abdominal or bicep muscles any time soon, though both muscle groups seem to have their share of fans online.
Although Emlyn seriously questions my more dubious postings, I needed to do something to get my mind off my problems and kill time. I’ve since applied to four more job postings so that also makes me feel a bit better though I’m currently fighting a cold. Although I spent several hours writing this posting I forgot some content. One of the impetuses for this posting was ads I saw in Wu Dao Kou for a local gym. They featured a fit Chinese women whose name was told to me but I’ve since forgotten it. She was featured in bus ads, posters, flyers, and billboards so a more fit and athletic body image may be taking hold in China. Below is a snap I took of a flyer which was handed to me.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 2:46 am filed under: Blogging, China, Depression, Internet, Search Engines, Wu Dao Kou, 健美 and tagged: Asian, calves, Japanese, Korean. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
