In its second life, Muscle Beach gradually sidelined female weightlifters and glorified the heterosexuality of male bodybuilders, thus reinforcing traditional gender norms and leading to wider acceptance of the male muscular physique by the 1980s. While the Muscle Beach athletes successfully distanced themselves from the taint of homosexuality by associating muscles with heterosexual glamour, the 1958 scandal reversed this trend and reinforced the stigma attached to muscles. The legitimization of visible muscularity was not a simple process. The Muscle Beach phenomenon illuminates the changing meaning of muscles in America, from the conflation of muscu-larity with homosexuality in the 1950s to the triumph of " hard bodies " in the 1980s. In the following decades a new " Muscle Beach " arose in countercultural Venice. The former body-builder-turned-action-movie-star-turned-California-governor is. In 1958, in the aftermath of a sex crime panic, the site was closed. It’s much too early to predict the nature of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s final Wikipedia entry, much less his legacy. In the 1940s and 1950s, at Santa Monica's Muscle Beach, male and female acrobats and bodybuilders performed stunts and displayed muscular physiques.
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