Dirty Words: “Chemical Pink” by Katie Arnoldi (Overlook)

Where else could "Chemical Pink" (Overlook), a novel about professional bodybuilding, go but deep into fetishistic obsession and kinky sex? Author Katie Arnoldi states as much in her Afterwards. She was a competitive bodybuilder, though not in the same class as those who she depicts in her book. How could she be without the drugs?

The book opens with Charles, the skinny, controlling, masochistic and sadistic collector of body fantasies reminiscing about the one who got away. Well, she didn't leave as much as evolved or mutated into a transitional sex, a bloated sack of confused hormonal development, with a clitoris overgrown to a decent-sized cock.

Such is the wages of steroid abuse, one of the many chemical cocktails that give the novel its name, injected to enhance training and sculpt the female form into something deep-voiced and bulky, just as Charles likes it. But the side-effects eventually overtook the desired effects, and this failed experiment was put to pasture like the cow she had become.

Along comes Aurora to the Venice Beach gym Charles frequents like a brothel. She has potential and he lures the single mother with cash and prizes.

"Chemical Pink" started as a short story exploring the dynamics of Charles relationship with Aurora and her daughter Amy, but once Arnoldi introduced the bodybuilding into the plot it expanded. It can be looked at as a cautionary tale, but really it's larger than even the musclebound bodies it portrays. The lens can open wide enough to take in the whole culture, but the disturbing details are what drives a reader forward.

There's the character of Hendrik, a older German trainer, drug dealer and pimp, who wears tube socks and a toupee, and claims have made Arnold Schwarzenegger a champion. He supplies Charles with bodybuilding dominatrixes.

If the development of secondary male sexual characteristics on a female body isn't upsetting enough, then Charles' femdom scenarios are going to test the limits of your tolerance. Or maybe you're just turned on by them.

Charles is seen swaddled like a baby in a dirty diaper, clawing at Aurora's naked breast, hungry to suckle. He bathes and preps Aurora for what she thinks is sex, and is for Charles, but first he needs her displayed naked in a seatless chair so he can squat beneath her splayed bottom and snort the odorous essence of her bowels.

It's a mutually rewarding relationship. Charles gets to rule from the bottom and Aurora gets a house for herself and her daughter, food and jewelry, a car, everything she could have desired or wanted. Mostly Aurora gets the body she always dreamed of through a torturous regiment of weightlifting, diet and injections, even as it ruptures her family. The line between sadomasochistic arousal and physical improvement disappears as obsessions tend to erase boundaries.

The story moves swiftly to the competition that will put Aurora on the professional map, and it sweeps a reader along for the ride with conflict and resolution terminating in a brutal conclusion fitting for the cult novel this is, and one that could easily be adapted into a great exploitation film. Yet, it's more than merely the mechanics of storytelling which give this novel its heft.

What resonates is the Frankenstein's monster of blind consuming passion that can literally warp the mind and the body, and the ignorance that isn't bliss but fuel to further push the engine of obsession to its logical conclusion, destruction.

That said, "Chemical Pink" is a hoot. It's hilarious and upsetting, thought provoking and entertaining, perverted and surprisingly touching—the great American bodybuilding novel.

Now, if you're one of those fetishists who love a strong dominant woman and need a more visual stimulus to turn you on, there are sites like MuscleWomen and SexyMuscleGirls and MuscleSensuality and Muscle-Fantasies to name just a few. Enjoy falling into that rabbithole.

Buy "Chemical Pink" by Katie Arnoldi