I’ve never seen a skinny guy work out, or go to the gym. It’s a fucking guy’s space. It’s his fucking place. And if you think it’s not a big deal because it’s just a fucking workout room, it’s not a fucking thing.”
The show’s female lead, Naima McLean, who played a gym owner with an equally extreme brand of female-dominated personal training, told us she sees the show as a celebration of women, or rather, a way for us to embrace the fact that women have as much strength as men. When she was starting out, she said, the gym she worked for treated women as “weaker” than men. “I’m tired of people treating us as fragile,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done as an actor to stay in shape.”
In 2017, there were 1.8 billion exercise videos on YouTube. That’s 1.8 billion chances for someone to see your body, how it looks naked, how it moves, how it sounds. And whether it’s the bodybuilder with her ripped abs, or the yoga instructor with his chiseled arms, or the female boxer with her boxing gloves, they’re all just doing something to earn a living. Maybe they think of their performances as sexual, or maybe not. But the reason we watch is because they look incredible while they work. It feels like they’re doing us a favor, giving us a taste of something they know we’ll love.
Fleur De Force makes “exhibitionism sexy.” The show focuses on three women, each of whom has a different skill. There’s Bettie Page, an amateur model who looks great, and she’s supposed to be pretty easy to manipulate. She’s the type of woman who might, for example, spend a day at the beach with her friends and then get naked for guys in a local bar after partying with them. She’s pretty, but no threat at all. Then there’s Jelena Johnson, who may not be on the same level as Page, but she’s more likely to be more aggressive. So while Page might go for cock just because she likes getting fucked, Johnson likes to show off for guys. She can get drunk and strip for strangers at the bar or in front of her parents’ house, and she always wants them to watch. Then there’s Veronica Bane, who is the most dangerous of the group. Her body’s the body of an athlete, so she’s strong and doesn’t let any of Page’s or Johnson’s attempts to take advantage of her get by her. When they try to control her or fuck her, she does not submit.
While they were filming the show, there was an assistant director on set with them the whole time, making sure no one was overworking or doing anything unsafe. In addition to filming the three main women, they filmed around 50 other women of various ages and body types who were just hanging out at the gym.
“It was so much fun,” says McLean. “It was the best crew I’ve ever worked with. I like being in the scene, especially when they’re doing interviews and the crew is standing around, looking at me and watching my face.”
Bettie Page was in control of the whole production, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. She told us she’s known it her whole life: She’s better than anyone. When you watch the show, it feels like she’s so natural on camera. You want her to have your body and your energy too. “My role is that of the ‘bad girl,’” Page said when we talked to her in Los Angeles. “A lot of people know me as a sex symbol or glamour model, but the reality is that I was on the streets and did not go to college. So it’s actually a way for me to show that I’m normal. In society, we’re not meant to be that strong.”
As you might imagine, the women they cast for the show were more than a little intrigued by the idea of doing their work in front of a camera, especially since, as they say, they knew they wouldn’t have to lose weight or hit the gym as much as they did when they actually did their work for the production company. But even when they were hired to shoot, it didn’t come easily for everyone. “I had a fear of being watched while I was having sex,” says Sarah Blake, the trainer at Sensuous Bodyshaping. Blake, a single mother who has worked at the gym for 17 years, had just quit smoking and was doing an after-hours cleanse when she was approached to be in the show. “I hadn’t smoked for a few days. I had just come off the couch,” she says.
And as you might guess, being in a reality show is harder on your personal life than you might realize. “I had a few guys that approached me while they were visiting their girlfriend who had just gotten her boobs done and had surgery on her nose,” says Lauren, who’s got a tattoo on the side of her arm that says “Don’t fuck with me” in Chinese. “They were both huge! So I thought, OMG, I’m a big girl and now I have someone else to compete with. Or these guys would start groping me a little too hard and too fast. It was weird.”
The woman who would become her rival in the “body building” competition is Veronica Bane. A former bodybuilder, Bane moved to LA from Ireland and started a business, Gorgeous, based in West Hollywood, which sells fitness products and fitness classes, and in the process became a leading voice in the bikini bodybuilding community. She was once a top-ranked bikini competitor on the international stage, and as a result, the first woman to receive a professional sponsorship from Fitness One. She’s worked with every major health and fitness brand, including Muscle and Fitness Hers, the magazine that she had her start on as a bikini model.
When she was first approached about being in Fleur De Force, she was excited about it. “I went to London for a photoshoot that I could have shot in my underwear, but they had me wearing this skimpy thong bikini top. It was such an obvious thing, this kind of bikini shoot with all the male photographers, and all the cameras on me. It was awkward and kind of humiliating,” she says. “In addition to all that, the only thing that was taken out of my dressing room was the lingerie. Nothing else was touched. So it was awkward to be naked in front of guys, yet no one was allowed to touch me. When I was in Ireland, I was always told never to give up my self-esteem for work. I got to be naked in a photo shoot with a bunch of men, and that was a huge part of who I am as a person.”
But she decided that this kind of show, this bikini competition show, wasn’t for her, because of the way it objectifies her and how dangerous it made her feel.
“It felt objectifying, and I don’t like that,” she says. “I felt kind of victimized by it. But when I started getting calls to work on TV shows, I began to be okay with that. I went from being a top-ranked bikini competitor, which is all about how good you look, to being a sexualized, sexual person. It was an interesting process to go from doing all of these objectifying bikini photoshoots to working on things like this.”
When we talked to her, she was back home in Florida, working on some social media and other projects while she decided what she wanted to do next.
As it turned out, filming the show took a lot out of Page, even though she’s the kind of woman who has a reputation for not showing it. She’s a little bit of a myth, and she’s tough about not overselling herself. “A lot of the girls were concerned about me,” she told us. “They’re like, ‘Fleur, you’re too skinny!’ And I told them I couldn’t do anything if I was too skinny.”
She’s never been in a porn before, so we asked her if she had any advice for women who are thinking about doing porn for the first time. “If you’re the type of girl who is okay with having your face in front of the camera, I would suggest doing more than one movie,” she says. “One time is fine, but if you do two and a half movies, and you start to get the same kind of shots, you’re gonna become super comfortable and less inhibited. As much as they say this is empowering for women, it’s really not.”
But on the inside, where she can’t always express herself, she’s the kind of person who’s ready to do anything for a guy. “I would make him breakfast in bed and do it all night,” she said. “I’m not going to turn down a guy like that.”
And when we asked her about the possibility of another movie, or even a TV show, she was excited about
