A lot of people are getting jacked these days, and it’s not just who you would think.

For men, muscles have always been a symbol of brute strength and power. In our current era, that’s manifesting in their desire to get as chiseled as possible with a strict regimen of lifting and proteinmaxxing. But lately, muscles have also become something of a cultural battleground for women — at a time when beauty standards are dramatically in flux.

The feminine body type of the moment shifts with time, from curvy to skinny and back again, but rarely, if ever, is America’s ideal woman overtly strong. For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become “bulky” (the horror!) but to do cardio instead, so that they would burn calories.

Nevertheless, strength training has begun to trend up among women. Recent high-profile research found that lifting weights significantly increases both lifespan and healthspan for women. In turn, wellness-focused women’s media — which is to say most women’s media — began publishing trend pieces admonishing women to step up their muscle game. One study from this February found that women’s participation rates in strength training are higher than ever before.

For most of my (millennial) life, women were instructed never to lift weights lest they become “bulky” (the horror!).

Three new books reckon with what it means for women to, at long last, begin to embrace strength. Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education is a memoir exploring Johnston’s journey from a thinness-obsessed runner to an empowered weight lifter. In How to Be Well, Amy Larocca explores the wellness imperative that pushes so many women today to relentlessly optimize their health. And in On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui explores the cultural symbolism of muscles and how they provide a way for us to think about who is allowed to be strong, and who we demand be weak.

Strength training is, in theory, an empowering alternative to the pursuit of thinness. But what happens if all our old body neuroses from the skin-and-bone days transfers right on over to the new well-muscled ideal?

How the thin woman became the well (and still thin) woman

There is always a type of woman you are supposed to be, a hegemonic ideal who hovers just out of reach, impossible to ever quite achieve. While America’s feminine ideals shift a little, writes Larocca in How to Be Well, these ideal women always have a few basic things in common: “They are always very thin and they do not complain, no matter how many responsibilities are added to their list.”

In the last 15 years, however, the ideal woman also became the “well” woman, Larocca writes. This is a woman who, in addition to being thin, has relentlessly optimized her health: She is pure of microplastics and........

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