Schwarzenegger’s Words About Women Are at Issue

As a bodybuilder and actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a record of 30 years of statements, in his own writing and in interviews, about women and sexuality.

Now, as a candidate for governor, his words have returned as an issue in the campaign.

Political rivals have seized on some statements to call Schwarzenegger sexist, a misogynist and worse. His friends and aides say such quotes were exaggerated for effect, out of character or out of date.

Monday, in a move that campaign strategists hoped would improve his standing with women, Schwarzenegger appeared with his wife, Maria Shriver, on the season premiere of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” The nationally syndicated program, which has an 86% female audience, is one of the most watched on daytime television.

Female voters could be crucial to Schwarzenegger’s ability to win the race to replace Gov. Gray Davis if Davis is recalled. Schwarzenegger and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante are in a tight race in several polls. But Schwarzenegger trails Bustamante by nine points among women in the most recent Los Angeles Times Poll, 35% to 26%.

Republican politicians typically receive more support from men than from women. With Schwarzenegger, however, political analysts say there may be an additional set of factors, including the tone of his campaign, which has targeted men through talk radio and rallies that Schwarzenegger often enters to heavy metal music.

But some of the weakness in his female support may be linked to Schwarzenegger’s words. A man who made his name with his body, Schwarzenegger has talked about his sexuality and relations with women publicly for nearly three decades -- leaving behind a record of public statements like those of few American political figures.

A Times review of more than 100 examples of his interviews and writings from the past 30 years reveals that Schwarzenegger’s habit of making off-color remarks about sex and women did not end in the 1970s, despite his defenders’ claims to the contrary.

On “Oprah,” for example, in dismissing his earlier comments about women as promotion for bodybuilding, Schwarzenegger said: “These were the times when I was saying, you know, ‘A pump is better than coming,’ ” prompting Shriver to put her hand over her husband’s mouth and say, “My mother is watching the show. Oh my God.”

At the same time, Schwarzenegger’s statements on women have long been far more nuanced -- and supportive -- than his critics acknowledge. Schwarzenegger, since his early days as a bodybuilder, has publicly praised women as equals.

Again and again when interviewed, Schwarzenegger has expressed an admiration for and an attraction to smart, independent, and above all “strong” women. In some cases, Schwarzenegger’s most explicit language -- and his most explicitly feminist thoughts -- appear in the same interviews.

Democratic strategists have seized on the language, distributing his raunchiest comments. The Democratic National Committee assembled a group of professional women just last week to denounce him. A women’s peace group, Code Pink, has begun to dog him at campaign appearances.

“He’s the kind of guy, if you met him at a bar, you’d want to push him off his barstool,” said Karen Pomer, a Code Pink organizer who e-mails reporters several times a day with tips on Schwarzenegger’s personal foibles. “We’re going to continue to be a thorn in his side.”

From his earliest interviews, Schwarzenegger has sought to appear sexually frank and irreverent. As a bodybuilder, he was fond of graphically comparing the feeling of lifting weights to the pleasure of orgasm. He frequently dropped names of women he was attracted to (“I would love to watch Brigitte Bardot going to a gym and doing some bend-over lateral raises,” he told The Times in 1975, for example).

He often turned questions about bodybuilding’s reputation for attracting gays into seminars on his sexual performance. In his 1977 interview with Oui magazine, which dominated questioning on the campaign trail for two days, Schwarzenegger talked about his use of women for sexual “relief” during training and competition and described a group encounter with one woman who appeared naked at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach: “Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.”

Even that interview, however, included Schwarzenegger’s trademark praise of smart women, this time in the person of an ex-girlfriend. “I lived with a woman for five years,” he said, “a very smart lady who teaches English at a college in California.”

Schwarzenegger’s campaign has responded forcefully and on many fronts to the allegation that he disrespects women. The campaign has offered testimonials from women who have worked personally with Schwarzenegger -- including Jamie Lee Curtis and Sharon Stone. The candidate himself has gushed publicly over his wife, and vice versa.

On “Oprah,” Schwarzenegger said of his previous statements about women that “the idea was to say things that were so over the top so you get the headlines.”

Shriver said her husband “is the exact opposite” of a woman hater and called him the “most gracious, supportive man I’ve ever met.”

When pressed, aides also have suggested that his statements reflected the freewheeling culture of bodybuilding and celebrity marketing.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger has served as an entertainer and promoter of his sports and his films for decades,” said his spokesman, Sean Walsh. “He has often stretched the envelope to grab attention ... to shock and grab the reader and the viewer and further the cause of the particular issue he was engaged in.

“But with regards to women,” Walsh added, “Arnold has been and continues to be a strong promoter of women as equals in all endeavors. He has a strong relationship with an extremely bright, extremely successful wife who has succeeded in all of her personal and professional endeavors, just as her husband, Arnold, has succeeded in his.”

The extent to which Schwarzenegger may be hurt politically by his past statements is unclear. In dozens of interviews, women voters said they were aware of some of Schwarzenegger’s statements, but that they were just one factor in deciding how to vote.

“I’ve heard that stuff, but I tend to believe he’s mellowed,” said Rose Ortega, 44, an independent, who works as an academic advisor at Cal State Long Beach. “It’s much more important to me to hear him debate.”

The Times Poll, released last week, showed that 58% of likely male voters viewed Schwarzenegger favorably; only 45% of women said the same.

Asked if Schwarzenegger had the character and integrity to be governor, men said yes by 56% to 37%; women were far more closely divided, 47% to 43%.

Arnold Steinberg, a Republican political strategist, said Schwarzenegger has not been as hurt by his long history of racy interviews as candidates in other campaigns might be.

“One reason is that the recall is a short, compressed campaign,” Steinberg said. “A second reason is that I think people take it less seriously, coming from someone from Hollywood. And finally, I think because of the fiscal crisis, people are sort of saying that the fiscal crisis trumps all of these other things.”

In his interviews and writings, Schwarzenegger frequently has talked of admiring women for their intelligence. In October 1976, he told New Times: “The lady with me has to look good, too. And I definitely want to have one that’s brighter than I. Then I can learn. I like an aggressive woman who can talk and is not always in the background. I can pinpoint her exactly: Candice Bergen.”

In 1986, he told Rolling Stone magazine, “I love American women because they are independent. I like a woman to be smart.”

Even when he has tried to express his admiration for smart women, however, Schwarzenegger often has used language that his opponents have seized on.

In an interview in Esquire magazine in 2003, for example, he discussed discrimination based on appearance this way: “when you see a blond with great [breasts] and a great [rear], you say to yourself, ‘Hey, she must be stupid or must have nothing else to offer,’ which maybe is the case many times. But then again, there is the one that is as smart as her breasts look.... “

Schwarzenegger often has portrayed himself as a defender of equal rights for women, but at times has done so in sexually graphic language.

In his 1979 fitness guide “Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women,” Schwarzenegger described himself as a champion of equal rights, outraged that women have been denied access to the same weight training as men.

“Women are proving that they are indeed equal to men -- not only mentally, but also physically -- and are beginning to live up to their physical potential,” he wrote. “The statement that women are the weaker sex is as unfair as it is ridiculous.”

At one point in the “Bodyshaping” book, Schwarzenegger wrote of a woman he first found “too fragile” but later was attracted to when he discovered that she worked out.

“To me, femininity has always indicated strength, character and confidence,” he wrote.

Schwarzenegger’s mix of the obscene with the empowering has been a feature of his comments on women ever since. In 1986, he spoke publicly, in a People magazine interview, about his practice of “phone sex” in his occasionally long-distance relationship with his wife. On TV, he called Shriver “a sexy devil.”

In a Playboy interview in 1988, Schwarzenegger declared that he hates when women wear pants. “I still feel that way, and neither my mother nor Maria is allowed to go out with me in pants,” he said. “Maria would never wear pants, believe me.”

Pressed on the subject, he added: “She knows she looks better in dresses. Maria has the kind of look -- the kind of face and hair and eyes and mouth and body -- that is very royal. Like a queen. And I don’t like to see a queen in pants.”

While Schwarzenegger’s comment about wearing pants has been circulated by women’s groups, he talked extensively in the same interview about his marriage as “a two-way street” and his view that men must do their fair share of domestic work. “You should see me iron shirts,” he declared.

Schwarzenegger’s views, however, do not mean he has curbed his penchant for coarse language. A 1991 Rolling Stone interview depicted Schwarzenegger -- by then already a political figure, as chairman of a presidential physical fitness community -- calling Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis a “jealous bitch” and addressing a crowd at a convention for Terminator fans using a graphic sexual term.

In a 1999 profile, Talk magazine described Schwarzenegger looking at a collection of photographs of women viewed from behind. “My favorite body part,” Schwarzenegger was quoted as saying.

In recent years, Schwarzenegger has mixed into his interviews his views on social issues -- defending equal pay, abortion rights, the struggles of single mothers in the inner city -- but without entirely toning down his language.

In an Entertainment Weekly magazine interview published in July, Schwarzenegger described his suggestion for a scene when his character, a computer Terminator from the future, battles a female-form Terminator.

“I saw this toilet bowl. How many times do you get away with this -- to take a woman, grab her upside down and bury her face in a toilet bowl?” he said. “The thing is, you can do it, because in the end, I didn’t do it to a woman -- she’s a machine! We could get away with it without being crucified by who-knows-what group.”

These days, Schwarzenegger -- who announced his candidacy for governor with a joke about getting a bikini wax in 1978 -- deflects questions about his interviews, telling MSNBC he is a “different Arnold.”

In doing so, he echoes the mea culpa of his autobiography, published in 1977: “I used to feel that women were here for one reason. Sex was simply another kind of exercise, another body function,” he wrote then. “My attitude about all that has changed radically.”

“There’s always been a crazy side about me,” Schwarzenegger said during the campaign. But now, “I am a 56-year-old man who is married and running for governor ... If I would have known that I was going to run for governor, there are certain things I wouldn’t have said.”