NATHALIE GASSEL'S NEW BOOK CELEBRATES THE SPLENDOUR OF MEGA-VOLTAGE MUSCLE LUST By Wessex Man             LONDON ... Yet another book from Belgian intellectual bodybuilder Nathalie Gassel, the fourth since 2000, confirms her role as the world's most candid commentator. No-one has matched her vigour in print, albeit primarily in French at the moment. Nathalie, aged 40, goes for the jugular with her pointed vocabulary.          'Construction d'un Corps Pornographique', published in Brussels by Collection Ah!, a distinguished literary imprint, is in fact a somewhat misleading title. But as Jacques Sojcher, the book's publisher and Nathalie's former philosophy tutor, says very fairly ; "This is in any case the beginning of a disrupting and moving work, the true birth of Nathalie Gassel."           Sojcher's introduction says he first remembers Nathalie as a timid almost mute student who was in process of transforming her physique through bodybuilding.  "There was always the pas de deux between her passion as an athlete and her determination to write."           The book's photo selections define Nathalie's focus. Here the author is shown up front displaying her physique and personality: the androgynous bare-shouldered muscle woman with short cropped hair, dense eyebrows and the predatory lips of Medusa. She's also adorned with  two strings of conventional pearls and matching ear studs. Her muscular chest is secured with a heavy duty weather-proof brassiere.           Nathalie's addiction to weights and combat sports is starkly illustrated. In boxing gloves and barefoot she's stabbing a  punch-bag with rib-cracking blows. You sense the executioner, or perhaps prison corporal punishment officer, in the way she powers her arms with the spring of her whole physique. Nathalie's profile in the ring threatens K.O. in the first round.            In the bodybuilding gym, her salle de musculation, she's chosen another mood. Here she stands alone in an austere high ceiling chamber filled with equipment. Her hands grasp an Olympic bar at thigh level. Wide muscular shoulders and roused biceps amaze the beholder. And the stress in her eyes, staring slightly upwards, suggest an intensive isolation workout.             The image of Nathalie's friend Renee Toney, recognised as the world's most muscular female, will astound anyone who's never seen her before. The chosen photo shows Renee, who weighs about 200 lbs, at her most potent and primordial. Few men have ever attained such ripe and detailed definition.               Here Renee is strolling in the wings of a physique contest with every muscle pumped and veined. Her Herculean [proportions are enhanced by a fearsome questing glance, dark eyes, full lips. Renee's magical 19" biceps must be unmatched in the history of female physical culture. Imagine Charles Darwin's bearded expression as she drops into his study to discuss evolution.               The final photo, entitled Le Secretaire, shows a brass-inlayed pulpit desk with its top open to reveal the contents. Traditional fountain pens mingle with dildos attached to rubber hand pumps.              The booklet, running to some 100 pages, explores the essence of Nathalie's sexual psychology. She explains the painful challenges she faced as an androgynous spirit trapped in a female body. She plumbs writers such as Yukio Mishima, Henri de Montherlant and Nietzche to help explain her physical and erotic journey.              "I found right away that several authors  spontaneously shared this susceptibility to a certain strand of sexual pleasure," she writes.  "They enabled me to work towards my own freedom."   These authors introduced her to herself and put her in the driver's seat.  "With Mishima and Montherlant I was able to probe right into the heart of sexual instincts. Thus I'd found kindred spirits  and discovered my sexual family for the first time. At last !".              Previously, Nathalie says, she'd felt she was living in the dock among the accused, continuously obliged to play games of pretence and camouflage. "I was smothered by femininity. My female body was a straight-jacket round my soul. The books of these writers allowed me to understand my own orientations, to come up for air and take a few breaths of oxygen ...."             But it was not easy to escape from permanent confrontation with the conventional world, she adds.  Success only came when she took up writing and serious weight training.             Some of the chapters are perhaps over extended with generalisations about lust and its mental processes. Nathalie's vocabulary on this subject is enormous, but the text might grab more readers if the details drew more from specific experiences.              She's interesting when talking of the evolving distinction between men and women.  Clearly going too far she states, " Neither man or woman exist as such. In their place we have tastes, diverse choices and multiple personalities."                The abolition of the sexes has now taken place, she argues.  "We can now explore our pleasures in bodies which are no longer constrained by  suffocating psychological barriers from the past."                Nathalie's chapter on sexuality and female bodybuilding is probably the most vivid ever written. She reveals the muscle lust psychology in minute detail, evidently inspired by her own sensibilities. Here she's both the courting admirer and the muscular demonstrator. She's electrified by the female bodybuilder curling her bold biceps. A moment later she's provoking similar attention by seizing the dumb-bells herself.             "One can say in a thousand ways how muscle, in its hardness, produces erotic stimulation," she comments.             In a nutshell Nathalie is a unique genius, living alone yet desirable to many. She wonders what the Creator has bestowed on her.   See Nathalie's website: www.nathaliegassel.fr.fm   To order the book: http://www.amazon.fr