THE LADY OF THE RINGS The Boxer's Heart: How I Fell in Love With the Ring. By Kate Sekules, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001. Reviewed by Tania Oost. Female boxing is banned in NSW and, following the punch induced coma of a woman boxer in West Australia, there have been recent calls from Federal Health Minister, Michael Wooldridge, with support from the AMA, for a national ban on boxing for both men and women. The rationale for banning specifically female boxers centres on the health risks allegedly peculiar to women, and bans are expected to curb the tide of 'unhealthy' female aggression.Yet despite the ban in NSW, fights continue in underground matches or 'club spars', and ever increasing numbers of women in Australia are tossing out their leotards and legwarmers in favour of leather gloves and mouth guards. Classes such as 'boxercise' offer a gentle introduction into the world of the pugilist, and recent films such as Girl Fight introduce the female fighter into popular consciousness, helping to normalise a link between women, strength and physical competence. The increasing attraction towards the sport might now be too hard for the government to fight. Given capitalism's ongoing pursuit to expand its market and create new demands and customer bases, the commodification of fitness is not surprising. An intelligent marketing strategy - one which companies such as Nike have developed with unscrupulous flair - is to combine fitness products and advertising strategies with popular feminist and 'doin'-it-for myself', third wave rhetoric. This amounts to what Cole and Hribar call 'commodity feminism', and one offspring of this union has been christened 'boxaerobics', or 'boxercise.' Yet the unintended consequence of this de-fanged version of boxing is to give women a taste for the real thing. A great number of women have taken up amateur and professional boxing; well known contemporaries include Barbara Butrick in the 1950s and Laila Ali in the 1990s. Yet women's boxing has a much longer, although much suppressed history (in recent media at least). Far from being a radical feminist interloper into an exclusively male domain, women's boxing and prize fighting can be traced to the fight tents of eighteenth century England. In 1722 British fighter, Elizabeth Wilkinson, entered the ring and made history as the first officially recorded female boxer. Fights were a bloody, bare-knuckled contest fought to the end among working class women, thought to be 'naturally' tougher and more brutish than the delicate and docile Victorian lady. The sight of a vampish, aggressive woman, sweaty, bloody and often bare breasted, provided an exciting display of animality and passion rarely seen in the sexually repressed Victorian woman. While this undoubtedly provided sexual titillation for the male audience, it also powerfully denies popularly held beliefs about the natural passivity, gentleness or weakness of the female sex. The affirmation of female strength may only be reified by the influx of female professional and amateur boxers in recent decades. Female boxing has been transformed from an activity of working class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into a popular contemporary pursuit for professional women and academics. Media attention on the sport such as the '60 Minutes' recent interview with boxer Laila Ali, reveals that many popular protests take the form of anachronistic musings about what is 'naturally' appropriate for the sexes. Kate Sekules' memoir, A Boxer's Heart, provides a timely insight into the world of boxing that is free from stereotypes of either male or female boxers, and is an honest examination of the personal fears, desires and motivations that draw an individual to the ring. Sekules' memoir is a highly personal, and at times painful, account of one woman's entrance into the male dominated sport of professional boxing in America. It also includes a history of women's boxing, providing colourful vignettes of women boxers such as Irish Martha Flaharty, Christy 'The Coal Miner's Daughter' Martin, and Sekules' own first professional boxing opponent 'Raging Belle.' A sensitive pacifist, with a reluctance to hurt her female sparring partners, Sekules makes an unlikely Valkyrie but, with a mix of personal pain and a feminist point to prove, she yearns for the release and escape offered in the ring. When Sekules throws her first punch in a New York boxercise class, she feels a power and energy that feeds her hunger for the cathartic physicality of fighting. Eventually, she joins the famous Gleason's gym in Brooklyn and hires a trainer willing to coach her in the 'sweet science of boxing', and it is here that she finds what she is looking for. She finds a way to challenge and stretch herself, and a way to remove herself from the quotidian, at least for a few hours a day. She thrives on the pure strength, skill and physicality that the sport demands. In her book she relates sparring matches and professional contests with flair : '[Terry's] opponent, a thick set brawler named Kenny Baysmore, charges him like a bull, grasping him in too many clinches, while Terry snatches himself away, zapping around the ropes like a crab on amphetamines, smooth as his moniker ("The Panther").' She describes the nerves and terror of her own first professional fight and gives a blow-by-blow account of the pain, fear and exhilaration of each round. She is thrilled and addicted from the start, going back again and again for another 'hit' which she likens to the hit she once found in drugs. Yet Sekules'memoir is not just about boxing, but about being human and being a vulnerable woman, unsure of her place in life. She uses boxing as a strategy for coping with, and escaping from the painful reality of life. Pain felt within the ring is a preferable, if temporary, replacement for the pain of her life in the outside world. One gets the sense that Sekules does more battle outside the ring than inside, as she struggles not only against sexism in the boxing world but also against her own personal demons. Constant self-doubt, self-criticism bordering on contempt, and feelings of inadequacy plague her, and she struggles throughout the book to reach some sort of peace within herself. Anxiety over her credibility and her worth is only heightened by the seedy side of boxing which she inevitably encounters within her career. Sekules feels keenly her position as a woman sharing a space that sweats machismo, spits testosterone and has little patience for anyone whose nose is not at least a little bit crooked. It is a space where the only role happily assigned to women is to provide a T&A spectacle between rounds. At times verging on paranoia, Sekules questions the motives of the men around her, does her coach take her seriously? Do the other boxers see her as an equal? Is she really good enough or is she being patronised? A running theme throughout the book is whether she functions merely as a novelty and sexual object for male sparring partners and male spectators/voyeurs. Her suspicions are justified when she discovers that her sparring partner, Dennis, enjoys being beaten up by women: 'I thought of Dennis's ineffectual defence all those times I'd sparred with him.... We'd been duped, all of us, inadvertently getting him off in the name of sport.... I'd auditioned as an athlete and won the part of an S&M porn star.' She notes the opinion of the columnist Art Carey: 'There's something about watching two women duking it out that causes a tingle in men's groins....' Topless boxing and foxy boxing works to shift the perception away from women boxers as legitimate fighters and towards the view that women are to be seen only as sexual spectacles. Yet this constitutes only a very small part of the actual world of boxing when a diverse group, and an increasing number, of women are seriously taking part in professional boxing. Despite the pessimism invoked by some of Sekules' experiences, she is positive about many of the others. Sekules has successfully entered, and revealed to the reader a side to boxing unknown to the uninitiated. Her memoir describes the love and admiration between men in the boxing gym and her own desire for this bond. It seems strange to look for care and respect in a sport where violence and aggression is the point and yet, throughout her book, Sekules writes of her love for the sport, her fellow boxers and her coach, and of her desire to find a home here, a place where she feels safe, loved and respected. To an extent she finds what she is looking for: 'If I'm feeling sorry for myself, thinking nobody's in my corner in life, I come here and bask in the illusion of family for as long as we share the ring.' She sees the same kinds of love and friendship among all boxers: 'I watch Angel with Sechew Powell and I see it there, the silent intensity, the pride.…The ministrations the trainer performs for you are, in fact, very paternal, but not paternal - maternal. He wipes your face, roots around in your mouth, holds the spittoon, laces your gloves, buckles your head gear.… Apart from the athlete's rubdown, the boxing gym is the only place I can think of where macho men touch each other with such easy familiarity, even intimacy, and now, without fanfare or special training, they do the same for us women. There is no sexual content.' Sekules also reveals the hidden language of boxing. Protected like 'secret men's business', boxing constitutes a little known corporeal language where the body, time and consciousness is experienced and expressed in ways not made readily available to most women. In the boxing memoir, Bruising: a journey through gender, Mischa Merz writes: 'the boxing match tells a story, a unique and highly condensed drama without words.' Both Merz and Sekules describe boxing as poetry, a new language in which they can express themselves in a different way. This is an opportunity which women in their thousands are now taking up, and Iris Young's wellknown work, Throwing like a girl, is far from relevant to these women, who are finally recouping the totality of their own bodies' abilities. Tania Oost is an Honours Student in Women's Studies at The University of Queensland.