Entertainment

For 70 years Batman has been the star of Detective Comics. That changed this week. Immeasurably. America's longest running comic book now features a superheroine—one who is gay at that—Batwoman.

Today is the 37th anniversary of Title IX. I considered how best to mark the occasion and decided on something that would palpably show what Title IX helped emancipate: female strength; better still for this purpose, female strength in its most lethal form yet.

If you've seen Gina Carano in action, you undoubtedly have some sense of her otherworldly striking power; even her glancing blows can injure an opponent. Now, thanks to Sport Science, you can supplement your intuition with actual numbers. The finale—a chokehold applied to the show's host—is equally impressive, and rather frightening.

When I wrote about Vicki Unus, and later Kaatie Akstinat, I was motivated by a profound respect for female aerialists. The female aerialist, at once formidable athlete and sublime artist, reveals an oft-hidden truth when she performs: that beauty and strength are not incompatible. I can offer no better evidence of this than the performance by Eva Garcia seen in the following video:



So good are female aerialists, in fact, that we sometimes forget how dangerous their profession is; courage, another of the many requirements for the job. Sadly, a devastating reminder came August 8, 2003.

If you follow "in the news" (to the left), you have probably already seen this interview with Jenette Goldstein, but some things are better not left to chance. Goldstein's performance, as Private Vasquez, in Aliens not only pioneered the muscular action heroine in film, but remains to this day unsurpassed in the female action genre. She has earned our highest esteem.

A recent TMZ photo of Elisabeth Shue from the set of Piranha 3-D shows the 45-year-old former gymnast with an impressive set of guns. Shue, who plays Sheriff Julie Forester in the film, looks fit enough to battle prehistoric piranhas with her bare hands; so much the better, I say. Otherwise I wouldn't have much interest in Piranha 3-D, but the chance that Shue will be an impressive action heroine has me thinking that I'll venture out to the theater when it is released.

Shue is obviously in fantastic shape, especially compared to most other 45-year-olds. Nevertheless, here we again see the binary-brained thinking that inevitably turns up whenever a female athlete or celebrity with a muscular physique is in the press. Comments like that make me want to scream at the top of my lungs: "No, knucklehead, this is merely a woman with muscles, a perfectly natural and wonderful thing."

I do so only occasionally.