reviewsThe Age, 25 May, 2002, Soft Covers, Overland reviewed
show/hide article
Overland: More than a Game, Ed., Ian Syson. Overland Society, $12
If the closure of The Australian's Review of Books has had any positive impact on the cultural life of this country, it has been indirectly, through the increased vigour of our literary magazines. Alongside the glories of Heat and Meanjin, the latest Overland, on sport, reveals just how far the bar has been raised. Anyone who thinks sport is a boys-only affair will think again - the most impressive content comes from women: my colleague Fiona Capp is vivid on getting back in the surf, and there's an extraordinary article by Mischa Merz on the forbidden art of female boxing. Also appearing is Marcia Langton's strident lecture on the futility of caffe latte politics in combating indigenous welfare dependency and substance abuse.
The Australian Book Review, October 2000 A Warrior's Pride , Inga Clendinnen
Click here to open pdf of this review
The Weekend Australian, 5 August 2000, Ring of confidence
Click here to open pdf of this review
The Weekend Australian, 30 April 2001, Beaten to the punch
Click here to open pdf of this review
The Age, Saturday 26 August, 2000, In for the count
show/hide article
Bruising: A Journey through Gender, By Mischa Merz, Picador, $20.78
EVERY now and then a book comes along that invites you to shake off your dusty old prejudices, and stop thinking along dichotomous lines. Leslie Cannold's The Abortion Myth was one recent example, a book that argued that neither hardline feminists nor hardline anti-abortionists had adequately represented the difficult moral and emotional terrain that women negotiated in choosing whether or not to terminate.
Mischa Merz's new book about women and boxing, Bruising: A Journey Through Gender, has tackled a similarly divisive topic and, for this reader, the journey was extremely fruitful. Bruising is an extended, elegaic defence of what Merz considers to be the pure and graceful art of boxing, and a plea for us to leave behind our cliched condemnations of this sport. And like Cannold, Merz attempts to debunk the myths propagated both by the conservative and feminist sides in the debate.
Merz took up boxacising in her early 30s, as have many young women in the pursuit of fitness, but pretty soon she moved on to the real thing. "Nothing in recent years," she writes, "had absorbed me to quite that extent ... I seemed not just more physically vulnerable but more emotionally exposed, too." Around the same time, she was mugged outside her home by two young women. Instead of feeling like a powerless victim, Merz fought off her attackers and felt positively elated by the experience.
This confluence of events opened up a Pandora's box of contradictions and questions about her own aggressive instincts and, more generally, about female violence and feminism's attitude to that violence. She contends that there has been a conspiracy of silence about aggression in women, fuelled on the one hand by feminists who want to insist that women are innately peace-loving and cooperative, and on the other by men who want women to remain passive and trapped by gender stereotypes.
A journalist by training, Merz draws on her considerable research skills to summarise the work of relevant writers and theorists, ranging from Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, cultural feminist Dale Spender, through to the Mars/Venus man, John Gray.
But far from creating a weighty theoretical tome, Merz cleverly intersperses the analysis with more personal revelations about her developing obsession with boxing. Indeed, the book works best when she is relating experiences such as her first sparring session with a woman: they spent the whole session saying "sorry" after every gentle punch.
She contrasts this with the climax of her career, a heavily promoted match in Mooroopna that she won after having to be pulled off her female opponent, and that was followed by weeks of manic elation.
Along the way we meet some colorful characters, such as her first female coach Amanda Buchanan, a kick-boxing champion and stunt woman with a magnificent physique, for whom Merz seems to have developed a strong fascination. Then there's her next coach, Keith Ellis (brother of Lester), a working-class man's man who nevertheless welcomes her into the boxing fold. And by her side the whole time is her husband, Peter, sparring partner, chauffeur, and astute observer of the whole tumultuous journey.
The book's main weakness lies in Merz's over-simplistic views about contemporary feminism.
At one point she dismisses its relevance to her life, and describes it as having "a victim fixation and an anti-male stance". Without the advances made by feminists in this and previous generations, however, it's highly unlikely Merz would ever have had access to the masculine world of boxing she so strongly embraces.
Nevertheless, it's a gripping read, and a timely call to re-examine both sanctioned and unsanctioned violence.
Mischa Merz discusses women and violence with Barbara Creed, Caroline Shaw and Sue Turnbull at noon tomorrow in the Merlyn Theatre.
The Australian, date, A book about women's boxing lands some punches by Mary Rose Liverani
show/hide article
Bruising: A Journey through Gender, By Mischa Merz, Picador, $20.78
Click here to open pdf of this review
CHANCES are, as you read this, Melbourne journalist Mischa Merz is squaring up to an opponent in a Melbourne or Sydney boxing ring. Aside from Muhammad Ali, she's just about the best-looking boxer you will ever have seen, posed artfully low on the Picador cover, with eyes closed, head bowed, lethal mitts crossed tautly over her midriff to give the well-oiled muscles of her upper body maximum definition, a picture of concentration, reverence, grace, strength and humility -- qualities martial arts masters applaud, but less often practitioners of pugilism.
Not that Merz is your average boxer. She volunteers that she's the wrong class: born to tertiary-educated parents and reared in a large rambling house. Her boxing apparently started at the University of Melbourne and, having had a career in journalism for 15 years, her hunger to lay about has never been spurred by the hunger to eat. In fact, one of her more interesting observations is that unemployment benefits have turned males away from the ring in droves.
Unaccountably, the cataloguing-in-publication data supplied by her publisher labels Bruising a fictional account of women in boxing. Instead, the work fits more comfortably within the stylish non-fiction popularised by writers such as Dava Sobel, Helen Garner and Janet Malcolm, a style that permits disguising argument as a tentative, personal, exploratory kind of inquiry -- contentious matter with a soothing tone. Nonetheless, the book will leave some feminists and anti-boxing proponents keen to go a few rounds with Merz.
Her story is that she took up boxing thinking her sex irrelevant, but that boxing ultimately became a way of defining herself as a woman. Like any good journalist, she starts her tale with an attention-grabbing item: three women mug her in broad daylight and she responds to the attack with some ferocity, scaring them off, wishing she could have another go at them and revelling in the sense of power her victory gave her. This incident becomes a matrix for her various themes, among them, victim fixation, violence in women, the nature of aggression, the excitement of fighting, redefining masculinity and femininity, and the dangers associated with vicariously experiencing violence but having no understanding of the reality.
There's no doubt that experiencing boxing as a woman provides Merz with some provocative and stimulating insights. She notes, for instance, that in boxing class maleness alone is not enough to guarantee you can fight. The instructor often prefers a woman to illustrate the finer points of evading or landing a blow. So if fighting is masculine, then masculinity is gender neutral. She discovers, too, that she and her female sparring partners really enjoy exhibiting their aggression in a public arena, gathering knowledge about their strengths, about their ability to hurt and to withstand hurt.
Not that Merz turned to boxing for self-defence, a concept she spurns for its victim associations. She's in the game to bruise, as well as be bruised, yet fear of the latter initially holds back her advance to fighter status. It takes time for her and her female sparring partners to liberate themselves from the inhibitions that keep them blurting: "Sorry, did I hurt you?" Getting past that means "disconnecting aggression from emotion" and ending the search for motive. It gives Merz a sense of triumph and power (and me a bit of a shiver).
Failure, however -- being knocked down by a fighter who demonstrates superior strategy, footwork, daring or resilience -- almost paralyses her with humiliation and it is male boxers, not her female friends, who empathise with her, the men's casual "oh f... that" signalling that they've been there and survived it. This suggests to her that men can and do empathise, but in a different way from women. Conversely, Amanda Buchanan, the licensed boxing trainer who is her mentor, turns out to be lacking in that kind of verbal intimacy normally associated with women.
Merz often turns to research (not well sourced) to bolster her reflections. She cites Finnish studies suggesting that female aggression is not researched as much as male aggression and that, where it is studied, results are skewed by a male perspective. Favouring male forms of aggression therefore leads to the myth of the non-aggressive female. Feminists need to confront the possibility, she says, that female aggression might be a force in itself that springs from a desire to dominate and control. Prepubescent girls are known to be aggressive and to reach a peak of aggression at 12, after which negative feedback forces them to express it covertly, often turning their aggression on themselves -- in the case of anorexia, with an awesome control.
Merz accepts that boxing targets the head. It's real danger. It calls for risk management. She sees it as feminine in its grace, rhythm, fancy footwork and evasiveness; masculine in its strength, resilience, and power -- but gender neutral, since both males and females possess these qualities. She's delighted that more girls, and littler girls, are taking it up and enjoying it. And she's looking around for sparring partners. But Queensberry Rules, please, ladies.
655191, Australian Books Direct, $18.55