can she do it ?

Anyone with, um, concerns about the feminist implications of a sexy, aggressive all-girl sport should meditate on a) the fact that women of all shapes and sizes play together and b) this article from the Dallas Morning News, which captures the contradictions nicely:

Playing a game that's punctuated with cursing and fighting might be the extreme in girl-power, but the attire the women wear seems a bit anti-feminist at first. There are a lot of splayed legs and exposed midriffs in roller derby. Not to mention penalties that include spankings doled out by audience members. But if that's all you see on the track, then you're not paying attention, say the women. Because the game is about much, much more.

For some of them, roller derby is the outward expression of a midlife crisis. For others, it's an opportunity to enjoy a sport that's intensely physical, intensely visceral and just plain fun. But most of all, roller derby is the perfect venue for a woman to explore all her polar opposites: the demure and the sexy, the coy and vamp, the good and the bad. Spokeswoman Louisa Brinsmade, aka Mau-Mau when playing with the Hellcats, puts it this way: Roller derby gives one permission to be a total woman.

"If you watch a roller derby bout you have the really ... sexy part of it, and you have this amazing physical prowess going on, and you have the real spitfire intensity of passion. ... It will come out in fights, in major plays. It will come out in the way that we relate off the track and after the bout.

"We're sort of trying out and using all of the strengths that women have," she says. "The power of seduction and the power of being sexy and the power of being strong. All of it is combined into what I think, as a whole, many women are made of."

"In many ways, this is a feminist movement," says Chola. "We're just being as bad as we want to be, doing what we love, and being ourselves."