Since the end of March, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City has hosted an exhibit celebrating both the aesthetic beauty and political significance of female bodybuilders. The book that accompanies the exhibit (and shares the same name, Picturing The Modern Amazon) features photos, paintings, and essays about the history of women who suffer mockery for the sake of powerful bodies. The points range from deflecting charges that "hypermuscular" women really want to be men—if that were true, Laurie Fierstein notes in her introduction, they would be transsexuals—to a discussion of the sexism rampant even in female bodybuilding competitions, in which women are expected to restrict their muscle development to remain feminine. (Charles Gaines, director of the documentary Pumping Iron II, notes the irony of judging gender-specific bodybuilding: "How much interest would there be in a series of 100-yard dashes in which all the runners had agreed to never finish in less than 10 seconds?") Many of the essays strike an academic posture, as in Joanna Frueh's centerpiece "The Real Nude," which has the irritatingly righteous tone of a polemic. But she makes a good point, arguing that female bodybuilders are viewed by men with the same objectifying glare directed at their non-bodybuilding sisters—only the objectification is confused by the fact that the hypermuscular woman's hard body doesn't appear to be sexually yielding. These pointed real-world observations by Frueh and other contributors are somewhat undercut by the fawning praise they heap on their idealized bodybuilding woman. Thankfully, at the end of the book (after an underdeveloped section on bosomy comic-book super-heroines), the editors interview the actual athletes, who show a mix of pride and paranoia in their obsession with body image. Getting into the realities of the sport, both the desire to recreate oneself and the competitive drive that leads to incongruities such as breast implants, should be at the heart of this exercise. There's already enough presumption out there about who these women are; in fact, when CNN did a feature on the New Museum exhibit, their spot had just the sort of giggly, aliens-walk-among-us attitude that the organizers were hoping to counteract. Picturing The Modern Amazon serves that purpose, but only when the editors avoid treating female bodybuilders as superhuman.