Those who go to the former Gleason’s gym these days aren’t there to fight, but to stay in shape for its own sake:

When Gleason’s left Manhattan in 1986, the gym had 200 members, 90% of whom were competitive fighters. Not a single woman belonged to the gym. Top-end pros like Gerry Cooney and Roberto Duran were regulars, and the gym’s history with Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali and others gave it international fame. But the fees from the small membership couldn’t cover the Manhattan rent. Silverglade said the move to Brooklyn was purely financial.

Just as I’ve been enjoying digging into literature and art on boxing comes plenty of rave reviews about an exhibition of the work of American realist painter George Bellows. This summer the tour began at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and currently is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Bellows, an “Ashcan School” peer of Edward Hopper and who died in 1925, painted a vast array of topics. But he’s considered one of the best American sports artists there’s ever been, and his boxing work even inspired the likes of noted boxing observer Joyce Carol Oates to pen a tribute.

More recently, his work is examined by sports historian Allen Guttmann in his wonderful 2011 book, “Sports and American Art,” which I wrote about recently.

The current Met exhibition, which continues through Feb. 18 before moving on to London’s Royal Academy of Arts, features the centerpieces of Bellows’ boxing art: “Club Night” (1907), “Stag at Sharkey’s” (1909), “Both Members of This Club” (1909), and “Dempsey and Firpo” (1924).

All four are examined in the National Gallery-produced video below featuring former world light welterweight and super welterweight champion Sharmbá Mitchell.

In The New York Review of Books, Sanford Schwartz writes that Bellows’ pugilistic renderings “epitomize an era when a degree of brute, barely regulated force colored many aspects of American life.”

Eric Gibson, in The Wall Street Journal, goes further:

“The deeper subject in many of these paintings is conflict. Sometimes not so deep, as in the the boxing pictures he painted between 1907 and 1909. Elsewhere, in paintings of the excavation of foundations for Penn Station, or of a pile driver amid a sparkling Hudson River landscape, Bellows depicts the Herculean efforts involved in building the modern city. Sometimes, as in his later seascapes, his subject is man pitting himself against the forces of nature.”

More reviews from The New York Times, Reuters, The Economist, and, as the exhibit opened in Washington in June, Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker.

The Amateur International Boxing Association is now saying skirts are optional for competitors in the first women’s Olympic boxing tournament in London.

Another first-world crisis has been averted.

This optional position is probably the best, given the mixed opinions from the boxers. Some were incensed about what might have become compulsory; others were not.

In free Western societies this shouldn’t regarded as be the greatest indignity, although there has been plenty of serious squawking from the usual suspects about this affront to equality.

For female athletes in Afghanistan, just getting in the ring is a miracle. Especially those few participating in combat sports who are defying the remnants of harsh Taliban proscriptions against their very participation in society.

Sadaf Rahimi, 17, is training for the London Games near a stadium in Kabul where women were once stoned for adultery:

“I hope the Taliban don’t come back and take over. But if they do, I urge them to let women engage in sports and go to school.”

There’s no mention what she was wearing. As if that mattered. But it’s not hard to guess.

It’s long been a cultural fascination. Most of the recent headlines have been complaints over the supposedly demeaning and sexist attire female competitors will be wearing inside the rings at the London Games.

Women’s boxing takes a huge competitive leap starting today when the U.S. Olympic trials get underway in Spokane.

Finally, it’s about the boxing. Or will it be?

In the coming months, viewers in America and around the world will be prompted to take the sport seriously as a sport, and not just as a novelty. Sanctioned by the IOC in 2009, women’s boxing will be on our screens like it has not before.

But as befits the American media formula for coverage of some Olympic sports, there’s got to be a human interest angle to serve as an introduction. The more tragic, the better. Barry Bearak’s profile of American medal contender Quanitta Underwood in The New York Times over the weekend was less about the boxing and more about her horrific childhood at the hands of her father:

“. . . she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.”

I don’t want to diminish Underwood’s ordeal. It is a harrowing tale that Bearak reveals, and her father was imprisoned for his crimes. There’s no dodging any of that. But she didn’t seem particularly thrilled for this kind of attention, which included a muted interview with her now-freed molester.

These stories are hard to resist, and we live in a society marinated in media and public voyeurism. Given the Penn State tragedy, it’s understandable why these types of stories will multiply, especially in women’s sports and other smaller niche sports. It’s an easy formula to perpetuate.

But there was precious little in Bearak’s very long piece about how Underwood developed as a boxer. How have she and other women come to putting on gloves? What stirs so deeply inside of them to do this? What does stepping in the ring really mean to them ?

“Women Box,” an ongoing series on WNYC radio that has been picked up by NPR, has answered some of those questions, with a thorough, compelling mixture of the personal and competitive stories of young women who will make us confront some deep-seated notions about the most extreme levels of physical combat females can endure.

It makes all the silly complaints about wearing skirts seem as trivial as they really are.