Sarah Connor

For anyone who has seen Terminator 2 the first image that should pop into your head when you think "female badass" should be the moderately-unbalanced matriarch of future human civilization that is Sarah Connor. While she was kind of a whiny bitch in The Terminator and even more so in her TV stint on "Beauty and the Beast", from the first scene of T2 when she beats the holy living shit out of an orderly with a broken-off broom handle "Escape From Women's Prison"-style you know that you're about to see some serious, grade-A, no bullshit asskickery. She's tough as hell, pretty cut and capable of using any projectile weapon she can get her hands on to deal out massive robot destruction, and she's not afraid to use it either. Not like those "Not Without My Daughter" pussy housewives on the Lifetime channel who are just content to point a small-caliber handgun at their abusive ex-husbands and then start crying because they know they don't have to guts to pull the damn trigger. Hell no! When the Terminator tells Sarah Connor the name of the dude responsible for the destruction of the human race, she just whips out an M-16 and drives over to his house to cap him in the head. When trying to snipe him from the bushes outside his house fails, she just pulls out a pistol and breaks in to finish the job. She would have done it too, if it wasn't for her dipshit kid who thinks he's so damn cool just because he's the future saviour of human civilization.

Sarah Connor is resourceful, another key component of badassery. It takes serious ovarian fortitude (read: nuts) to steal a paperclip, hide it in your mouth and use it to break out of a mental institution despite the fact that all of your appendages are locked into restraints. She's like a female MacGyver, except instead of a ruler and a hockey ticket she uses a syringe full of cleaning solvent and a human shield to bust out of a tight situation. Plus she's pretty fucking tough. When the T-1000 jabs her in the shoulder with his finger that turns into a knife and tries to torture her for information? Sarah Connor doesn't give a shit about that either! She just uses her one good arm to try and reload her bigass shotgun so she can blow his nonexistent nuts off. She even manages to get away and try to save her kid. I think if the T-1000 stabbed me in the shoulder I would probably just piss myself.

Sarah Connor is easily one of the most respectable female movie heroines. She separates herself from the oversexed pseudo-badass bimbo Tomb Raider types because of the fact that I actually buy her as being someone who could either kick my ass or kill me without blinking. And while I appreciate scantily-clad backflipping women with huge breasts and perfect hair as much as the next testosterone-drived male, I dig the fact that Sarah Connor's not about anything other than killing robots and saving humanity. There's no bullshit romantic side-plot and no roomfull of dudes drooling over her every move; just a shitload of guns, a couple cartons of cigarettes and a whole lot of swearing. You gotta love that.