Opinion: What calls to boycott ‘The Woman King’ are really saying
The “The Woman King: Behind the Screens”, a recently-published book that chronicles the lives of a number of women – including Serena Williams in the past, and many who have appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated – has been hailed as a landmark work on women’s basketball, and is being touted as a guide for understanding and supporting the sport.
It has received an overwhelmingly positive response – although it’s been criticized, and sometimes even called a book of false promises – because of the personal and poignant stories that are told within its pages.
But for those who are boycotting it, to be blunt – and to say that they are boycotting it because they don’t want it to become the new “The Big Book of Basketball?” And they would like it to simply be “The Woman King’s” book of basketball, a book about the sport told from the perspective of the women who make up it. It’s one thing to criticize a book which is written from the perspective of a man, and who is largely ignored by the press. But it is quite another to boycott a book because it is written from the perspective of a woman who is largely ignored by the press.
It is something else entirely to boycott a book because it is being marketed to women who are not being asked to believe or to support something that is not, in fact, true.
I can think of many examples of books that are marketed in this way, that were never written from the perspective of the men that we claim to support.
“The Great Gatsby” was written from the perspective of Jay Gatsby, the title character who is the narrator of the story. The movie and the book have sold a combined total of nearly 17 million copies. It was once considered to be the greatest novel of all time, and was even selected as the basis for the play, “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
But the book was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the greatest writers of fiction the world has ever seen. But not from the perspective of Ben Gatsby. Instead, Fitzgerald wrote about the
