The Battle of the Sexes

Iwas watching the film “The Battle of the Sexes” tonight. The movie is based on the historic tennis match between Bobby Riggs, former men’s tennis champion, and Billie Jean King, at the time the reigning queen of women’s tennis.

As a young kid back in the day, I vaguely remember the event when it happened, and even many years thereafter, did not really think about how much of a seismic shift it represented in sociological terms. The following excerpt from “The Guardian” gives us an idea of just how path-breaking that single tennis match was, in its time.

“The stranger-than-fiction story of how the tennis courts of America became a gender battlefield in the early 70s was brilliantly told in James Erskine and Zara Hayes’s 2013 documentary The Battle of the Sexes. About 90 million people watched Billie Jean King take on self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs in the titular 1973 game, which was less a tennis match than a seismic sociological standoff. This dramatisation revisits those carnivalesque events in splendidly springy fashion, achieving the quadruple grand slam feat of being emotionally engaging, political- ly intriguing, dramatically gripping and frequently very funny.

A typically responsive score by Nicholas Britell juxtaposes the driving force of King’s game with the anxieties lurking beneath Riggs’s brash bravado, lending nuance to a story that seems all the more pertinent in an age in which athletes in America are once again taking action for socio-political change.”

Yes, it is true, and I needed reminding from “The Guardian” of just how true. There was a time when men and women did not always relate to each other as they do today; when male chauvinism was the norm, and politically incorrect meant a politician who had just committed a serious grammatical error.

How apt therefore that in the beginning of the third millennium, a film such as this would come along to remind us that, despite how we think times have changed, old habits – especially bad ones – do really die very hard indeed.

For while I was thoroughly enjoying “The Battle of the Sexes,” as I switched off Netflix and flipped the channels to CNN, I realized that sadly, nothing much has really changed. Because just today, Larry Nassar, a licensed osteopathic physician and the national team sports-medicine doctor for USA Gymnastics, was sentenced to consecutive jail terms totalling 175 years, for sexually abusing young female gymnasts under his care, under the pretext of performing legitimate medical procedures on them.

Of course, prior to Nassar, we had the spotlight on numerous men with enormous power – ranging from Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinsten, comedian Bill Cosby, news anchor Matt Lauer, and even many prominent global political figures. Their tales, with almost certainly no exception, tell of male chauvinism in the extreme.

Because underneath their abusive behavior is really a deep-seated belief that being of the masculine gender gives them the license to dominate those of the female kind, or indeed those who do not identify with being male.

So when will this warped and distorted view of male dominance end?

There was once a great general, who spent most of his ruling years on an unprecedented military campaign through Asia and northeast Africa, and he created one of the largest empires of the world by the age of thirty, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. And guess what, the general was a known homosexual. One would think that after a person like that, people’s attitudes about male dominance would have changed for good.

The man was Alexander the Great, and the time was 356-323 BC. Over two millennia later, it seems the problem is still very much with us.