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| More on Million Dollar Baby and a plug for The Week | | Date Created: Mar 05, 2005, 11:21 AM |
 This is as good a time as any to plug The Week, the best weekly print magazine that attempts to do what Time and Newsweek and the like have attempted but have become part of the mainstream media problem. The Week is entertaining, attempts to report and let you decide, and covers a fair amount of territory from international events to pop cultural items. It's not perfect but it's the best weekly print mag out there currently that I'm aware of.
In the latest issue (March 11, 2005) there is an amazing essay on women in boxing. Unfortunately it's not posted on their website. Fortunately, as The Week often does, it's reprinted with permission from another source. In this case it's The Washington Monthly and they do have a website that includes the original article. The Week called it "Waiting for Ms. Rocky" but the original is called, Battered Women: Female boxing is brutal and hopeless by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
What an eye-opener. Turns out Million Dollar Baby is remarkably true-to-life (well, not the medical scenes) and women do indeed find it hard to be trained properly but engage in a brutal sport more akin to cock-fighting than anything else. They can get seriously injured as in the movie (unlike the staged "fights" of the WWF) and they make little money from it. I've spent just enough time in Philly back in the 70's to know the scene the author describes rings true.
This article is very well written, important in its subject matter, and it's connection to the movie that was just awarded Best Picture. The author even handles the issue of the ending of the movie well. The comparisons to pornography and exploitation are apt and I would add that women's professional boxing is more like prostitution than anything else. Maybe it will hit the liberal's radar screen as an "epidemic" or a social problem to be rooted out with government regulation and social programs.
Anyway, see the movie and read this article. |
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