About ten or fifteen years ago, women started to box. That was probably not a good thing. A few years after that, women started to box so that they’d have something to write about. That was definitely a bad thing.
Joyce Carole Oates wrote about boxing, but from a distance and with the respect of one writing about what she cannot understand. Robert Anasi wrote about it from inside, but with the respect of one who recognizes himself as a novice.
Lynn Snowden Picket and Kate Sekules write about it from inside, but you never get the they consider themselves insiders—never for a moment do they allow you to suspect that the men surrounding them may be their equals, much less their betters. They write from the inside for one purpose: so that they can say they did it, as women, and are therefore better than all comers.
Sekules’ A Boxer’s Heart isn’t bad at all as a memoir, but it falls apart dramatically when she attempts to turn it into an account of women’s boxing in general. If she just told her story without trying to prove that “women in boxing is normal”, and if she told the stories of other boxers as though they were people instead of potential stats or proof points, it would be a decent book.
Snowden Picket probably would benefit from therapy. At least Looking for a Fight was aptly named. She brags about throwing a tantrum at a party, and about bullying her significantly younger boyfriend, and about doing quite a few things that men would go to jail for. Then she whines that her male sparring partner “hit me on my breasts”. Hello? This is boxing. In sparring with a smaller opponent, you’re supposed to avoid head shots. Where is he supposed to hit?
I’m not sure what to make of it, but one thing that marks both of these books apart from others in the genre is the lack of camaraderie in the gym. Not that boxing gyms are really nice places, but men who write about boxing talk about each other as men worthy of a fight. Women who write about boxing talk about each other as targets for, well, a cat fight.
