In their attempts to discredit continuing women’s rights movements, men who feel threatened by feminism frequently resort to the refrain that all necessary progress has already been made in the realm of gender equality. According to these guys, equality just isn’t enough for women – we actually want to be superior to men; we want to benefit from the discrimination and subjugation of the male sex. I mean, we women already demand that our sexual assault allegations be believed. What’s next? Adequately funded health services???
When I recently saw Emma Stone’s new film Battle of the Sexes, I found that so much of the sexism and discrimination featured still rings eerily true today. Based on the historic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, Battle of the Sexes paints an all too familiar picture of female professionals who are treated as less valuable and/or less talented than their (often demonstrably inferior) male counterparts. While conversations about the gender wage gap have definitely become more normalized since the early 1970s, women are still being paid significantly less than men for the same work, and, as Billie Jean King herself pointed out in a joint interview with Emma Stone for Out Magazine, black and Latina women fare even worse than white and Asian women do.
Battles of the Sexes also beautifully depicts the extent to which, when in comes to anything concerning feminism (or, as the movie terms it, “women’s liberation”), the actions of a single woman are held to be representative of her sex as a whole. For a good deal of the film, Billie Jean King grapples with the decision of whether or not she should agree to the match against Bobby Riggs, since she knows a loss on her part would be construed by men as irrefutable proof of the inferiority of female athletes. Ultimately, her choice amounts to a double-edged sword, since declining Riggs’s offer would also have been portrayed as King resigning herself to the fact that men are simply better than women at not only tennis, but sports in general. Basically, Billie Jean King needed to win, and win she did.
Of course, Battle of the Sexes is not merely a story of BJK’s prowess on the tennis court. Rather, the film presents a deeply human rendering of this incredible athlete, devoting considerable time to telling the tale of King’s burgeoning relationship with Marilyn Barnett, as well as exploring the social and professional repercussions bound to follow should their love become public knowledge. Battle of the Sexes ends with the following line, just as poignant now as it surely would have been in 1973: “Times change. You should know; you just changed them.”