And by “lady persons”, I mean real life WOMEN, not a freeze-frame of Jeanie Garth circa 1992.  “90% Of The Game Is Half Mental” author Emma Span got part of the way through Bill Simmons’ NY Times best-seller, ‘The Book Of Basketball’, and she might’ve actually finished the book (length somewhere between Lenny Dkystra’s autobiography and “War & Peace”) had the ESPN.com superstar not engaged so frequently in bro’-down acts of casual sexism.  There’s a number recounted by Span, including but not limited to Simmons gleefully recalling a female sex worker’s head being shoved into a toilet, analysis of tit sizes (DUDE!), guesstimations of female undergrads’ weight and most jarringly (for Span, anyway), the Sports Putz claiming his wife’s second pregnancy was the result of his “pulling the goalie” (“usually couples discuss pulling the goalie before it happens¦ unless it™s Bridgette Moynahan. In my case, I made the executive decision to speed up plans for kid number two. This did not go over well. I think I™m the first person who ever had a home pregnancy test whipped at them at 95 mph.”) From Span and Bronx Banter :

I assume this is a joke ” at least, it™s clearly supposed to be funny, but man did it fall flat with me. œOrnery does not begin to describe my reaction if my husband, who™d very soon be my ex-husband, made an œexecutive decision to stop using birth control without telling me. (Also, what the hell were they using that he could do this without her knowing? A valid question, though not one I care to dwell on).

I could have picked out and transcribed a dozen more examples, but life is short. Taken one at a time, any of these could be shrugged off, but each one piles on the previous instances until they have so much cumulative bulk that they can™t be ignored. I read a lot of books that are written by men and for a largely male audience ” in fact that describes many of my favorite books. But this book goes further: it™s not just not coming from a male perspective, it seems to have been written without the slightest hint that any woman could ever conceivably read it. I don™t know what Simmons is like personally, but with this book the Sports Guy persona that he™s constructed for himself has become downright toxic.

Simmons does have a number of female fans, and hey, to each their own. I would have liked to know what the rest of his NBA Pyramid looked like, but not enough to wade through 400 more pages of this stuff.