It’s the relentlessness that’s the problem for me. I could overlook a lot of the “jokes” (which, a lot of people have noted here, are not generally funny — like his pop culture references and cracks about wanting to be black). But in a 700-page book he never finds a decent thing to say about a woman.

Like a lot of the female commenters here, I spend quite a bit of time in male circles and am not easily offended. But Simmons is disgusting, and I can’t believe he has a daughter. Hopefully, she will inspire some change in him. Unfortunately, from what I know of guys like him, she probably won’t.

There are certainly far more pressing issues and challenges facing women today than what Bill Simmons writes, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth calling attention to.

It’s a book about basketball and sports. It isn’t a book about feminism, or gender studies. It isn’t a book that “defines” womanhood. He isn’t required to give a full account of his thoughts about womanhood and feminism as a pre-emptive disclaimer in the introduction of the damn book.

As someone who thinks there has been, and continues to be, a real War on Women that is thousands of years old, cheapening the struggle by calling this stuff “sexism” is shallow and counter productive.

Whether you want to fuck them or not is not what defines women, but that’s what he uses over and over again. And there’s an anger, even though he’s joking, towards women he doesn’t want to fuck. Man, can you believe that blonde comes out looking all hot but then has the nerve to not have big boobs? Jeez, all these women wearing heavy sweaters in the winter – it’s like they don’t understand that I need to be able to tell at a glance how much they weigh so that I can decide if I might want to fuck them or not.

If it was just the things I quoted above, it would not be that big a deal, but the point is there are tons more of these, often brought up for no reason except that obviously he thinks his readers want tons of this. And while I should make it clear that I don’t know if Simmons personally has contempt for women, this book absolutely does.

I’ve listened to the BS Reports with Jemele Hill and Erin Andrews and I’m really unsure how you can characterize him as having an “utter contempt for women”.

I don’t buy that. Simmons is a guy who never matured past the age of 19. He managed to get to college, found a bunch of guys that liked to talk about dicking women and fart jokes. As luck would have it, he has a audience that unintentionally encourages him to not grow up (afterall, every year brings a new crop of 19 year olds that think talking about dicking women and fart jokes is the GREATEST THING EVAR!). I read a few of his columns when he first popped up on ESPN and never cared much for them. He brings the hits by “telling it like it is, and not backing down to PC pressure, etc”. But he’s a really hateful guy thinks that everyone’s idea of a good time is denigrating a stripper. Controversy brings page views and ad- dollars, so here he is and here he continues.

I really enjoy the book, and I’m willing to grant some leeway to his fratboy persona. But he’s badly in need of an editor who can prune some of the gratuitous sexism (and, ideally, scale back some of the more obvious Boston homerism: Robert Parrish in the pantheon? The 86 Celts as the best team of all time? No.) He can be a great basketball writer; unfortunately, I think deep down he wants to be a comedy writer. (Isn’t that why he moved to LA?)

To be frank, this happened for two reasons. One is that there’s lots of women up here who understand hockey at a deep level just fine. The other is that the men who do hockey up here helped them out with coaching, money for the nascent league, and so on. Since then women’s hockey in Canada has become self sustaining, and while the international games are a bit of a snoozefest (ISTR we pummelled Italy forty nothing or so an Olympics or two back) the games here are fast, hard-fought, and fun to watch.

If the WNBA sucks, it’s almost certainly not the W that’s at fault. If a woman can hold her own playing pro hockey with men in Europe, the WNBA can put on good games.

His persona is that of a regular male fan. Maybe none of the readers here are like that, but I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t thoroughly entertained and enlightened by the book. And he admits he likes porn, but he also admits that Jackie MacMullan is one of his favorite journalists.

I can see how the book would rub some people the wrong way, though.

If you look at The Book of Basketball, on paper or via Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature (http://amzn.to/hV522q), you can go to the pages I cite and decide for yourself if I’m being unfair. Indeed, you can probably find several dozen additional similar examples; time and length concerns kept me from being comprehensive last night.

Actually, I read a lot of sports books, but I don’t think I’ve seen one written in the last twenty years that had this level of chauvinism, to use your word. It actually isn’t that common — and, judging by the traffic, people were interested in reading about it.