Men's Group

-- since I last posted in this topic. (What would be the point? I'm sure they have been hostile to a greater or lesser degree.) Not because I have any personal animosity toward you, but because both of us are, in a sense, hopelessly close-minded. Since there can be no dialogue between us, there's no point in either of us reading the other's posts. Sadly, we'd only talk past each other and get nowhere; and neither of us would ever change the other's mind. So, this will be my swan song, so to speak.

I will continue to believe that for the most part the sports media is nothing but a propaganda mill. Certainly not deserving of respect from those of us who personally appreciate investigative reporting. Oh, you might be able to point to a website or two; but the sports media generally is loathe to deal with the issue of individual high-school or college athletes committing crimes against others, such as physical assault or rape. "Jock privilege," indeed! Just answer this question in your own mind: How has the sports media usually treated accusations of rape by athletes in mind-numbingly popular sports? If a teenage girl or young woman has been raped by one or more football players or basketball players, what sort of support should she expect from the community? The answer is obvious: She should shut the (expletive deleted) up!

There is one sports commentator whom I do admire: Dave Zirin. He's a brave man who undoubtedly has received death threats for daring to antagonize conscienceless sports fans (as opposed to those who have a conscience or the rudiments of one). Just as Kathy Redmond, who was raped by the former Cornhuskers football player Christian Peter (What a great name for a rapist!), has received death threats from sports fans for even daring to speak out publicly on the issue of athletes who get away with committing rape. (This is past history. Make appropriate Google searches. Even Coach Tom Osbourne now publicly supports Kathy Redmond -- probably for PR purposes). I've posted a rather interesting column of Zirin's below, as follows:

http://www.edgeofsports.com/2013-10-27-872/index.html

How Jock Culture Supports Rape Culture, From Maryville to Steubenville

By Dave Zirin




Your 14-year-old daughter is dumped on your freezing front lawn in a state of chemically induced incoherence with her shoes off and frost stuck in her hair. She tells you she was raped. You hear her 13-year-old best friend was also raped that same night. Your daughter is then bullied as a tape of the incident passes around her high school. You wait for the indictments and some semblance of justice, but they dissipate, as one of the accused is a football star from one of the area’s most prominent and politically connected families. The county prosecutor drops the charges, stating that your family is refusing to cooperate even though you are begging to be heard. Then it gets worse.

You are fired from your job without warning and the violent threats against your family through social media increase. You have to pick up your family and leave town. After your departure, your house is burned to the ground. But you refuse to be intimidated.

A public outcry develops, spurred by the decision of your family to come forward and speak out. Now, eighteen months after the incident, a special prosecutor is looking into the case.

This is the story of Melinda Coleman, her daughter, Daisy, her friend Paige, and Daisy Coleman's alleged rapist, Matthew Barnett, the grandson of a longtime member of Missouri’s House of Representatives.

There are other young men as well who are under scrutiny: athlete Jordan Zech, who allegedly filmed the assaults, and a 15-year-old whose name we do not know—who admitted to police that 13-year-old Paige “said no” several times, yet he refused to stop.

I do not know how Melinda Coleman has had the wherewithal to go public, be strong, and even have to serenity to say, in advance of a demonstration called for her family, “I do not condone violence in our defense I don’t want others terrorized as we have been.”

I am amazed by the composure of the now 16-year-old Daisy Coleman, choosing to go public, standing up for herself and writing essays online where she shares:

I sat alone in my room, most days, pondering the worth of my life.{… I burned and carved the ugly I saw into my arms, wrists, legs and anywhere I could find room. On Twitter and Facebook, I was called a skank and a liar and people encouraged me to kill myself. Twice, I did try to take my own life.

Yet I am the most stunned that here we are, six months after a similar case in Steubenville, Ohio, and still not talking openly about the connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture.

According to the Campus Safety Magazine website, in their statistical analysis:

College men who participated in aggressive sports (including football, basketball, wrestling and soccer) in high school used more sexual coercion (along with physical and psychological aggression) in their college dating relationships than men who had not. This group also scored higher on attitudinal measures thought to be associated with sexual coercion, such as sexism, acceptance of violence, hostility toward women and rape myth acceptance.

But forget the studies. The jock culture/rape culture dynamic should be obvious to anyone with any connection to organized sports. I saw it on the teams on which I played and I saw it on the team’s I’ve covered. I’ve heard the stories from athletes I’ve interviewed and from women with detailed descriptions of rape that go unpunished if someone with sports-related status is accused. I have seen it in the story of Lizzie Seeberg and the ways people still pretend that Notre Dame football is a bastion of morality.

The fact is that too many young male athletes are taught to see women as the spoils of being a jock. These young men are treated like gods by the adults who are supposed to be mentoring them—like cash cows by administrators who use their on-field exploits to extract money from politicians and alums.

No, I am not arguing that a majority of young men who play sports become people who engage in sexual assault. But hell, yes, I am arguing that in most male team sports, athletes are conditioned to look the other way if they see an assault about to take place. It is the exception when a teammate stands up at a party and says, “This cannot happen.” To take it even further, it the exception, for anyone, male or female, at a jock party to do the same.

The most distressing detail in the many articles I have read about Maryville was the story of a young girl at the high school who wore a homemade shirt when charges were not filed against Mr. Barnett. It read “Matt—1, Daisy—0”. To her, it was a sports score, a pep rally and just a big game. It’s time to change the game. Jock culture left to its own devices is rape culture. If you are a coach or parent not trying to intervene in this culture to teach young men to not rape, then you are doing everyone a grave disservice. Talk to other coaches. Bring in speakers. Seek out curriculum. Be someone who uses sports to actively build a movement against rape culture. To do nothing is to just ensure more Steubenvilles, more Torringtons and more Maryvilles to come. Not everywhere will have survivors willing to be as public as Daisy Coleman. But you can be a hero now by walking into your locker room and standing up to this shit today.

Is this the sort of commentary you would find in the sports section of your local newspaper or a magazine such as Sports Illustrated? What do they care about rape victims? The truth is they don't care. They haven't cared in decades. They never did care about the victims. All they care about is putting athletes on pedestals, regardless of whether they're decent or not, because there's money to be made by promoting school sports as the national secular religion of the United States of America.

As I said, there's no need to respond to this. Why bother when dialogue is virtually impossible between us?