Fuck rape culture (including small towns and football)

Growing up in Colorado, I know we had at least 2 famous athletes (not counting Kobe Bryant) accused of abusing their spouses.

Patrick Roy (People have said he didn't hit her, just intimidated her)
Bill Romanowski (I can't find any mention of this and may be misremembering)

In both cases, it felt like people didn't want to admit these people, who led our teams to championships, could do anything wrong. I don't understand why people get a free pass so often, either. Like, Roman Polanski. He admits to having had sex with the 13 year old girl and having given her drugs, but he refuses to admit it was wrong. And people support him because he's a fantastic director (and also because the judge was a loon).

I didn't say I was unsupportive. I'm actually very supportive of all his athletics (football, basketball and baseball) and try never to miss a single game since he started at a very young age. I just don't know anything about sports and can't really do much to help him improve. Apparently throwing a football to someone running at full speed is beyond my meager ability as he likes to remind me.

There's definately a problem with the sports culture. I've always felt that sports don't need to be attached to education, and in a lot of countries that is the case.

I did grow up in a small town and at least there things seemed to be mostly kept in the right perspective, but that was largely because most of the coaches were good people. The best teacher I had in high school was the head football coach who taught history. One of the worst was the head basketball coach who taught english. So it can vary. But when four of the five boys basketball starters were caught at a party after curfew they were suspended for almost the entire season.

Reading the comments just darkened my view of humanity (again) :'(

Sure, but we'd get science stuff out of it. What do we get out of football that furthers humanity?

Concussion research?

Anonymous, since I didn't see it linked earlier.

As I stated In Some Other Board, pour the gas, light the match, burn. I'm sure that the "The Jock Who Got Away with X" genre is as old as history, but thanks to the Interwebs we now get exposed to the full measure of said Jocks' brilliance, as opposed to having to listen to hushed giggles at the Fraternity party.

This is fundamentally about hero worship. We see it over and over again in football because that's who our culture tends to put on pedestals, but it would be happening no matter who is deified. I am not certain we are collectively capable of not deifying anyone.

It's just that it seems to be yet another cultural thing that (some) other countries do fine without. Sure the rape culture in Delhi is even worse, but there's also spots on the planet where these things don't happen.

At least if we have a class of people where the hero worship lets them get away with stuff like this, then the cover up is so effective, that I've never heard of it.

Athleticism? Good health? Learning how to work as a team? A sense of community?

Look, I agree that the current football culture in small town America is unhealthy & sick. But that's because of the small towns, not because of the football. When pursued in a sane & healthy maner, sports are at least as valuable to humanity as science.

No. A thousand times no. You are out of your mind crazy if you seriously believe that.

I happen to enjoy sports, played football (not handegg) for many years, then taekwondo, then judo, but I'm still absolutely certain that whatever benefits I derived, and still derive, from participating in sports is nothing in comparison to the penicillin shot I got when I had pneumonia. Or any one of a thousand other examples of how science benefits us.

I'm gonna speak out of turn here and say that this thread's kinda went beyond "football culture is belligerent and out of hand in some areas" and started looking more like "I was unathletic/socially marginalized/harassed by jocks in school so I will assert that sports are without merit". Not to say that's anyone's motivation, mind, it just looks bad.

Look, competition either brings out the best or worst in people, and that's not a phenomenon isolated to sports. Yes, sporting culture is often rife with hooliganism and bad idol worship, particularly in rural towns where sports are pretty much the only major social outlet. But I guarantee if you took a look at any town where behavior like that is just considered part of the landscape, you'd probably find equally shameful behavior outside of the athletic realm; the visibility of the social aspects of sport just makes it all the more apparent.

Professional sports are a mixed bag, but it's no different than any other entertainment industry. All over the world we see examples of athletes showing streaks of racism, domestic abuse, and just plain being dicks. Is it really much different than the music business? The movie industry?

I'm just as biased defending football as anyone who would vilify it. I love sport. I was a pretty keen rugby and soccer player before my body completely broke. I don't choose to ignore the Michael Vicks and Lance Armstrongs of the world, and I vote to improve the sport with my voice and my dollars. But it doesn't make me write off what is otherwise a wonderful demonstration of the intellectual and physical limits of the human body and the really cool social forces of public competition. They're not always unifying, but they are most of the time. Just like everything else in this God-forsaken world. /rant

I think Penn State was shocking because for decades Joe Pa had a reputation for running a sparking clean program. That as bad as the FSUs of the world was, his program was "the good guys".

I dunno, the whole obesity epidemic seems to fly in the face of that, but that's a tangent and a half for this thread.

I wouldn't tie the obesity epidemic to a lack of high pressure sports achievement in high school.

I'll take the bait....
There is some concern about HS football adding to the obesity epidemic
http://www.boston.com/sports/school.../05/tipping_the_competitive_scales/?page=full


And from the bastion of scientific knowledge that is people...
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20238302,00.html

Indeed, there are plenty of fat football players.

That was not what she said. She was responding to the assertions that athletics are without merit or benefit. I give this forum credit in the short time I've been here for understanding context and not resorting to strawman arguments, and I'm certain that wasn't your intent.

Back to the topic and not the ridiculous apples/oranges argument about the benefits of science vs. sport (although I will make the pointless observation that sport has been around for a millennia longer than science as we know it; we did alright all that time without sporting ourselves to extinction, but we may not be as lucky with science).

None of us have any doubts that these events happened, and it's pretty evident that the town is hiding behind fear and ignorance in the face of it. Something had to be done to make up for the futile local law enforcement efforts, even if it came down to state intervention. But Knightsec is dangerous, and not in the "be afraid, bad guys" kinda way they want to portray themselves. This kind of vigilanteism worries the shit outta me, especially when they post things like this:

UPDATE: Due to recent evidence coming to light Cody Saltsman is once again NOT INNOCENT.

The evidence regarding him can be viewed here http://i.imgur.com/mNzHn.jpg

NOTICE: Harold Malone IS TO BE LEFT ALONE

And when they get it wrong, their stirring of the pot to coax the public into breaking out their pitchforks and torches? What happens then? I just can't condone this stuff. But don't get me started on Anonymous.

I was referring to sports in general, and like I said, it's a tangent for this thread.

I'm definitely not saying that you motivation for posting in this thread is that you fall on the right side of the bell curve for athletic abilities but on the wrong one when it comes to I.Q., which led you to have a great time in high school but miserably fail at adult life. But in my opinion, when we aren't saying that some people have deeply insulting motivations for posting what they did, it's better not to bring up the matter at all, or it just looks bad.

haw haw you guys.

I've got me own teen sports are evil anecdote. In high school I ran cross country. Our team was the goofiest but we had our fair share of dark moments -- we once stole a street sign from one of our rivals' school. We also team swing-danced girls!

I wholeheartedly apologize for using mild hyperbole to point out that a couple of folks took hold of this story rather quickly to push what seemed like their own wholesale grudges against sports in general. And no one's been trying to make the "intellect vs. athleticism" argument here, but that's okay; anyone who would accuse me of being a meathead jock is probably either more stoned than I usually am or took a few too many tackles themselves. I actually had a pretty crummy school experience, but it was largely because I spent most of school being shuffled around between grades and shoved in and out of testing and early attempts at "gifted" classes in the days before school systems had codified that sort of thing.

There's two separate things here. One is the hero-worship of college-age sports stars alluded to above, which strikes me as a particularly American phenomenon. The other is the way in which aggressive team sports - and the ways team "bond" and are encouraged to bond - seems to go way beyond the bounds of normal behaviour, particularly when it comes to women. The NRL in Australia for example is littered with examples of sexual misbehaviour, ranging from unwelcome touching to reports of gang rape and a history of "multiple-on-one" sexual encounters with many stories of coercion (many of which are never proven, because... well, we all know why).

I bear no hatred towards sports people. I'm a huge rugby fan, and I played a lot of rugby and cricket as a youngster. I'm friends with a few professional rugby players (one of whom is a gigantic geek) and I know a little about the environment that they're in. There is a problem here, but it's not going to be tied down to a single cause, and in my opinion there is indeed a cultural aspect in the USA that we can't match elsewhere.

Really? Do other countries not worship their college-aged athletes? The semi-annual high school baseball tournament is the biggest sporting event in Japan (the only other country I've spent significant time in). I'm sure those players get pretty special treatment in their hometown.

Not to any significant extent, apart from obvious exceptions where young athletes are good enough to play in adult leagues. High school and college sports don't really exist as a concept, except for some exceptions (the only significant sporting eventon the college level I can think of in Europe is the Cambridge-Oxford row-off).

It's different over here, for a variety of reasons. One is that many 18/19 year old athletes are already starting their professional careers and as such are part of academies/counties (likely from a much younger age) or in some cases their full team. They're already 'in the system', so to speak. Some of them do their university studies at the same time as their professional/international careers, if they do them at all.

If you're talking school-age, that's pretty much anathema. As pure conjecture, I wonder if it's an American thing because international team sports aren't really an American thing? Over here, international is the pinnacle of your career, with regional/professional club seen as the next level down and local club/county level as the lowest tier. Youth and university-level sports, unless the youngster is exceptional, are seen as feeders into the bigger systems.

Taking purely the big two in the US, the NFL and MLB, international competitions don't seem to exist. My understanding is that in the US, professional is the pinnacle of your career, which would make varsity the next level down and youth the level, because the varsity players feed directly into the top-tier and the youth directly into varsity. Does that sound correct?


+Ice Hockey and Basketball are genuinely international sports. Actually, there's a question: how many international basketball fixtures do the USA play every year?

I'm quoting this because it's very much true; though the importance of high school and college sports don't exist in many parts of the world, team bonding is something that can end up weird and toxic everywhere, obviously. I'm sure Hammett can tell you about some weird initiation stuff that got revealed at the youth level in a Swedish football team a few years back.

Not really. I assume you're referring to the time ten years ago when 4 16-year old males in an AIK youth squad got fined for pushing objects into the anus of younger team-mates? At the time they tried to bullshit the police about how it was all a "club tradition" and part of some made-up "initiation", which was later proven to be false. Since AIK is a resident of the largest city in Sweden and this had more to do with these particular kids than with sports, I'm not sure I see the connection to the subject. They did not receive special treatment for being good at soccer and their actions were directed at establishing dominance over their younger team mates, which I'm not sure is what we're discussing here.

I'd say there's even a bit of a reverse idolization going on when it comes to soccer players in AIK or Djurgården, where they certainly might get some minor fringe benefits on the town, there's also the general "Law of Jante" (Don't think you're special just because you're great at something) and the whole "you shouldn't be out enjoying yourself, you should be home preparing for the game". That's actually VERY common.

And this is what happens when I refer to events I didn't follow very closely at the time!

That whole Jock thing, Neo/nazi gym teacher type mentality is what turned me off to sports entirely when I got to high school.
I loved playing football and baseball up until then, and when we played in gym class the teachers always wanted me to join the teams.
I lasted like two weeks freshman year of high school and just could not take that whole mentality.
Up until then it was great, and when I decided to stop in high school, it seems my football locker and football uniform were pissed on, so I just left them there.

I think they tried to make me pay for the uniform before they would let me graduate 4 years later, but I just kinda' laughed at them and nothing came of it.

The more this fleshes out the worse it looks. Jesus fucking christ.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/the-definitive-timeline-of-the-steubenville-rape-s

Actually, if you read Kalle's post she was responding to the statement that science is far more important than sports. Given that exercise can be had without participating in sports, it's a pretty silly thing to try and refute. It's possible that obesity could be battled with more participation in school sports, but given that most high schools and all colleges have extreme restrictions on who is allowed to participate in sports, one should not rely on sports to solve the obesity epidemic nor is it particularly worthwhile to cite the obesity epidemic as a reason why participating in school sports is a positive endeavor.

Ohio sheriff confronts protesters, claims no new suspects will be arrested.

I think you're taking an off-handed comment much too literally, and I'm saying the whole thing is just as stupid to affirm as it is to refute. It's like asking if love is more important than shelter. When you start comparing tangibles to intangibles, it's a quick path towards a useless circular argument. The benefits of athletics -- health, gathering, mateship, personal improvement, etc. -- can easily be considered the anthropological essence of humanity by some people but not everyone is going to have the same experience. I'm pretty sick of love right now but there was a time when I cherished it more than a roof over my head.

The one thing we can all agree on is that things like this dilute any benefits of sport. But I don't think Anonymous is helping; I appreciate that they took it upon themselves to bring this issue to light and organize protests and community efforts, but trying to illegally obtain evidence that would only end up inadmissible in court and using it to spark a witch hunt is horribly self-righteous and irresponsible. You can't correct bad justice with more bad justice.

No. I am reading words people say. Kalle, at no point whatsoever, said that athletics are without merit.

Good gravy, now you're just arguing semantics for the sake of it. When the title of the thread is "fuck football", it already set the tone for broad, sweeping generalizations anyway, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid. So ... "Athletics are of marginal merit compared to penicillin." Happy now? Can we hug it out?

Its not a zero sum game, you can have penicillin and football. Happy now?