Promising young athletes
Clementine Ford has some thoughts on Brock Turner.
Turner did not present to the world as the archetypal monster dwelling in shadowed alleyways. He was attending Stanford on a sports scholarship as an accomplished swimmer with aspirations to one day compete at the Olympics. He is from a privileged white background, with enough family money and support to hire the kind of expensive lawyers who usually appear on behalf of the of well taken care of privileged white sons defending themselves against rape charges. It has been suspiciously difficult to track down the police mugshot taken after his arrest; instead, media reports throughout the trial have been littered with smiling photographs of what is no doubt an attempt to portray a ‘promising young athlete in happier times’.
These tactics are employed deliberately. Not, as you might think, in an attempt to humanise a rapist – but to massage that niggling impulse to associate rape with certain traits. A promising young athlete with friends, teammates and well-to-do parents can’t possibly be a rapist! There must be some other explanation – alcohol consumption, perhaps, and poor reasoning skills. Misread signals. A life-altering mistake.
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Being a promising young athlete does not provide a protective charm against criminal activity, but this is the message that has been all too often sent by judges, lawyers and community members intent on protecting young men from the consequences of their violence and entitlement.
Indeed. But I would go beyond “being an athlete isn’t a defense” and “being an athlete doesn’t magically rule out being a rapist” to make it an affirmative thing – being a promising young athlete may well encourage rapey ideation. Why wouldn’t it? At least, why wouldn’t it in cultures that overvalue male athletes and undervalue women?
What’s true about promising young male athletes? That they get masses of social validation, not to say hero worship. That they spend a lot of time with other promising young male athletes, who all get masses of social validation / hero worship. That these tribes of promising young male athletes tend to be very macho, and very contemptuous of all things female. (How do they provoke each other? By saying things like, “You need to take the tampon out of your pussy.”) That all this adds up to a sense of entitlement coupled with contempt for girls and women. You do the math.
I’d say this can apply more broadly to men at universities, particularly those in the fraternities, where the same sort of ‘bro-culture’ can fester in relative secrecy, until it spills out in some ugly display like the various pro-rape chants and such.
And even those athletes and frat brothers who would never, themselves, participate in such practices receive heavy pressure to never, ever speak up, or worse, speak out against their peers. Parallels abound outside the schools, of course–from religious hierarchies to police departments to corporate offices to anonymous online commenters. Wrongdoing breeds more wrongdoing in the darkness. Transparency can help so much, but someone has to be in a position to force it, and that someone has to have the will to do so.
Indeed. Athletes are just one example of bro culture; there are lots of others. It would be faster to enumerate the non-bro cultures…
Non-bro culture – librarian.
Oops. Sorry, my mistake. The American Library Association has trouble with sexual predators at their conferences; in spite of men being heavily outnumbered, they still feel they are entitled to sample the goodies that are on display. And although the vast majority of librarians are female, the majority of administrators tend to be….wait for it…you guessed it…right. Male.
Even in female dominated fields, women can’t get away from bro culture. The sense of entitlement of so many men is so strong they don’t even recognize that the woman is actually a person, not a sex toy.
Yeah, that’s just it. They see women as a Sex Opp and not as people. We’re maybe 1/8 of a person.
A relative of mine was raped by an athlete at college. She didn’t press charges even though the police encouraged her to do so. One of the reasons was that one of his teammates would have been called as a witness (because the perpetrator spoke to him about it the next day) and it would have caused problems within the team. I think she didn’t want to be the centre of the controversy.
The assumption of virtue in athletes is a crazy old notion. So even swimmers are somehow given a pass. In the Big Team sports, which involve vast sums of money for the schools, the culture of ‘managing’ pathological young men until they can be passed on to the rest of society has been a disgrace for decades.
USF’s basketball program was shut down after the Quentin Daily scandal in 1982. But Daily went on to play professionally for 10 years. A career marked by incidents of drunkenness and drug use.
Punchline, though he died at age 49, of suspicious symptoms, Daily too, got to be recycled as a Professional Positive Role Model, according to Wiki:
‘ He eventually became a recreation and cultural program supervisor, a position he maintained until his death. Dailey had a variety of responsibilities, including gang intervention, sports and special events.’
Just the guy you want around young men, or anyone else.
Actually, it serves a very modern purpose. I mean, when people complain about how much money is spent on sports at the expense of collegiate activities, someone has to come rushing out to explain how important sports are because they promoted teamwork and build character. In short, better citizens. If we actually looked at the way that rape culture pervades collegiate (and professional) sports, they would lose an important argument in trying to make it look like sports serves some important educational function that can be justified as a school expense (this is necessary, since sports, although often touted as a money maker for the schools, loses money for the school in the vast majority of schools – only a small percentage of the big draw schools actually make money on the program).
Of course, if the character you want to build is one of self-important entitled dudes, you’ve got the character you want. Most people don’t want that, but they want to turn on their TV on Saturday and see their favorite team “slaughter” the opposing team, automatically in the role of bad guys. For people who just want to watch sports and have their heroes, any argument to maintain sports is a good one, and anyone who demonstrates otherwise gets the fingers in the ears treatment.
Iknklast@3: when I was in Library School, one of my professors presented a paper on the subject of sexism in hiring and promotion practices within the profession. She compared librarianship and teaching and showed that in both professions, talented, highly credentialed women remained in entry-level positions while males were routinely promoted to the better paid and more prestigious administrative positions.
The other thing I took away from her talk was to refer to librarianship as a “female intensive” profession, rather than a “female dominant” one.
Thanks, Julia, for the “female intensive”. I’ll use that. I think it better describes a lot of fields where women are the majority but men are the ones in the high positions (physical therapy and occupational therapy are others).