With two of the Duke Lacrosse players arrested in that stripper rape scandal, I decided that I should put in my two cents about this. This is a scandal by all definitions, but I wasn't shocked to hear about it coming from a school like Duke. Afterall, I went to Exeter and saw examples of this kind of attitude on our lacrosse team as well. Both of these athletes were rich white boys who went to expensive prep schools and then to Duke, the top school in the South, but that doesn't make them immune from being sleazy. Some of the guys I played football or hockey with were also Lacrosse players, and a lot of those guys were pure sleaze. It didn't matter that they were rich white boys from one of the top schools in the nation, they were sleazy guys no matter what. One of the guys called himself "The Virgin Surgeon" and another of the guys used to go down to the liquor store to purchase "Barely Legal" and other raunchy publications. One of the guys on the team was a 19 year old postgrad dating a 14 year old freshman girl, and forget about the way these guys talked about women when amongst teammates. It's not just Lacrosse players, it's just jocks in general. There is this prevalent attitude amongst athletes that women are not much more than sex toys and objects for us to ogle.
When I was playing American Legion baseball we had a party just like the Duke one. We had 40 players (in Redwood City we had two legion teams: a varsity (the Blues, the team I was on that season) and the JV Reds) there and one of the sleazier guys on the team suggested that we call for strippers and buy a bunch of alcohol to celebrate winning this big tourney in Mesa Arizona for the second straight year. Now I LOVE strippers...nothing is more fun than having a silicone barbie doll shaking her stuff on my lap, but there's a huge difference between a lap dance and having 40 guys and 2 strippers.
Basically it all boils down to the concept of mob mentality. Team sports tend to enhance the mob mentality of the players and all it usually takes to get a team to do something horrible is a "team leader" with the proper motivation. No person in their right mind would EVER send an email like the one that one player sent. Not all of the players are guilty, but if all 44 players were at the party, then they are all guilty of being sleazy. If you're a varsity athlete on a ranked team, why bother paying for strippers? It's not like it's hard to find a group of slutty girls to get drunk enough to give lap dances...hell, the LAX team did that at my High School. There's just something I've never understood about the whole ordering a stripper to a party full of guys. It's not fun for me to be surrounded by a bunch of testosterone-laden guys getting all horny over some skank who has no intention of hooking up with any of them. Every time I'm at a party that's mostly guys and a stripper is ordered, I just go somewhere else, simply because I know that things like this Duke incident happen all the time. The only reason why this is such major news is because of the added racial tensions and the fact that it happened at Duke. If it was a white girl at some random school in rural kentucky, we'd never hear about it.
The worst part of this scandal is that these kind of guys are the ones who always get away with similar things. They assault women all the time, but most assaults go unreported. Is it any wonder that there would be a gang-rape case like this in a world where hyper-masculinity and aggression are desired traits? I'm actually surprised that this case was so unusual, when I heard the story I just thought "So? Not like it doesn't happen at a couple schools every year"...I guess you should feel bad for the "Stripper" even if she was asking for it by being intoxicated and by returning to the party after an apology. That's the other thing about these kinds of guys that pisses me off...women will fall for their bullshit when it is obvious that they are jerks. If you know you're in danger from 40 testosterone charged jocks who want you to get naked for them, it's your own fault for going back to the party. I feel bad for the hooker, but seriously, it's all about natural selection: If someone is dumb enough to put themselves in a position of danger, then they deserve everything that happens to them.
No matter if these players were guilty of the rape, they were guilty of being sleazy and of slandering the name of Duke and of LAX players worldwide. They deserved to have their season cancelled for letting such an event take place, and the coach deserved to be sacked for losing control of his team. Think Bear Bryant's players would have been arrested for gang-raping a stripper? Even Mike Kryzewski controls his players better than that. I hope these players are guilty and get what they deserve: 20 years of sodomy in a state prison...at least they'll be getting laid, right?
When I was playing American Legion baseball we had a party just like the Duke one. We had 40 players (in Redwood City we had two legion teams: a varsity (the Blues, the team I was on that season) and the JV Reds) there and one of the sleazier guys on the team suggested that we call for strippers and buy a bunch of alcohol to celebrate winning this big tourney in Mesa Arizona for the second straight year. Now I LOVE strippers...nothing is more fun than having a silicone barbie doll shaking her stuff on my lap, but there's a huge difference between a lap dance and having 40 guys and 2 strippers.
Basically it all boils down to the concept of mob mentality. Team sports tend to enhance the mob mentality of the players and all it usually takes to get a team to do something horrible is a "team leader" with the proper motivation. No person in their right mind would EVER send an email like the one that one player sent. Not all of the players are guilty, but if all 44 players were at the party, then they are all guilty of being sleazy. If you're a varsity athlete on a ranked team, why bother paying for strippers? It's not like it's hard to find a group of slutty girls to get drunk enough to give lap dances...hell, the LAX team did that at my High School. There's just something I've never understood about the whole ordering a stripper to a party full of guys. It's not fun for me to be surrounded by a bunch of testosterone-laden guys getting all horny over some skank who has no intention of hooking up with any of them. Every time I'm at a party that's mostly guys and a stripper is ordered, I just go somewhere else, simply because I know that things like this Duke incident happen all the time. The only reason why this is such major news is because of the added racial tensions and the fact that it happened at Duke. If it was a white girl at some random school in rural kentucky, we'd never hear about it.
The worst part of this scandal is that these kind of guys are the ones who always get away with similar things. They assault women all the time, but most assaults go unreported. Is it any wonder that there would be a gang-rape case like this in a world where hyper-masculinity and aggression are desired traits? I'm actually surprised that this case was so unusual, when I heard the story I just thought "So? Not like it doesn't happen at a couple schools every year"...I guess you should feel bad for the "Stripper" even if she was asking for it by being intoxicated and by returning to the party after an apology. That's the other thing about these kinds of guys that pisses me off...women will fall for their bullshit when it is obvious that they are jerks. If you know you're in danger from 40 testosterone charged jocks who want you to get naked for them, it's your own fault for going back to the party. I feel bad for the hooker, but seriously, it's all about natural selection: If someone is dumb enough to put themselves in a position of danger, then they deserve everything that happens to them.
No matter if these players were guilty of the rape, they were guilty of being sleazy and of slandering the name of Duke and of LAX players worldwide. They deserved to have their season cancelled for letting such an event take place, and the coach deserved to be sacked for losing control of his team. Think Bear Bryant's players would have been arrested for gang-raping a stripper? Even Mike Kryzewski controls his players better than that. I hope these players are guilty and get what they deserve: 20 years of sodomy in a state prison...at least they'll be getting laid, right?
posted by Dan Pasternack at 3:56 PM
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