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Saturday, April 22, 2006
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Endemic “[S]exual assaults … are as endemic to the big-time college sports machine as the recruiting rat race,” writes a New York Times sports reporter, and UD likes his use of “endemic,” since there are still plenty of college sports types (she heard them at the Knight Commission meeting she attended at GW a few months ago) who will deny this and talk about a few bad apples, etc. Yet having stated baldly the incredible fact, the incredible scandal of college sports -- that it asks us to accept as endemic, as the price of admission, a sideline in sexual degeneracy among some college sportsmen -- the writer (in a remarkably badly written piece) insists that we should not, in seeking to understand this phenomenon as it has played out among some of the country’s most advantaged young people, make any reference to the wealth, privilege, SUVs, and McMansions from which many of the Duke players emerged. That would be a no-no. That would be stereotyping. That would be suggesting that “the accusations brought by a 27-year-old woman that she was sexually assaulted last month by three Duke players are related to where and in what size house they grew up.” "It troubles me, the way the media has been falling back on old stereotypes," [an observer of the sport] said in a recent interview. "Clearly, the details in the Duke case indicate that poor choices were made and may have resulted in a tragedy. But does this story get juicier when you play up that these kids are from a so-called preppy background? Does it make it more divisive?" …I think it does, and that's a sad commentary on where we are as a society." There’s an obvious difference between gross social generalization and serious consideration of the social factors that might have contributed to the barbarity of some lacrosse players. That a number of the players drive SUVs slightly less gargantuan than Hummers, for instance, is not an innocent fact. I don’t have to leave it alone for fear of being labeled a stereotyper. Some people like aggressive and intimidating cars because these cars reflect their own propensity toward violence. Liking to scare and intimidate other people and flaunt their superiority to them, these same people tend to purchase vast and expensive houses that make people who enter them feel small, overwhelmed by the thought of their owners’ financial muscle. Is there a word for these people? Yes. It’s “Americans.” Millions of Americans are like this. They use their considerable wealth to shut out the non-wealthy world and to keep it at arm’s length when they have to be out and about in it (hence the virtually armored cars). They raise their children with a sense of their untouchable superiority to others. All you have to do is look at the imagery and language of many of the ads for the big cars I have in mind to see that they often appeal to these people’s aggressive acquisitiveness and aggressive display. When this sort of community lionizes particular young men among it because they are good at playing a notably aggressive sport, when it rewards its most testosterone-laden population for all sorts of aggressive behavior, on and off the field, the problem of endemic cultural violence deepens. And when such young men engage in sexual degeneracy as a group -- after which they close ranks about it as a group -- cultural generalization is not something to avoid out of fear of the preppie card, but rather something to take up as a moral responsibility. |