Poor, poor rapists... WTH!?

[Arwon]

Let me preface this by saying that I obviously think the girl deserves the most sympathy. She is the victim here.

HOWEVA, I honestly DO feel some measure of sympathy for the football players. Here is why:

I'm pretty familiar with Steubenville. I grew up maybe an hour away, and I've covered their high school football team before (they're pretty famous around Ohio). The town is hopelessly backwards, and has 100% completely fostered a culture where young football players feel they are completely above the law.

The most powerful man in town, the football coach, is in cahoots with the sheriff. The administration and local law enforcement have covered up rampant academic fraud, drinking and drug trafficking for years. You have kids who are taught from fairly early on that women are prizes that they are entitled to thanks to their athletic exploits, not actual human beings. When you add all of that up, plus alcohol, plus being dumb teenagers, you get tragedy.

I'm not saying these kids should not be punished. They have committed a horrible act and they ought to be punished. I do think it is sad that they've basically thrown their lives away on a terrible mistake, and most importantly, that they've grown up in a culture and community that has enabled this behavior before.

The kids should be punished, but they aren't the only guilty party here.

I'd go one step further and point out none of these attitudes are unique to jocks in backwards football towns. It's something our culture is very good at instilling everywhere.

 

[Arwon]

It's not that these teenagers didn't deserve their punishment (apart from the register, perhaps, which could be argued to be very unprincipled), but rather that so many others can engage in the same behaviour without it being a 'crime' in any meaningful sense of the word. That there are so many others who deserve the punishment too. Sympathy would be better directed towards hidden victims.

Also this. So much.

 

[dutchfire]

Well I can get behind torching the entire town too in that case.

This.

 

[Carras Dad]

On the other hand, they're 16. People do some really stupid things at 16 that are in no way reflective of the person they might be at 46. I think sex-offender status might be something subject to renewal or, maybe better, review.

they deserve jail time. certainly not an R branded to their foreheads. but then, that's the jurisdiction they have to live under.

 

[Borachio]

I blame the owners parents of these young puppies.

They plainly think it's no big deal to treat another person as just an object.

Maybe it's something to do with the media, too, providing a normative background of high levels of violence and sexual activity. And a general atmosphere of dog-eat-dog and gotta-get-your-own.

On the other hand, perhaps this girl was just an undercover reporter setting them up for a scoop. Who knows? Anything's possible.

 

[downtown]

That is a fairly good point, but it still doesn't make me see these two rapists in a much better light. It feels dangerously close to an argument that goes something like "They were given everything in life, and nobody ever denied them anything, so they just didn't know any better". I'm just not buying it.

I can agree that there might be a cultural problem involved here however.

And I wouldn't really say that it's just affecting this town. The same "Athletes are demigods!" problem seem to exist around all the good high school and college teams in the US. And professional sports are not entirely different.

That's often been a partly explanation for many rape and sexual assault cases around schools in the US.

Well, I guess that might be kind of what I am saying. Throughout the trial, it certainly appeared that these boys honestly didn't think what they did was THAT bad. Multiple kids, both the perps and others involved, didn't think it was "rape" because it wasn't "violent". I'm not saying these morons are innocent, but there are some very basic moral truths that for some reason had not sunk in here.

There are some things here that are generalizable, but I do not think the prep-athlete adoration level that we see in Steubenville is something that's an issue nationwide, although it may be tempting to think that because we just watched Varsity Blues or something. This was a perfect storm of not just misplaced athletic and academic priorities, but also a small town in the midst of a horrible economic downturn, isolated from their neighbors, with a huge drug problem. There are other places like this town, but I don't think these exact community-wide attitudes would be found in say, a wealthier suburb.

Or watch the TV show on Netflix. It's really good.

How closely does it follow the book? I've heard the show is really good too, but the book is probably one of the best sports books written in our life time. It's excellent journalism about the good, bad and ugly about HS sports. Odessa is a LOT like Steubenville, except bigger and with a little more money.

America needs to get with the rest of the world and remove sports from the grade school level entirely.

That's a terrible idea.

Both are clearly blue collar jobs more than white collar jobs, and neither require a "great" deal of skill to adequately perform the job. There are thousands of sheriffs who are mediocre at best, and there are tens of thousands of high school coaches who are.

We could probably say that about virtually every profession.
For what it's worth, nearly every football coach in Ohio has a Masters Degree, since nearly all of them are teach high school. That's not a blue collar job.

Furthermore, I have yet to see a high school coach who was above average when it came to teaching. There are probably a few, but there are certainly not very many of them based on my own personal experiences. This is particularly true if they majored in some absurd major like phys ed instead of a legitimate academic subject.

In Ohio, they probably had the same major as the honors teachers, "Education". I'm sorry you went to High School at "The Breakfast Club" though.

(sorry, my multi quote wasn't working)

 

[Crezth]

If the girl didn't want to be raped, she shouldn't have been wearing that dress. This is just another example of the indecent lieberal media making a huge fuss about nothing. Of course rape is wrong: nobody is saying rape is right. But sometimes rape is a good thing, and you know if it's a legitimate rape I'm pretty sure the female body has a way of shutting all that down. Secretly the girl wanted it, she shouldn't have been out at that time of night, these young men are too young to know the consequences of their actions, every act of consummation is a sacred gift-

Ugh, I can't do it anymore. The androcentrism of this media coverage kills me. It honestly makes me sad.

 

[IAM]

Is the girl going to do time for underage drinking?

 

[Carras Dad]

i dont think consuming alcohol underage is illegal, but selling alcohol to underaged persons. right? right, america?

 

[downtown]

No, it's very much illegal. None of those kids should have been drinking.

 

[Carras Dad]

seriously? it's illegal to consume the drug? as in the consumer can be prosecuted for consuming?

 

[caketastydelish]

To Crezth: This isn't androcentrism. The vast majority of men (myself included) are furious at this two males for what they did. The majority of men do not think rape is acceptable.

Just because these two men were idiots and CNN is stupid enough to defend them does not mean the majority of men think rape is acceptable.

 

[Traitorfish]

That's very true. But it in no way contradicts his point, because that's not what "androcentric" means.

 

[caketastydelish]

That's very true. But it in no way contradicts his point, because that's not what "androcentric" means.

So if two women do an outrageous thing should that be categorized as 'misyncentrism'?

As in, based around women? It's not based around women if it's not deemed acceptable be a mainstream consensus of women.

I'm guessing less than 10% (at most) of men approve of what these two guys did. Thus, it does not have a mainstream male consensus. It's not andocentrism if it doesn't represent the mainstream male view.

 

[Traitorfish]

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism

An ideological focus on males and men, and issues affecting them, possibly to the detriment of non-males.

How hard would that have been?

 

[useless]

Are you a male rights activist by any chance, cake?

 

[caketastydelish]

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism



How hard would that have been?

Ah, you're right. Never mind.

Are you a male rights activist by any chance, cake?

What does that have to do with the definition of a word?

 

[Leoreth]

It's more like he's one of these "if something disproportionally affects women we still shouldn't act as if it disproportionally affected women because then you'd discriminate men" people.

Nobody's even suggesting that men as a whole are responsible for this, or that the majority of men thinks rape is okay. You're fighting windmills, caketastydelish.

 

[useless]

I asked you a question; are you a male right's activist or not?

 

[Traitorfish]

Ah, you're right. Never mind.

Well, you get a for acknowledging it! Far too many people here dig themselves in behind untenable arguments to save face, especially in threads with a subject matter as sensitive as this.