Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Another Modest Proposal

You might as well start here with Mark Purdy's opinion piece on jock culture. I did, having been a bit of a jock myself [and nerd and geek and dork] all through school, and for some years after. One of my [many] soapboxes is Organization Is Evil, so I'll step down off of that one for the moment and just agree that jock culture needs an overhaul. Call this Plank One in my proposal.


If you've already clicked on the link, you noticed there's a list on the right hand side of the page of Related Stories, and that they're all about the De Anza rape case. I've read several of those, including this one, where the prosecuter explains one of the reasons for not going forward with the case:
Is it sexual assault when a victim is too intoxicated to consent to sex? Yes, but we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim was so impaired that she could not understand what she was doing. We must also prove that the defendant should have known that she was incapable of consenting.
Well, heck, if you've got to prove all that, no wonder we can't get anywhere. So, for Plank Two, I propose we use Twisty's definition of consent [it's a good one]:
Well, what if lack of consent were the default? What if all prospective objects of dudely predation — by whom I mean all women — are a priori considered to have said “no”? What if women, in other words, were seen by the courts to abide in a persistent legal condition of keep-the-fuck-off-me?



Last one, Plank Three: What if we remove sex from the equation, dispose of the word rape altogether [and the phrase "sexual assault"], lump everything under one label? From Wikipedia:
Assault is often defined to include not only violence, but any physical contact with another person without their consent.
Don't use your penis, your fist, your baseball bat, your stun gun, your hairbrush, your [insert favorite object here] to make physical contact with someone without their consent. Don't reach out lovingly towards that pregnant belly, and don't admiringly stroke those manly biceps. Not unless their owner says so. Explicitly and enthusiastically.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

New Jock Rule #1: nothing good can happen after midnight. Go home!

New Jock Rule #2: if you can't get him/her into your bed without intoxicants or before 10:00 p.m., nothing good can happen. Take him/her home, then go to bed.

New Jock Rule #3: renting/buying a house so you and your posse can party is "probable cause."

New Jock Rule #4: any party where jocks outnumber strippers is an engraved invitation to arraignment court.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

hipparchia said...

... without intoxicants or before 10:00 p.m. ...

i'd change that "or" to "and" myself, and include "without the use of force" too.

those are a good start. my original proposal was to eliminate competive sports from all high school and college campuses in the u.s. if the nba, nfl, and mlb want farm teams let them foot all the bills themselves, up front, in their own facilities.

we definitely need to keep athletic activities in schools [actually we need to increase them, mens sana in corpora sano or whatever it is], but the competition part of it has gotten way out of hand. schools are for academics

also, we need to increase arts, all of them, in schools.

Anonymous said...

I can't render an opinion on any sports other than football and (by necessary implication) lacrosse. There is something about the hormonal flow of boys (not men) as they traverse the landscape from 15 to 19 that makes organized violence seem like a good idea. The outlet could be football and lacrosse, or it could as easily be gang warfare. Football (cross country wrestling) and lacrosse (run around and beat each other with sticks) are more-or-less socially acceptable, but gang warfare isn't. The real problems are that (1) there aren't really clear boundaries between the socially acceptable outlets and the other outlets, and (2) those who don't get over it at 18 or 19 seem to be unable to distinguish between the acceptable and the unacceptable.

Unless government can guarantee that the one doesn't become the other, there is no justification for funding the one and not the other. And, yes, I played football.

hipparchia said...

and my gymnastics team lost their funding to the football team. :-)

good points, all. i'll be back later, when i've recovered from kitten herding.