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Sports

Athletes Raping Everybody Out Here

The rapes are not caused by closeted gay men, but the hyper-masculine vibe in the sports world. A coming-out party in sports would likely reduce the amount of sexually repressed athletes who feel the need to hurt women to show off their manhood. Maybe...

My freshman year of high school, my friends stole all the wrestling team schedules, which featured generic photos of two buff guys in spandex eyeing each other, and stashed them in my locker. A fine recipe for an ass-kicking, in retrospect, and a prank pulled because the wrestlers were clueless as to just how gay their sport looked to us hardcore skater kids. What's funnier than pissing off jocks who spend afternoons hugging each other in sex positions, grunting, twisting, and calling each other "fag," while wearing Jazz Age ladies' bathing suits and earmuffs? We got caught for stealing the posters, and I stayed an enemy of the wrestling team until I graduated.

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Last year, my high school's wrestling coach, David Castricone of North Andover, Mass., was arrested on child pornography charges.

More than 15 years after graduating, I felt vindicated. The wrestling team was a cultish breeding ground for homoerotic sociopaths. Coach Castricone was released on a paltry $500 bail, since all the cops in town were (duh) former wrestlers. (Some local ex-wrestlers started a  Facebook group to raisedefense funds for the guy with kiddie porn on his hard drive; it’s been taken down, though several cops did “like” it.)

Last November, the Jerry Sandusky scandal hit Penn State. Reports indicated head coach Joe Paterno had known of his assistant coach Sandusky's crimes—or at the very least, serious improprieties—but never properly reported them. Paterno was fired. Riots in the streets of State College, Pennsylvania ensued: A full-on car-flipping pro-rape protest over football, a sport in which men in spandex jump on each other (not homoerotic at all) and religiously slap each other's asses. Then Sandusky's adopted son has admitted he was raped, and Sandusky, was convicted on 45 of 48 counts in a court of law.

Things got more complicated this week, thanks to the commission led by ex-FBI director Louis Freeh releasing a report that indicates that Legendary Heroic Coach of the Century, the Honorary Sir Joe Paterno, was one of the folks trying to repress the Sandusky scandal.

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The Paterno family denied the claim in a statement, though after the Freeh report , it’s pretty cut and dry: Paterno covered for a rapist. Since the Sandusky floodgates opened, a Catholic Church-like parade of sex allegations has enveloped the sports world. Longtime Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine was accused of molesting boys, and there was another child porn/ rape scandal at the Citadel.

While coaches take the priestly, Cub Scout leader kiddie-toucher approach to sex abuse, players go the aggro frat boy route. June brought adate rape charge against LA King Drew Doughty. The girl's offense? Calling him an asshole in front of his teammates, who laughed; Doughty wrangled her into a cab, and the rest is he-said-she-said. Police have said she's not credible, and the case may be dropped.

Last winter, Boston University's hockey team had two different players accused of separate incidents of rape. Both players were NHL draftees, and those cases, too, were dropped and reduced.

But just because the charges went away doesn’t mean Boston hockey players are paragons of virtue. Having lived in that "shithole" myself once—props to Big Papi for having said that about Boston—I can attest to the hockey players' rape vibe. Ask any college girl about the puck jockeys from the three big programs (current national champs Boston College, BU, and Northeastern University) and you'll hear sad, disgusting stories.

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Is it coincidence? Or is there something about sports—a highly sexualized workplace, even if there are no girls—that changes the dynamic? The Boston Globe reported this:

Sarah McMahon, a Rutgers University researcher who studies violence against women, said that her work had found a unique sense of entitlement, sexual and otherwise, among some male college athletes, especially those in high-profile or revenue-producing sports, such as hockey at BU.

A book on the subject, Public Heroes, Private Felons (Northeastern University Press), uses statistics to show that athletes are more likely to commit sex crimes than average citizens but less likely to be prosecuted or convicted, which should be pretty obvious to anyone who's been around any group of jocks.

Athletes get away with this stuff because the majority of sports fans are creepy men who worship them. There are sports that don't have a rape culture among athletes. One of them—swimming—is a sport where athletes train coed in near nudity for over two hours a day year round. (I grew up swimming competitively.) Pubescent boys are around 16-year-old, perfect-bodied girls, getting boners in Speedos, and there have been no major scandals involving athletes. Coaches are another story--several NCAA swimming coaches have been busted. But training coed and near-naked seems not to cause problems, at least in swimming's case.

So what's missing in swimming that is causing sexual aggression in other sports? How about homophobia? It's true that some athletes have gone on record saying they wouldn't mind a homosexual teammate, but in reality, just about the only pro to play while openly gay is Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas. New York's Pride Parade in June had bizarre, pan-societal corporate floats like the "FedEX Lesbians," but not one pro-sports league sponsored anything.

Sports, God love them, are repressed. The rapes are not caused by closeted gay men, but the hyper-masculine vibe in the sports world. A coming-out party in sports would likely reduce the amount of sexually repressed athletes who feel the need to hurt women to show off their manhood. Maybe start with a national campaign with a cool slogan like "You Can Be Gay and Play" or "Butt Slapping and Butt Sex Are Equal." Athletes will be cocky and unengaging assholes forever, but it would be nice if they at least stopped raping people.