Oops We Did It Again
When I woke up this morning, my husband said, "well, you have your work cut out for you today." "What do you mean?," I replied, thinking through the various tasks I'd scheduled. "Well," he told me, "Mark Sanchez was arrested for the rape of a USC undergraduate last night."
Oh.
No.
Ugh.
Mark Sanchez, our new golden boy, number two on the depth chart yet expected to make a run for starting quarterback against John David Booty, was released from custody after being booked on suspicion of sexual assault.
But what does this have to do with me?
Good question. On the one hand, it's big news since I am a huge football fan and season ticket holder and have myself been enjoying the pre-season buzz about this new phenom. I find myself having conversations about him with other sports fans, usually male, at places like the Parent's Dinner I attended last week. We are all building him up to legendary status before most of us have even seen him throw the ball.
And now another legend begins.
The second reason Mr. Dr. Diana Blaine knew this news would resonate powerfully with me on this cloudy Thursday relates to my position as resident Feminist Theorist on the USC campus. Last Spring, in case you don't know, I wrote an editorial which asked USC men, particularly our leaders, to hold themselves responsible for stopping rape. I'd taken this public position in spite of the backlash I knew it would generate as I felt it was time to call attention to the Elephant in the Living Room at USC which we were all seemingly ignoring. Over my years at the university, I had been privy to many tales told to me by female undergraduates of the myriad ways in which the sexism pervading the campus had affected them negatively, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and I was sick of seeing their access to higher education impeded by male privilege and the accompanying abuses. And I was sick of the deafening silence regarding this reality.
So I said so.
The incident which had broken this camel's back involved a young woman, a freshman, who had brought charges against Trojan footballer Eric Wright. I knew a number of things about the case, which include the fact that women are not generally lying when they expose themselves to public humiliation by making accusations of rape (and I don't care that some men need to pretend that they usually are); I also know particulars about this situation through insider sources which I will never name that helped me to have confidence in speaking out against an injustice that I am quite sure occurred. And while charges were dropped, as I predicted that they would be, the accused was also drummed off the team and out of the school, swept along like a pedophile priest to go cause headaches somewhere else, in this case UNLV.
Kinda makes you wonder if he wasn't in fact guilty, doesn't it?
So here we are again, barely a year later, with yet another accusation against a male Trojan athlete. I haven't any idea what happened, haven't heard from the women's spy network on this one yet and may never, so of course I have no way of knowing Sanchez's guilt or innocence. I do have history to go on, which suggests that smoke indicates fire and that the person who started the fire often walks away unscathed, unlike the victims, who remain deeply scarred forever.
If we keep doing the same things, we will get the same results. This feminist says it's time to change the way we do things, even if that means that we are not the #1 team in the country. After all, football is just a game. Women's lives, on the other hand, are real, and we must stop the misogynist culture of male athletics on college campuses that lets men use females as objects to dominate and then toss on the trash heap when they're through asserting in the most cowardly way possible the hypermasculinity encouraged by institutionalized sports.