Thursday, September 20, 2007

Duke Lacrosse Players Re-gain All-American Hero Status


Three Duke Lacrosse players, who didn't rape a black stripper in 2006, can now enjoy the privilege of skipping to the front of line at the grocery store once again. They won the trial in their favour.

"Being thought of as a rapist was not fun," said Fred Singleman. "You lose the celebrity status. But now, I love feeling important again because I'm a college star-athlete."

"I'm a non-rapist, yay! It's been proven as fact now," he finished.

"It kind of sucked during the trial, you know," said Joseph Lackston. "I couldn't pick up any chicks. Except for ugly ones."

"Our prosecutor was so bad at his job, that he actually made us look good," said Andrew Shevkow.

Households across America have begun celebrating the fact that its best athletes aren’t rapists. These nation-wide parties have created a shortage of strippers and hookers. So if you were hoping to order a whore, you're out of luck.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, we can't sleep better, because it is still possible for anyone to make a false accusation of rape and put someone else through a year of hell.

Anonymous said...

Reade and Collin did not invite the strippers to the party. They were required (captains' party) to attend, and did so, but left pretty soon into the strip show, which (from what people tell me) grossed out most of the players there.

By the way, the Fine Arts Department at William and Mary had strippers perform on campus last year, as did feminists from Bucknell College who were "celebrating the sex worker." Also, Duke's vaunted basketball team two weeks before the LAX party had a party with strippers.

So, get off your high horse, please. How would you like to have a prosecutor trying to throw you into prison for 30 years (where you would have been murdered by black gangs for "raping a sister")? Puts this into perspective, but most Americans don't understand what happened, you included.

lrbinfrisco said...

Maybe we could sleep better if the author's local PD and DA arrested and charged him with rape for being a big jerk and writing blog posts that contain maliciously false statements attributed to other people. That is if we didn't believe in things like the US Constitution, the Rule of Law, and just all around fairness. However this is essentially what the Durham PD and the Durham DA did to the 3 young men. As Dr. Anderson so correctly points out, 2 of the young men, Collin and Reade, had nothing to do with the planning of the strippers at the party and probably didn't even know that they would be there. But to bigoted bigmouth jerks, things like the facts really don't matter. It's sick and sad how some people take so much pleasure in the suffering of innocent people.

The Writing Staff said...

Everyone, thanks for your insightful comments and criticism. I’m overwhelmed.

Anonymous: Yes, you’re right. It is very disturbing that people can be accused of something that they didn’t do. However, I find it equally disturbing that strippers are hired to appear at team college parties to begin with. I don’t think this is acceptable behaviour. Such incidents deserve to be criticized.

William: So perhaps those innocent students didn’t even want to attend the party. Maybe they even left early in disgust. That’s great, but why were they there to begin with? If they’re so innocent, why didn’t they notify the school about such stupid team parties? (Please tell me if they did, I would be happy if that’s what they did.) Or attempt to personally stop this “let’s have naked women at our party” trend? As I said earlier, I don’t understand why talented college athletes organize stupid parties that will inevitably damage their reputations.

You tell me that the basketball team hosted a stripper party as if to justify the Lacrosse team for inviting strippers. Just because the basketball team did it doesn’t make it right! (No matter how good the basketball team is) Regarding the “sex worker celebration…” There are some feminists that love sex workers. I don’t believe in that kind of feminist theory. I think a sex worker celebration is just as absurd as this Lacrosse party.

Also, it doesn’t surprise me that more than one Fine Arts Department invited strippers to perform. Contemporary art usually tries to “push the boundary,” and I assume, that strippers were used as a prop to “push the boundary” in your fine arts examples. I really wish I could have seen how strippers were used in these performances, because the difference between “fine art” and “garbage” is never very clear. Even if strippers danced at a performing arts show in a completely legitimate and meaningful way, I still have a problem with strippers dancing at a college sports team party.

So the accused students may not have had organized the party. But excuse me, the captain of the team organized it? What kind of leadership is that? A horrible role model, in my opinion.

I write this blog because I find jock culture absolutely ridiculous. Sports heroes are often thought of as these clean, perfect people who represent their nation well. That obviously isn’t true, and this site is meant to draw attention to the fact that professional and college athletes are extremely fallible.

Incidents like this Lacrosse party are just plain unfortunate and ridiculous.

Perhaps my tone in this particular blog post was a little too harsh. I wanted my article to reflect the following attitude of an editorial from the Boston Globe: “Three members of the Duke lacrosse team may have been louts, but all the evidence suggests they were not rapists...”

I am not saying that these athletes were guilty. Yes, they were wrongly accused. But before everyone leaps for joy upon determining their innocence, I don’t want anyone to forget the lucrative circumstances of the party.

Again, thanks for reading. Your comments have inspired me to change the posting slightly, and I hope, for the better.