Friday, May 07, 2010

I probably should explain....

... the women's movement rant.

It was engendered (no pun intended) by the ....ummm disgusting situation with Steeler's quarterback, Roethlisburger. Apparently, he has never been known as "Mr. Nice Guy", under the best of circumstances, but in the 'Burgh, keep your nose clean, and nobody much cares. The residents hold the "nice guy" athletes (Joe Greene, Jack Lambert (can you imagine?), Mario Lemieux, Franco Harris, Willy Starzel, way too many to name) near and dear to their hearts. But the bad eggs...meh. That is unless you turn into a really bad actor - which has a pretty low threshold in the 'Burgh -ask Plaxico and most recently Santonio. Roethlisburger is on thin, thin ice, let me tell you. That's the back story.

The other part of the context is where I currently live, a college town (which is emptying out even as we speak, it becomes almost livable for the next 75 or so days). If you live in South Bend, Ann Arbor, or Chapel Hill, I expect you know EXACTLY from whence I speak.

When the details of Roethlisburger's (hereafter referred to as "the Idiot") situation became public. I shook my head. I know those women. The underage partiers who CHOOSE (important point) to go out and binge drink. They don't care if they drink too much, and some do it systematically. Meaning--that is their intent. They go out in a posse, and drink themselves stupid. They figure as long as they are not driving they will be safe. (Here, lately, the authorities have been cracking down hard on establishments serving underage drinkers, but the overage drinkers are no smarter.)

Enter the Idiot (and others of his ilk), these women are not just easy pickin's because they are intoxicated (by choice), they literally are asking for sexual contact. And here is where the victim/participant line gets totally blurred and why this is nothing short of head shaking time. Before, a woman could be accused of leading someone on if she 1) wore short skirts; 2) tight clothing that showed her "endowments"; 3) drank too much; 4) flirted.... Everyone can probably come to some agreement that these behaviors, while not smart, and show a lack of personal respect, do not invite sexual assault, in and of themselves.

However, what to make of this?
The 20-year-old GCSU student and others in her group of sorority sisters were wearing name tags of a sexual nature—the accuser's read dtf, short for Down to F---. Witnesses said the woman was visibly intoxicated at Capital City, and one told police that the accuser had been "obsessed" with Roethlisberger's arrival in town.
Now I have no idea what really happened. And frankly, at this point, I'm too disgusted to care. You can read the SI story for yourselves and see if you can figure it out. However, envision what this DA saw in his report:

A visibly drunk student, wearing a profane invitation, and according to heresay, "obsessed" with the accused, is now claiming sexual assault. What a superb witness! I'm not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, but I can hear the cross examination now....can't you? What choice did he have in the absence of physical evidence? But according to the feminist movement, this person is still a victim. Of sexual assault? Maybe...but we'll never know for sure. What we do know is that there are lots of victims of stupidity in this story.

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