When I headed over to Women's Sports Blog recently and saw a post entitled "More football idiocy," I thought "yeah, no kidding. All that craziness at a high school in New Mexico." But no, that's not what Fat Louie was talking about. And though indeed the advertisements to female fantasy football participants are demeaning (FL makes a good point about why women would want to participate in such an endeavor anyway given the overtly masculinist nature of the whole thing) so is getting sodomized by a broomstick as part of an initiation into the culture of high school football.
At a training camp this past August six upperclassmen allegedly (I use the word in the legal sense because investigations against coaches and players are ongoing and no charges have been filed yet) sodomized six younger players over the course of two days. As someone has noted, "hazing" seems to be a little light in significance when we think about what happened here. It's sexual assault. And, it gets worse.* Turns out coaches walked in on the incident(s), told the players to cut it out and then walked out on the whole scene. All the coaches on the team have resigned. One player was expelled. Others were suspended for the year.
*Why do these things always seem to get worse? Nothing related to football can ever just be bad--it always becomes really, really bad--horrific even. I've already washed my hands of professional football, but I still try to hang on to some aspects of college football. Why, I just don't know. It could arguably be even worse than the pros. And waves of schadenfreude just overtake me when a coach or a player gets caught doing something wrong after thinking he could get away with it because of the fact (I was about to say mere fact--but nothing about football these days can be described as mere anything) that he is affiliated with the sport.
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