After Atalanta

 I posted on the Title IX Blog my 2025 intention to blog more; a goal that will be facilitated by shorter (pithier?) posts. I have let go of trying to make deeply profound and impactful posts all the time--since that actually prevented me from posting most of the time--and will shift to more frequent posts that are comments and observations.  That intention applies to After Atalanta as well, so here goes. In this moment of downtime I have been trying to get through all the tabs of things I absolutely must read before my computer decides to automatically restart itself.  I did not absolutely need to read about the Stop Campus Hazing Act which requires changes that incidents of hazing be included Clery Act-mandated reporting. (It's possible I already thought this was happening in fact.) But when reading about it, I did get to thinking about standards of risk and reasonableness.  A thorough definition of hazing was provided, including this second part that the offend...

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...