I think sports-writer emeritus Frank Deford is almost right about the silence... knowing, uncomfortable, yes, but still silence... at Penn State.

[A]s always, always, the defenders of football are furious that the violence might be curtailed by do-gooders, that football will be sissified. The expression heard from the time little boys first play is that football "teaches you to become a real man," to be manly. Nobody ever says that about even the most sublime basketball or baseball players.

The only other North American school sport that approaches football in its meanness is ice hockey, and — yes, maybe just coincidentally — hockey has also experienced horrifying cases of pedophile coaches that went unreported for years. How could anyone believe an abused boy that such a manly sport could possibly produce such sexually perverted men?

For football's devotees, the sport is public proof that our American men are still tougher than anyone else. Because of that reputation of machismo — that conceit, that creed — it surely becomes painful, almost traitorous, for men who love football to accept such an abject contradiction of their sport's manliness — the very rape of a little boy by a coach.

Source: National Public Radio

There is a degree of transgression-denial in major college sports. (And to a lesser degree professional sports.) I don't agree, however, that coaches are afforded the same latitude for behavioral transgressions that players are. Football players, especially, are encouraged to be quick tempered, violent, and at least somewhat entitled. And coaches are sort of encouraged to skate as close to the lines in order to win, first of all, but also to foster players who can win and winnow out players who can't. So while they may be excused for "going overboard" on players and of course for recruiting violations they're not really excused for personal transgressions such as car theft, real-estate fraud, or... pedophilia.

I think instead what's going on is something closer to what show-conservative David Brooks wrote about in a recent column: a sort of institutional numbness and... call it a "circle the wagons" mentality that's common in many, many organizations from football teams to insurance offices to "kink" communities: "this would make us all look bad so let's ignore it or cover it up." One really good diagnostic for organizations like that? Is there a hierarchy such that when you witness a crime an implicit or even explicit policy obliging you to report it to a superior rather than to the police. At Penn State, in the Catholic Church, at Goldman Sachs or Leman Brothers, in the Boy Scouts of America, in most political parties, in "alt" cultures, and in formal and informal kink communities there usually is such a "report up" rather than "report out" culture. The consequences are rarely pretty. Bottom line: no one should have to rely on a manager, supervisor, or mentor to call the police about an issue you've witnessed with your own two eyes.

So to that extent I think Deford and Brooks miss the mark. It's not a football problem, and it's not a Rwanda/Bosnia/Tea-Party problem, it's an institutional culture one.

Is it "worse" because we expect more from our sports heros?  I don't think so.  Surely we expect no less from our priests and politicians, from our "dungeon masters," our scout leaders, our soldiers, or our bankers.  And not just from the guys (and it's still mostly guys) way up the hierarchies who for predictable if not admirable reasons must keep their eyes, ears, mouths and... all to often... their noses closed.

Assuming you're a carbon-based life form you've probably heard the common wisdom that men think about sex more often than women. Common wisdom varies but usually it's every six minutes for men. And while common wisdom is pretty much completely silent on how often women think about sex it's always a foregone conclusion that it's not as much.

Anyway, like a lot of common wisdom that "everyone knows" because it reinforces common... um... stereotypes the actual difference was just too well-known for anyone to bother to go back and check.

Until now. Via Patrick Morgan a preliminary study titled "Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability" tried to confirm what "everybody knows." And discovered instead that while men do think about it more frequently compared to women they also think about all their other bodily needs (food and sleep as well as sex) more frequently. The upshot evidently (again it's another study conducted by public employees with public grant money that's behind another private paywall) is "it's complicated." Men evidently do body check-ins more frequently than women do, and when they do they think about sex... but they also think about other body needs like food and sleep. Women evidently do check-in less frequently but when they do they think about sex, food, sleep, and other needs in proportions very similar to men.

Anyway, it sounds like in absolute terms men do think of sex more often but proportionately don't think about it more than women do. I don't feel a sufficient urge to know to ask someone to send me an ungated copy of the paper, but I am curious how they feel proportional need-based cognitions is a better metric than absolute numbers.

But they must feel pretty confident about it because the abstract ends with

Overall, erotophilia* was a better predictor of sexual cognition than was sex of participant. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that, although there may be a sex difference in sexual cognitions, it is smaller than is generally thought, and the reporting is likely influenced by sex role expectations.”

Source: Discover Blogs - NCBI ROFL

The next question, especially after a relatively small-scale study like this, would probably be whether there's much variation in erotophilia between men and women. But it's always great when someone takes a closer look at what "everybody knows." As Will Rogers said, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

* See Cory Silverberg's definition of erotophilia. It's a psychological term for, basically, comfort and interest in sex.

So Ta-Nehisi Coates started a fairly short post calling bullshit on the notion that women aren't funny.

I haven't finished this Tina Fey piece on Fresh Air yet, but as I've said, my readings of Jane Austen, and now Edith Wharton, have really taken me back to this old claim (most famously aired here and answered here) that women aren't funny. As an adult, probably the first author I found to be truly humorous was Zora Neale Hurston. Better people then me can probably cite a range of other women authors who used humor in their writing, but even in my own small forays it's clear to me that they are there. Leaving aside the desire to say something provocative, if thin, I'm thinking that a large portion of this claim originates in shrinking the range of "funny."

Source: The Atlantic Blog

In comments the conversation eventually turned to Vanity Fair's humorless article "Women Aren't Funny" by Christopher Hitchens. A bit further in DoctorJay said

I just clicked through to Hitchen's piece. I'd never read it.

In his first paragraph he mentions that you don't often hear a man describe his partner/mate as funny. I think this might be a socially accurate observation, within his circle. Or maybe even beyond it.

Reading on, I discovered, to my surprise, that Figleaf's rule number 2 applies. (Many thanks to the commenter here, I think it was K__Bee, who linked that a week or so ago.

If you aren't familiar, rule number 2 is, paraphrased,

Men are not allowed to be the object of desire. [close enough --fl]

In Hitchen's case, he claims that men (at least, straight men) must be funny in order to get laid. If we weren't funny, nobody would fuck us.

Therefore, men have a powerful motivation to be funny.

Of course, to disprove this, all one needs is to think of examples of men who aren't funny, but still got laid. Richard Nixon comes to mind.

At which point the thread becomes more of a discussion of Hitchens and/or of the power of the whole "evolved to be funny to spread our seed" thing.

Sigh!

The whole stupid "pass on your seed" business is so overblown. You know another indisputably evolved behavior that's absolutely critical to "passing on your seed?" Taking a deep breath right after birth. Screw that up and you'll never "get laid" either. Considering some of the other convolutions some people go to to wring sexual selection out of a behavior it's amazing no young cupid has never come forth to explain how men learn to breath after birth because chix think men who breathe are hawt.

So you can buy the whole pitiful-male/gatekeeper-female model, where every action men takes is designed to get her to lower her "barriers" just misses a heck of a lot of, you know, other regular old every day selection you've got to get through to survive long enough to meet, greet, subvert or defeat those gatekeeper-y feeemales.* And Mr. Hitchens joins on the order of millions of otherwise sensible men who fall for it. But doing so means they miss out on a very large group of other possible reasons a trait might develop.

For instance, with all due respect to Hitchens on many other topics I'm... pretty sure men have to be funny, and might even somehow genetically have to be funny,... for the same reason they have to not become objects of desire: to keep from getting beaten up by older and/or bigger boys and men. Or perhaps even more accurately, in order to enter alliances with groups of older, larger boys and men who will either not beat them up or will stand by then when members of other alliances try to beat them up.

Laughing men rarely beat up juveniles and newcomers. Jealous ones do. For that matter men rarely beat up juvenile or newcomer men they perceive as having any non-jealousy-provoking merit or potential. (BTW, say hello to the true, patriarchal source of the whole male worthiness trap.)

Given that in all but the most chaotic, atomized or (possibly) well-ordered societies boys must at some point in their development depend on the tolerance and/or support of older/larger males if they hope to achieve sexual maturity, trying to explain all gendered behavior in terms of male/female sexual selection necessarily overlooks huge swaths of selective pressure (social or biological) on human behavior.

(This latter point, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons Ayn Rand's science-fiction-y novels fall apart. Neither John Galt nor, especially, Howard Roark, can have had human childhoods. Indeed, in The Fountainhead Roark is born full-formed, naked, and to tie it all together, laughing, thigh deep in a stream miles from anyone. As he had to have been. Because otherwise, no matter what a hardass he became, somewhere between the ages of, say, two and sixteen, he'd have had no choice but to compromise, to flex, to joke, to ingratiate, or otherwise fit in -- if not with other boys and men then with parents or their proxies.  But I digress.)

At any rate, whereas at least in patriarchy men tend to be far bigger obstacles to male reproductive success than women, and therefore men might feel like they're under more pressure to be funny, I don't see why it's not obvious that a) women are just as likely to benefit from being funny to men, b) that men benefit from being funny around groups of women, c) that women benefit from being funny around women, etc.

* Quick point: throughout history and literature, virtually all gatekeepers are flunkies, lackies, or at best trusted servants of the lord or master who owns the gate itself. Women are designated "gatekeepers" to their sexualities alright, but by convention, tradition, and often law the gate they're charged to defend with their lives and honors actually belongs to a custodial male. Thus people who label women "gate keepers" are 100% up to their scuppers in patriarchy.

Screen capture of push-up bras for 7-year-olds via Sociological Images.

Sex-work advocate Suzyhooker says

A Florida GOP Rep has jumped on the victim blaming bandwagon by saying that an 11 year old gang rape survivor was dressed like a “prostitute.”

Source: Tits and Sass

I've seen several variations on this story from various predictable suspects and I'm a little confused.

Couple of rhetorical but pointed questions:  Are actual prostitutes (who sort of by definition "dress like prostitutes") are criminally sexually assaulted by approximately 18 assailants in numbers sufficient to warrant Kathleen Passidomo, Bill O'Reilly, and others' allegations that attire was the immediate cause in this case of assault of a child? Second, are non-prostitutes who nevertheless "dress like prostitutes" gang raped in sufficient numbers to warrant the same confidence?

No.

In fact I'm pretty sure that for all the talk on the right, left, and center there's little if any evidence whatsoever that "provocatively" dressed women are any more or less likely to be sexually assaulted than non-provocatively dressed ones.  It's a crime of power, people, not one of lust.  It's also far, far more accurate to call rape a crime of opportunity, not one of "provocation."

I'll just go one step further and say that to the extent actual prostitutes are made targets of violence (and Gary Ridgeway's remarks if nothing else would be sufficient to satisfy my assertion) then to the extent they actually do "dress like prostitutes" it's other factors such as vulnerability, isolation related to the need to avoid arrest that makes them easy targets, not what they're wearing.  (That and, as Ridgeway explained when asked how he was able to murder more than 60 subsistence prostitutes, prostitutes are good victims because society really doesn't care what happens to them.)  Point being that even when prostitutes are attacked it's not because "they're dressed like prostitutes."

So, back to the 'winger lament that the motive for a massive sexual assault on an 11 year old is an open and shut case.

Remember, we're talking about responses to descriptions of the victim.  Pretty much no one who's casting these stones would have had access to direct information.  They just heard something like "halter top" or "short skirt," or allegations by community factions,* added preexisting biases, and just let their flights of fancy take it from there.

Nor should this be a surprise, of course.  For way too many people the single statement that there has been an assault is all the data they need to "know" the victim did something to cause it.

See also:

• Holly on rape culture defenses
• Audacia Ray on State Department human rights review, and for that matter,
• Amanda Hess on When anti-gay hate crimes happen to straight people

* The case has allegedly widened divisions in the affected community with the result that it's not clear how much of what we know is spin and how much is actual evidence.