Author: Hank Nuwer

All–My friend Garry Williams manages the Town and Country team in Logansport, IN. Thought you might like a story that makes you feel good about youth sports!!

This story will appear in the Logansport (IN) newspaper.

TRUE CHAMPIONS

A remarkable thing happened Tuesday night at Royal Center’s Rea Park. Two baseball teams won a single game that ended in a score of 5-0.

The 9- and 10-year-old tourney championship was in the 6th and final inning. All the Dye Lumber boys had to do was hold on to a five run lead. But with the first pitch of the inning, the Dye Lumber coach realized he had broken a five-inning limit for his starting pitcher. The game was declared a forfeit. The Town & Country Embroidery team, five runs behind, had won.

But after the trophies were handed out – first place for Town & Country and runner-up for Dye Lumber – the players themselves took matters into their own hands. The Town & Country boys walked across the field and asked if they could trade trophies with the other team. They felt that the Dye Lumber boys, though they had technically lost, deserved the championship trophies.

As the proud parents of both teams looked on, the boys posed together for this photo. They think they’re displaying their trophies. What they really displayed, in the minds of those who witnessed the event, was true sportsmanship.

And isn’t that what youth sports is all about?

Middle school locker room: a lawless frontier

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, June 7, 2009

The boys’ middle school locker room is one of the scariest places in America, a mine field of adolescence, where danger lurks behind every shower stall and plastic soap dispenser: Atomic Wedgies and staph infections and Wet Willies and athlete’s foot and Red Bellies and Rear Admirals and … behind you.

Schpa!

Towel snaps.

It is a place where lessons are learned and rank is established, where armpit hair is more valuable than gold. There is urination and defecation and embarrassing nudity on this unsupervised island. There are fistfights and ambushes and God help you if your mother writes your name on your underpants. Or if your name rhymes with a sex organ.

The locker room is also a place where teen tomfoolery advances to hazing and bullying and animalistic brutality. This was the case at Walker Middle School, prosecutors have said, when four teens repeatedly raped another boy with a broom handle and hockey stick. The news was met with shock and horror and the usual questions: How could this happen?

What’s not surprising is where it happened.

Author’s locker room story No. 1: A substitute for the gym teacher at a junior high school runs into a locker room after hearing shouts of “Fight! Fight!” Upon entering, a boy flips off the lights. In darkness, the teens spit on the substitute teacher. Lights go back on. Boys act as if nothing happened.

• • •

“There’s this nationwide attitude: What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room.”

That’s Hank Nuwer, author of Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, and several other books on hazing. He tracks reported incidents across the country. One identifiable trend is location. Locker room tops the list.

Among the recent stories: A Wisconsin teen is arrested after waving a knife at kids who were calling him gay.

A 14-year-old Pennsylvania boy holds down a 13-year-old classmate while a third student urinates on him. Six Texas middle schoolers are charged with felonies after attempting to anally penetrate three younger students with athletic cones. A 12-year-old Alabama boy is burned when another student ignites an aerosol stream of Axe deodorant and sprays him.

All in the locker room.

These are reported incidents. “The tip of the iceberg,” says Nuwer.

• • •

Author’s locker room story No. 2: Boy secretly greases pull-up bar with lotion. Challenges weaker boy to stand on that bench, then jump and try to grab pull-up bar. Weaker boy does, slips, crashes to the ground.

• • •

Why didn’t the Walker Middle School victim say something sooner? we asked.

We can’t know what he was thinking. But every locker room has a set of unwritten rules. You don’t talk about what happens in the locker room because tomorrow you’re going to be back in the same locker room.

The dynamics of the middle school locker room make it a noogie away from chaos.

You have sexually charged, immature and undersupervised teens, in various stages of emotional and physical development, jockeying for position inside the adolescent hierarchy. There also exists an immediate audience made up of boys most concerned with self preservation (who cares if he’s getting picked on; at least it’s not me), which can lead to a sort of acne-faced mob mentality.

And, says Nuwer, “You’re nude in that room. You’re taking a shower. You’re very vulnerable.”

“It may even be part of nature,” says Dr. Susan Lipkins, a psychologist and author of Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation. “It may be the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest and a battle to see who is strongest.”

Like Lord of the Flies, with athletic tape, golf balls and broomsticks aplenty.

Fifty percent of the reported cases, Lipkins says, involve sexual assault. That’s because anal penetration is the ultimate form of humiliation.

What frustrates Lipkins is that the bullying programs don’t work. Telling a kid to stop bully­ing, no matter the method of delivery, has not been successful.

“The whole culture will have to change,” she says.

• • •

Author’s locker room story No. 3: Boy is tossing money at the feet of mentally challenged student, making him dance. Others are laughing. Student with armpit hair steps in front of him. Chastises other boys. Tells them to stop. They do.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com.

>
Forwarded from Doug Case’s newsletter:

National Sexuality Resource Center
>Posted June 4, 2009
>http://www.alternet.org/story/140416/
>
>Why Is the Frat Boy Culture So Sleazy and Sex-Crazed?
>
>By Nicholas L. Syrett, National Sexuality Resource Center
>
>In the late 1980s the Florida News Herald reported that a Florida State
>University student had been gang raped by some fraternity brothers.
>Allegedly, the attackers painted the Greek letters of their house on her
>thighs, symbolically claiming her as they had also claimed her through
>sexual assault.
>
>In 2001 Dartmouth College’s campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, published
>graphic excerpts from Zeta Psi’s weekly newsletters in which brothers
>described their sexual encounters:
>
>”She’s baaaaackk. And she’s dirtier than ever[;] if young [female name]
>hooks up with one more Zete, I’m going to need a flow chart to keep up.”
>
>”Commenting on [Brother B]’s chances for a highly-coveted spot in the
>Manwhore Hall of Shame, [Brother C] said, ‘Are you kidding me? Rancid
>snatch like that makes you a fucking lock.’”
>
>”Next week: [Brother X]’s patented date rape techniques!”
>
>These two examples — a gang rape fraught with symbolism and the
>misogynist publication describing sexual exploits — are clearly extreme,
>but both of them are the logical outcome of a culture of masculine
>supremacy and sexual exploitation that has made its home in some college
>fraternities since the 1920s. While most do not participate in such acts,
>there is ample evidence to show that many, if not most, fraternity members
>are expected to report on sex they have for the entertainment of their
>entire house. College fraternities — currently numbering three hundred
>fifty thousand undergraduate brothers with more than four million alumni
>– have become a haven for a masculinity that takes sexual conquest as one
>of its defining characteristics. Indeed, the social science literature of
>the past three decades has shown that fraternity men are more likely than
>their nonaffiliated classmates to rape women, and some studies have
>estimated that as many as 70 to 90 percent of repor! ted campus gang rapes
>are committed by members of fraternities. This makes fraternities a
>dangerous place for the women who frequent their houses and attend their
>parties. In their sexist logic — and in their own words — “Brothers Over
>Babes” or “Bros Before Hos.”
>
>But fraternities and the men who join them have not always behaved this
>way. So where did the culture of sexual exploitation and masculine
>bragging come from? Clearly, the men’s behavior is a product of time,
>place, and cultural circumstance, not simply an instance of “boys will be
>boys.” Nor is the behavior a natural outcome of all-male organizations, as
>even fraternities themselves have not always behaved this way.
>
>Dating, ‘Homosexuality,’ and Frat Culture
>
>In the early twentieth century two phenomena that we now take to be
>commonplace were invented. The first was dating and the second was
>homosexuality as a discrete identity category. Both have impacted
>fraternity culture. Dating arrived on college campuses in the 1920s.
>Fraternities, established a century earlier in the 1820s, and sororities,
>which had been founded on some college campuses by the 1870s, were the
>hubs of the collegiate dating scene. With rare exceptions fraternity men
>and sorority women dated each other in an exacting scale that was governed
>by each organization’s popularity. The reputations of the individual
>brothers and sisters and thus of their collective memberships were in part
>determined by whom they dated. Fraternity members were judged by their
>attractiveness, their charm, and by what they called “their line,” the
>verbal method they used to make themselves appealing to young women.
>Popularity — evaluated through dating women — came to define! a properly
>enacted collegiate masculinity. And fraternity men themselves knew this;
>they picked new members based on the perceived expectation of potential
>brothers to attract women. As Dartmouth’s Zeta Psi boasted in 1924,
>”Brother ‘Stan’ Lonsdale has improved the already magnificent reputation
>he had attained in past years as Lothario and Don Juan put together, and
>as representative in the chapter in all women’s colleges within a radius
>of several hundred miles.”
>
>This celebration of men’s attractiveness to women necessitated a
>concurrent demand that brothers themselves recognize what made a man
>attractive. They had to come to terms with themselves as men evaluating
>other men’s good looks.
>
>In a world like that of the nineteenth century United States, where there
>was little recognition of a homosexual subculture and where most men could
>not conceive of a man ! whose sexual desires were centered exclusively on
>other men, this would not have been a problem. But by the 1920s fraternity
>men did not live in such a world. They still don’t. By the early twentieth
>century — thanks to sexologists, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud (and his
>popularizers), as well the very people who identified with the label
>”homosexual” or “invert” — that some men were in fact attracted
>exclusively to other men was widely understood. It was also at this time
>that masculinity itself became yoked exclusively to heterosexuality in a
>decisive refutation of homosexuality.
>
>Thus, at precisely the moment when fraternity men were becoming highly
>conscious of the characteristics that made males attractive to females,
>and were indeed evaluating their brothers based on these characteristics,
>they were simultaneously coming to terms with the possible meanings of
>these evaluations. They were also in the compromising position of being
>members of organizations tha! t enrolled only single men, organizations
>that, through shared living! , bathing, sleeping, and erotic hazing
>practices, fostered an atmosphere of camaraderie, intimacy, and loyalty
>that most found to be the fraternity’s biggest selling point.
>
>They were caught between a rock and a hard place, even more so when some
>fraternities actually did turn out to be havens for homosexually inclined
>students, as my own research indicates, and as Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and
>Florence Haxton Britten found in their fascinating 1938 study, Youth and
>Sex. From the 1920s onwards fraternity men have responded to this dilemma
>with the enactment of particularly active dating and sexual lives designed
>to refute suspicions of homosexuality and to assert heterosexuality, and
>thus masculinity. These practices have only increased throughout the
>twentieth century, in part as a reaction to the intensified denigration of
>homosexuality at mid-century and as a result of the increasing sexual
>permissiveness of college women in the wake of the sexual revolution of!
>the 1960s.
>
>These were not conscious choices made by fraternity men, however. Rather,
>they were gradual changes over generations in response to cultural shifts
>like the advent of dating and the emergence of modern conceptions of
>homosexuality. It is also clear that these two phenomena are by no means
>exclusive to men in fraternities. That said, because fraternities remain
>organizations made up exclusively of single men, organizations that choose
>to haze their initiates in explicitly homoerotic ways and that foster an
>intimacy among men not common in society more generally, they compensate
>for what might be perceived by outsiders as either feminine or gay
>behavior by enacting a masculinity that takes aggressive heterosexuality
>as one of its constitutive elements. This often has adverse effects for
>the women with whom they interact.
>
>Misogyny Rules when Sex Takes Center Stage
>
>By the 1960s, as a result of the sexual revolution, college women were
>more willing to have sex before marriage. Fraternity men thus turned to
>them not just for dates but also for sex, rather than to the prostitutes
>and working-class women of earlier eras who had previously met their
>needs. In 1957 two sociologists found that fraternity members were
>particularly likely to have attempted to take advantage of their female
>dates, some using “menacing threats or coercive infliction of physical
>pain.” Fraternity men in one 1960s study, despite having more sex than
>their nonaffiliated peers, expressed the highest rates of dissatisfaction
>because, in the estimation of the sociologists, the pressure upon them to
>have sex was so much greater. Finally, in 1967 sociologist Eugene Kanin
>concluded: “Erotic achievement is now evaluated by taking into account the
>desirability of the sex object and the nature of its acquisition. A
>successful ‘snow job’ on an attractive but re! luctant female who may be
>rendered into a relatively dependable sex outlet and socially desirable
>companion is considerably more enhancing than an encounter with a
>prostitute or a ‘one night stand’ with a ‘loose’ reputation.” Sex was
>being used explicitly to bolster a man’s reputation amongst his fraternity
>brothers.
>
>By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, fraternity men had
>built upon some of these traditions and elaborated others as well. For
>example, fraternities foster an atmosphere where long-term intimate
>relationships with women are actually discouraged. As Allen DeSantis has
>shown in his recent book, Inside Greek U, many fraternity men perceive
>their brothers’ girlfriends as a threat both to the time that the brothers
>might spend with the fraternity as well as to their loyalty to the
>brotherhood. Casual sex is valued more highly because it can be chronicled
>in a way that many are unwilling to do when it comes to the sex they have
>with girlfriends. Regular reporting on each member’s “conquests” further
>cements the bonds of brotherhood. This emphasis upon casual sex is part of
>a bigger problem, however. Social scientists have demonstrated that it
>places pressure on men who are not otherwise having sex to do so in order
>to save face, and this can lead to sexual assault. In order to ensure that
>brothers always have a steady supply of sexual partners, fraternities
>throw regular parties, often replete with grain alcohol punch. The parties
>are designed to supply intoxicated women who will either consent — or
>succumb — to sex.
>
>Two other practices are also worthy of note. Some fraternity men take
>pleasure either in watching their brothers have sex with women or in being
>watched as they do so. One brother interviewed by anthropologist Michael
>Moffatt for his book Coming of Age in New Jersey put it this way: “When my
>friends pick up chicks and bring them back to the fraternity house
>everyone else runs to the window to look at somebody else domineer a girl
>and I tell you what you almost get the same satisfaction. Some of the guys
>like to put on a show by doing grosser things each time. . . . Watching my
>friends have sex with other girls is almost as satisfying as doing it
>myself. . . . By the same token I enjoy conquering girls and having people
>watch.”
>
>The view of women as objects of domination seems to preclude any
>understanding that women might be acting on their own desires. That they
>are exploiting these women — regardless of the women’s own feelings or
>desires — goes without saying for this brother. Indeed, he uses the verb
>”conquering” to describe what seems to be otherwise consensual sex.
>Finally, some brothers simply compete with each other to see who can have
>the most sexual encounters in a year. Like the infamous Spur Posse of
>1990s Lakewood, California, these men keep a tally to determine who is the
>winner in a competition that has little with to do with the pleasure that
>may be gained from sexual acts themselves, and everything to do with
>bolstering one’s self-esteem and reputation through the perceived
>connections between masculinity and sexual exploitation. It is predicated
>on a double standard that sees women as lesser than men and as possessing
>something that must be coerced from them.
>
>This version of sexually aggressive masculinity is not inevitable. The
>first generation of fraternity men would not have recognized it because
>they did not live in a world that denigrated their intimacy or encouraged
>them to prove their masculinity through sexual conquest, at least not to
>the degree that we see today. Of course not all fraternity men necessarily
>practice it, and just how many of them subscribe to this version of
>masculinity is impossible to calculate. That said, it should not surprise
>us that the structure and the historical context of the fraternity give
>rise to this phenomenon: an all-male organization intent on proving
>masculinity in a world where masculinity is seen as antithetical to
>intimacy amongst men, because that intimacy is too often understood to be
>”gay.” Until fraternity men learn to be more comfortable with the intimacy
>fostered through the bonds of brotherhood without demanding its concurrent
>disavowal through homophobia and the conquest of women, it seems unlikely
that women will be much safer on college campuses with active Greek
populations.

© 2009 National Sexuality Resource Center All rights reserved.