-If you can still get decent odds on Baltimore to win the division, jump on it. You know, if gambling is legal where you live.
-There is no right answer when your quarterback choices for at least 25% of the season are Byron Leftwich, Dennis Dixon, or Charlie Batch. Only varying degrees of wrong.
-Ben is suspended, Santonio Holmes is a Jet, and Willie Parker is a Redskin. At the time of Super Bowl XLIII, those three were the core of Pittsburgh's offense--and 26, 24, and 28 respectively. And while Parker was a little past being "young," he had very little mileage on the odometer. That's the lookings of a five-year dynasty right there, at least. Two years later? Ruined.
And most importantly?
-This suspension is complete and utter bullshit.
And here lies the heart of the issue. If you are male, and the word "rape" is even mentioned in the same breath as your name, you are utterly fucked. Even if you win, you lose. In Ben's case, it has happened twice. Two different women have come forward and accused him of raping them. Neither time led to a charge.
As a 21-year-old who has been in college for three years and can best be described as a "seasoned veteran of the party scene," I consider myself somewhat of an authority on this kind of situation--because it is hardly uncommon. From the police report, it seems that Roethlisberger and the girl in question were both drunk as hell, and decided to bang in the bathroom of the club. Ben's bodyguards stood guard outside--according to the accuser, they were there to make sure the rape went uninterrupted. But let's be real here--a bathroom is a very public place, and the last thing that you want when you're mid-coitus is a door to fly open and a horrified bystander to come in. So if you've got the resources to make sure that doesn't happen--like, say, a couple large guys whose job it is to do just that--you're gonna exploit that. And he did. Nothing wrong with that.
But here's the thing about 20-year-old girls--while there are certainly more than a few who are intelligent, emotionally stable, high-quality women already, the majority (at least that I've had dealings with) are fucked up in some way or another. And it's far more common than you'd think for them to be total attention whores--especially the ones in the "party girl" crowd. As a wise man once said to me, "Girls don't go out looking to have a few drinks, then go home alone." Reports indicated that Ben's accuser was wearing a nametag that said "DTF." (For those of you scratching your head right now, that is a common abbreviation for "down to fuck.") Is this a woman who could potentially be raped? Yes. Is this a woman who could potentially drink herself to the point of having consensual sex that she would later regret, or at least pretend to regret in order to keep up appearances? Yes. Statistically speaking, which one is more likely to happen? From experience, I can safely say that it's the latter.
The problem is, the line between the two is often blurred, especially for women. Men are simply a different species. We are far more blunt and brutally honest with our friends than women are. If a man gets drunk and hooks up with someone he knows he shouldn't have, his friends laugh at him. And rightfully so--he fucked up, did something stupid, and the laughter allows him to realize this and not fuck up next time, or so you'd hope. But it sure as hell works a lot better than the way that women handle these things. Publicly, they sympathize--behind closed doors, they judge. It's happened with friends of mine a couple different times. Girl gets blackout drunk, girl hooks up with a sketchy guy that her alcohol-addled brain fell in love with, girl wakes up sober and realizes she fucked up, girl claims rape to keep herself from looking like a dumb, drunk panty-dropper.
And why not? The way our society and legal system are set up, it's to her advantage to play this way. As soon as the word "rape" is thrown out there, she is instantly shielded from judgment by the protective cloth of "victim." She's not a drunken slut--she is an innocent girl who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it doesn't even matter if the rape claim holds up or not--by the time that happens, it's yesterday's news and she can escape the judgment of her peers.
Furthermore, crying rape can make legal sense. On most college campuses, a woman who comes forward claiming to be raped is immune to being charged with underage drinking. In theory, this allows more victims to come forward, since they won't get in trouble. In practice, this leads to more false claims, since it makes a rape accusation a veritable get-out-of-jail-free card. Roethlisberger's one-night stand (I refuse to call her a "victim") was 20 years old. I do not support the current drinking age in any way, shape, or form--but if you're going to have it, and you're going to have a rape accusation loophole, you BETTER FUCKING MAKE SURE YOU CLOSE THAT LOOPHOLE AS SOON AS "RAPE" IS THROWN OUT OF THE EQUATION. In every case I've seen personally, the girl claiming rape was underage. In every case, the girl in question was drunk as shit. In every case, the girl in question was not ticketed for underage drinking. In the case of Roethlisberger's one-night stand, this also held steady. Diversion successful.
Look, don't get me wrong. I'm not defending rape. Rape is awful--right up there with torture, war, and Michael Bay movies in the category of "Really shitty things in life that everyone would be a hell of a lot happier if we just did away with." True rapists are sick fucks, and deserve to have their cocks burned off with the most painful acid available. But that's the other awful part of the casual false accusations--by falsely crying rape to save your own hide, you are crying wolf for your entire gender. If someone is really raped, now not only do they have to deal with the hell that their life has become as a result, but they have to deal with their peers second-guessing them behind their backs, questioning whether it really happened. And in no way is that alright.
And here's the problem--you don't even need to be convicted of rape in order for it to fuck up your life. Even in being accused of it, you are stigmatized for life. Look at Roethlisberger. He does not have a criminal record. He is not married, and has no family. He had every right to do what he did. If the Steelers want to renegotiate a contract with a "no partying" clause, that's up to them--but as it stands, he didn't do a fucking thing wrong. What he did is what every other male ages 18-30 has done, and what most of them do on a regular basis--capitalize on a generation of women who are historically DTF. In his case, she was even wearing a fucking nametag advertising it. Yet the NFL is suspending him (a suspension which will cost him $3 million, by the way), the media is vilifying him, and pretty much everyone is backlashing out at him with a furor.
Here's the thing. It's clear that something's gotta give for Ben. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Clearly he didn't learn his lesson earlier--that dumb, drunk panty-droppers will do anything, including ruining you personally and professionally, to avoid be branded as such; and that when the man in the case is an NFL superduperstar, you also get famous on top of that! If he isn't a total retard, he'll stop putting himself in those situations. Or at least take a page out of Dave Chappelle's book and make one of his bodyguards carry around a folder of Love Contracts.
| Chappelle's Show | ||||
| Love Contract | ||||
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And that's the way this should have gone. Indeed, Ben has some lessons to learn. But suspending him not only does nothing to help those lessons be learned, it validates the acceptance of false rape accusations in our culture. The NFL had a chance to stand up and score a symbolic victory for falsely-accused men everywhere. Instead, they chose to punt on fourth and short.
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