Why Do Male Athletes Assault Women? Research Begins
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Somewhere between the West Point football gropers and the heavyweight rapist, Mike Tyson, may be a vast, troubling, uncharted area of sexual assault on women by male athletes, a kind of Bermuda Triangle of sports in which discussion mysteriously disappears. Anecdotal evidence pops up several times a week, a paragraph or two here and there about another pro player beating his wife or a college team raping a drunken classmate, but rarely has an attempt been made to pull this information together to find out if there is a pattern of behavior. Even the coverage of the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, which seems to have diagrammed every racial, sexual, class and economic X and O, seems so far to have avoided dealing with the possibility that football players, as surely as combat soldiers, have been programmed and rewarded for a kind of violence that can’t always be turned off. And if there is a pattern of violence, why? Does the nature of combat sport itself build a “character” that is out of control off the field? Are the best of these athletes genetically disposed to be more aggressive? Is it hormonal? Are drugs a factor? Are they conditioned by coaches to regard nonmembers of the team — including all women — as the enemy? Is it just a heightened alpha male entitlement, is it a further example of the lack of communication between men and women? Is there a homoerotic strain here, as the writer and counselor Ed Gallagher of Alive to Thrive, a self-help organization for the handicapped, suggests, making athletes angry about their suppressed desires? More : query.nytimes.com |