NUance
New member
Yeah, you pretty much nailed it. Or let's say LP picked a fight with another male athlete[SIZE=12pt]—[/SIZE]say a skinny frosh basketball player[SIZE=12pt]—[/SIZE]dragged him down a couple flights of stairs and then banged his head against a mailbox. If that had happened[SIZE=12pt]—[/SIZE]violence against a smaller male athlete[SIZE=12pt]—[/SIZE]I doubt if there would have been a huge scandal like there was with LP. And people certainly wouldn't get as excited as they do about it, even now, twenty years later.This is most of it. I guess if Phillips had drug the equipment manager down 3 flights of stairs by his hair that'd almost be the equivalent?Men are more physically imposing and powerful than women. Most people don't have a hard time accepting this as a general, physiological statement with exceptions. This puts women in a position of vulnerability, which means that collectively, as a society, it's our responsibility to look out for them in a way that we wouldn't need to for men (again, in a general sense). We treat men and women differently because they are different, so no, those posters wouldn't have gotten bent out of shape, but that's actually a proper and good thing.The thing is, if LP had instead gotten in an off-the-field fight with a male teammate, I sincerely doubt if those three posters would have gotten all bent out of shape and responded in that manner to my post.
But let's face it, there are physical differences between men and women. Because men tend to be larger and stronger, society views male-on-female violence to be much worse than an equivalent incidence of male-on-male violence. And I agree with that. That's the way it should be. I've never once hit a women in my lifetime[SIZE=12pt]—[/SIZE]not even once. (Not even my sister when we were kids, and she probably deserved it.) And I found it particularly abhorrent to be accused of supporting rapists, or perhaps being a wife beater myself, in a recent thread—all in response to a post I made defending Tom Osborne's actions in regard to Lawrence Phillips. So I guess the lesson I've learned is that you just can't speak in a frank, matter of fact way on some topics concerning women as you would about men.