After Atalanta

Alternate title: Why I shouldn't turn on the TODAY show while still in bed. Not just because I hate the TODAY show, but because I hear more about stories I had kind of been avoiding, like the murder of University of Virginia lacrosse player, Yeardley Love by her (ex?) boyfriend, George Huguely, also a lacrosse player. Not avoiding because I am indifferent to the murder of a young woman, but because the more I listen to and read the coverage, the more irate I become. This column was particularly bad. I do believe writer Les Carpenter had the best of intentions in trying to both memorialize Yeardley Love and bring attention to the issue of bad behavior by student-athletes. But in attempting both, he succeeded in neither. First, I found it highly problematic that in describing the vigil for Love held on UVA's campus, he wrote only of women holding candles in their "flowing summer dresses" and sandals coming to the vigil site from all over campus. It was kind of Greek tra...

This morning, NPR's Morning Edition was reporting on the doping in baseball/Mitchell report brouhaha currently starring Roger Clemens and his former athletic trainer, Brian McNamee, and, of course, their respective lawyers. McNamee has produced needles and gauze that he says he used when injecting Clemens with steroids and HGH. He kept them in a Fed Ex box for three years. Ewwww. I thought it would be easy to discredit such evidence. Much easier, than say tennis players and cyclists who cry about sample tampering and improper testing methods during official drug testing. I mean this guy kept needles and bloody gauze in a cardboard box for three years. But apparently I am wrong because NPR called up a law professor at Stanford, presumably one who is an expert in the rules of evidence, and he said a judge would admit it. And this leads now to a battle of reputations as evidenced by Clemens's defamation suit against McNamee where the needles and gauze could come to the defense of ...

...apple pie and baseball. Good thing, too, for the members of the De Anza Community College baseball team in California who are being charged with absolutely nothing after sexually assaulting a teenager (17 years old) at a house party. The ripple effects of the Duke lacrosse apparently have run all the way across the country because despite witnesses and a huge amount of local publicity, none of the eight men are being prosecuted because the DA claims there is not enough evidence. Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy and Diane at The Dees Diversion have posted about the case so I won't go into just how ridiculous it is that once again the players and their supporters are crying "poor persecuted white men are we." That's been covered. I will say that it is quite saddening to find that, even as many of us yearn for more women in positions of power, that a woman actually in power were at the center of the decision not to prosecute: the DA Dolores Carr. I figured out long a...

Feminist scholar and activist Dr. Gail Dines has been receiving some vicious hate mail after her appearance on CNN's Paula Zahn Show. She recounts and analyzes the past few days in an article at Common Dreams . Dines, a sociologist, was asked to comment on the Duke lacrosse case and the media coverage of it (her area of research is racism and sexism in the media). Her five-minute segment has generated many emails from disgruntled men attacking her and her views and defending the members of the lacrosse team, presenting them as the victims of the black female "stripper." At the end of fall semester, a female student at University of New Hampshire (my alma mater) wrote a letter to the editor of the university's student paper, The New Hampshire , that a poster on safe sex, displayed in her dorm, was offensive.* It featured a male pitcher and a female catcher with the tag line: "whether you're a pitcher or a catcher, always wear a glove." The student made ...