Sports Blogs are to Culture as Joe Morgan is to Baseball Stats
Fuck all you sports bloggers who are calling out Ben Roethlisberger. Especially you, Deadspin: The blog that regularly rewards its readers for submitting stories of attempted date rape. The blog vacillates wildly between upbraiding the media for covering a sex scandal and, you know, generating hundreds of thousands of pageviews by covering the selfsame sex scandal. It’s the blog that promulgates the already popular notion of athletes enjoying limitless access to sex.
What Roethlisberger has done is (very likely) maximally reprehensible, but his actions are made possible by the larger culture of sports, which is of course not in one of those airless, unpressurized spaces. The general social course of humanity—its telos, if you will—has been toward power becoming less centralized and more distributed. State of nature, social contract, end of slavery, universal suffrage, blah blah blah. Now, it’s the case that in nature, people with more power get to fuck literally and figuratively the people with less power. One of the marks of a great society is the attenuation of this state of affairs. You can make the argument that men should have power over women because they are better/faster/stronger/whatever. But an analogue to our historically expanding knowledge is the growth of empathy, which has created an increasing mutual understanding of shared humanity among progressively larger and larger communities: The men all hang tight together, then the men and women who look similar, then the men and women who are more proximal, and so on. All of a sudden, the United Colors of Benetton are trapped attractively together on an island east of Fiji as the first black President of America passes healthcare reform.
