Culture Shock

I’m full of questions today. As you know I rarely write here about sports or sports-related matters. It’s generally just not something that interests me.

However, I do have a question about the rash of suspensions of NFL players over charges of spousal abuse and/or child abuse. Is there a racial and/or cultural element in the outrage? I think there is. For example, I think that corporal punishment of children is much more socially acceptable among African Americans and rural whites than it is among, say, middle class suburban whites living in the Northeast.

I also notice that no one has asked if the wives or girlfriends of these NFL players strike them.

Just for the record I don’t think people should strike their children, spouses, or significant others. If you beat a dog, it does not cause the dog to express the behavior you might be looking for. Rewards are much more useful in eliciting behaviors than punishment. It may make the dog mean or furtive, however. We aren’t that much different.

20 comments… add one
  • CStamley Link

    I don’t think it’s race, but culture (class), yes. Lots of poor white kids still get whuppin’s. Apparently it’s a thing with some fundamentalist Christisn churches, too.

  • steve Link

    My relatives in the Midwest, fundamentalist Christians for the most part, still spank their kids. (Which is a big step up because parents used to give us real beatings when we were young.) Just from what I have heard, it doesn’t sound like Peterson did anything exceptional for people in his area. The spouse and wife thing is a bit different. Heaven knows it is common among lower economic groups, white and black, but it is also generally understood that it is not really acceptable, as opposed to spankings where they really do believe they are doing the right thing for their kids.

    Steve

  • Maybe my reaction is what it is because I’ve seen black women really whale the hell out of their men.

  • Guarneri Link

    I have heard – does anyone know if it’s true – that the frequency of spousal abuse is greater in the general population. I think that affects Dave’s question. Then we also have to consider if the wives of rich husbands under report.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I tried to warn Dave in his post on returning to the States that Sports had emerged as something different since he had been gone. Sports is the new morality play. I’m more interested in the specticle of sports being the arena in which social justice and even punishment is meted out, driven in some part by voices that don’t strike me as fans of the sport.

  • The dynamics of those relationships — well, seductive women, virile men, money…

  • Guarneri:

    I think this this may answer your questions. My general recollection is that rates of spousal abuse and/or reporting of spousal abuse vary by race and ethnicity but, interestingly, not by family income.

  • PD Shaw Link

    The discussion reminds me of 80s music video sex-kitten, Tawnya Ketaen, beating her professional baseball player husband, Chuck Finley with a stiletto heal. She was SoCal jewish, and he was from Monroe Louisiana.

    The answer to the riddle: Cocaine.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I’ll skim Albion’s Seed when I get home, but I think it details the prevalence of violence in the Scots-Irish culture for both genders, probably distinct from Virginia culture, in which female violence is not acceptable, though male violence can be.

  • Let’s not forget BDSM fantasies played out on the public stage. For some people that’s all a prelude to … a game that was never on my shelf.

  • ... Link

    A lot of this is simply whiter people indulging in the positional good that is moral outrage.

    As for the Peterson case, that goes beyond any whooping I or any if my friends got. Repeatedly shoving handfuls of leaves into the boy’s mouth while whipping him til he bled is pretty bad. Not to mention the second case where he slugged another four year old in the head while that boy was in a car seat. I think that’s more fucked up than the usual corporal punishment meted out down south.

    Incidentally, did you hear where either his high school coach or principal beat Peterson with a paddle when he was in high school? We still had them around when I was in junior high in the early 1980s, often with holes cut in them, but I thought they were long gone.

    And yes, I did feel the sting of that paddle in junior high. Seems I once tried sucker punching a football player’s hand with my face.

  • ... Link

    If you’re in a football crazy school, your best bet is to steer clear of the players. They are given a very wide latitude to do whatever the fuck they want to whoever the fuck they want to do it.

    The one exception is if you’re at a college that’s the heart of a state’s old boy network. In that case certain fraternities will trump football players, and you need to avoid THOSE guys too.

  • steve Link

    “Although domestic violence occurs across income brackets, it is most frequently reported by the poor who more often rely on the police for dispute resolution. Victimization surveys indicate that lower-income women are, in fact, more frequently victims of domestic violence than wealthier women. Women with family incomes less than $7,500 are five times more likely to be victims of violence by an intimate than women with family annual incomes between $50,000 and $74,000.[28]

    Although the poorest women are the most victimized by domestic violence,[29] one study also found that women receiving government income support payments through Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) were three times more likely to have experienced physical aggression by a current or former partner during the previous year than non-AFDC supported women.[30]

    Race

    Overall, in the United States, blacks experience higher rates of victimization than other groups: black females experience intimate violence at a rate 35 percent higher than that of white females, and black males experience intimate violence at a rate about 62 percent higher than that of white males and about two and a half times the rate of men of other races.[31] Other survey research, more inclusive of additional racial groups, finds that American Indian/Alaskan Native women experience significantly higher rates of physical abuse as well.[32],†”

    http://www.popcenter.org/problems/domestic_violence/2

    This author tried to control for income. Not sure it is fully possible. Anecdotally, I can tell you that the abused women who are hurt badly enough to need medical attention dont tend to be the wealthy ones.

    http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/anna_aizer/main_files/research_files/wagejune16_2009_name.pdf

  • ... Link

    Actually, the case at Florida State is instructive. They’ve got a chunk of meat named Jameis Winston, who led them to a 14-0 record and a national championship last year, and won the Heisman for himself along the way.

    It also turns out he was investigated for rape about 12 months prior to winning the Heisman, the rape investigation was very poorly handled, it turns out he shot up his apartment complex with a BB gun, shooting out several windows while shooting at other students, committed the bizarre crime of walking into a fast food store and using one of the little ketchup cups to poor himself drink after drink from out of the soda machine, “shop lifted” some crab legs from a Publix supermarket after cutting in line*, and God only knows what else that the city of Tallahassee Police Department and FSU have managed to cover up.

    The rape investigation was badly handled and the university is now being investigated for Title 9 violations.

    Amongst all of this, the braindead bag of meat jumped up on a table in the student union the other day and shouted “Fuck her right in the pussy!”

    Yep, accused rapist and confirmed knucklehead Jameis Winston did THAT, this week, after all the NFL fallout. If he could have come out after last season he’d have been the number one pick, no question. But that little incident on top of everything else just dropped his draft stock in this environment.

    Worse still was his explanation that his competitive nature just got the best of him. WTF???? Was there a contest to see which accused rapist on campus could draw the most attention to himself by shouting that on campus?

    But the worst has been that a fair number of the students at FSU are going after the few who tweeted about the incident. Yeah, complaining about this kind of thing is getting people shafted.

    * There’s a suspicion that this wasn’t shop lifting. He walked up to the seafood counter and was given the package and walked out without bothering to pay. Many believe some employee called the police not realizing that the store has an arrangement with certain players. That’s speculation, but that’s what’s out there.

  • ... Link

    I should mention that Famous Jameis is going to be punished for this. They’re sitting him for half a game. Yep, half a game. It is a game against a ranked opponent, and THAT explains why it is only half a game suspension. If they were playing Our Sisters of Perpetual Sorrow, they’d give him the whole game off.

    It’s sad because FSU fans used to be the classy football fans in the state. They were pleasant to opposing teams fans, win or lose, the always wore their team colors AFTER a big loss, etc. Now they’re worse than Gator fans, who are pretty much all assholes, and Miami fans, who are coked-up slimeballs that will be running the state in the future.

  • Uhmmm.

    Tempers could get high when, ah, cards like this are in the deck:

    http://youtu.be/nxtIRArhVD4

  • Interesting things, these women’s sexual solidarity videos. That’s J-Lo teaching Iggy how to do it.

  • Between them and Shakira and Beyonce — well, who has set the world on fire? The Middle East or the firecracker West?

  • Isolate those silly m’ers in the ME. They lost the thread a long time ago.

  • Yeah, Ice. We had some of those at LSU, too. Not many, but enough, already.

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