Reading through former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s deep report into the culture and decision-making at Penn State that allowed former football coach Jerry Sandusky to go unpunished for so long, I was struck by the way the report was framed. “The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel,” the report says, “is the total and consistent disregard by the most sernior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims.” There’s no question that compliance with the law and with Penn State regulations were major issues in Sandusky’s case, but there’s something powerful about framing the problem in terms of empathy. There’s an extent to which empathy requires more, both emotionally and morally, than mere compliance. And throughout the report, there are small details that illustrate how empathy flowed up the hierarchy at Penn State, while it was consistently denied to people who were less powerful.

When Joe Paterno, Sandusky’s superior and mentor, was fired from his position as Penn State’s head football coach, there were major protests at Penn State on the grounds that Paterno, a Penn State legend, had been treated callously and unfairly. So it’s interesting to see little incidencies of Paterno’s own lack of empathy in the report. When Mike McQueary, who witnessed Sandusky raping a child in the Penn State locker room, called Paterno to see if he could speak with him about what he’d seen, “McQueary recalled Paterno said he did not have a job for McQueary so ‘if that’s what it’s about, don’t bother coming over,’” an unpleasant little aside. In the timeline of Sandusky’s tenure at Penn State, the one item notes that “Paterno reports the incident to [then-Athletic Director Timothy] Curley and [then-Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary] Schultz on Sunday, February 11 as Paterno did not ‘want to interfere with their weekends.’”

Even though Sandusky was the subject of serious accusations, the report documents many cases where authorities appear invested less in determining his guilt or innocence than in his comfort. When John Seasock, a counselor who met with one of Sandusky’s victims, made his report, he suggested a conversation with Sandusky but noted that “The intent of the conversation with Mr. Sandusky is not to cast dispersion (sic) upon his actions but to help him stay out of such gray area situations in the future.” A detective, Ron Schreffler “recalled that the interview was conducted in an office in the Lasch Building so as not to put Sandusky on the defensive.” Curley, in an email discussing how to handle Sandusky, proposed a less aggressive approach because “I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved…I would indicate we feel there is a problem and we want to assist the individual to get professional help.”
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We’ve had a lot of conversation on this blog about the way Daniel Tosh handled a woman who told him rape jokes weren’t funny at a recent show. There are a lot of threads to parse here—how people handle heckling (and how clubs should handle them)*, whether rape jokes can be funny under any circumstances, why comedians close ranks around their own. But I want to separate those issues out and talk very specifically about another strain of argument. One thread of conversation here has suggested that the woman who related her story was wrong, or oversensitive to feel threatened when Tosh suggested it would be funny if she were gang raped. The idea behind those objections is that no one would ever act based on Tosh’s words, and that because there isn’t a real prospect of her being actually assaulted, there is no impact to his words.

This is wrong on two levels. First, if you’ve never had someone visualize raping you out loud, and I’m talking about actually visualizing performing sex on you without your consent, not use of sexual violation as metaphor for victory and defeat, I can tell you, it is not pleasant. It’s unpleasant randomly on the internet, and I can’t imagine having it happen in a crowded room. If we stripped away the circumstances, if Tosh had just singled out this woman as an example during his defense of rape jokes, maybe that would be clearer. But because the point of a comedian’s response to heckling is to shut the person interrupting the set down as quickly as possible, there’s an idea that the most effective way to do that is to be as gross and mean as possible. As the anonymous OffensiveComic told me during a long, and for me, useful conversation about heckling on Twitter, “If the thing a comedian says to a heckler isn’t the worst thing anyone’s ever said to them, the comedian lacks imagination.” Daniel Tosh meant for this woman to be uncomfortable. Whether she consented to it or not is another question.

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The bridge is yours.

-Chronicle director Josh Trank will direct the Fantastic Four reboot.

-Why Batman doesn’t date fellow heroes.

-Scarlett Johansson will make $20 million for the second Avengers movie.

-Yay more Legend of Korra!

-I’m always in favor of greater golem representation in popular culture.

With the Olympics coming up, questions of gender are already in the air, from sponsorship for American weightlifter Sarah Robles, to the presence of out soccer star Megan Rapinoe on the Olympic women’s team. With that in mind, my friend Chloe Angyal‘s going to spend some time over the next few weeks considering movies about women and sports, beginning today with Bend It Like Beckham. An editor at Feministing, Chloe hails from Sydney, Australia, works out of New York, and is writing her ridiculously awesome thesis on romantic comedies. Please welcome her.

By Chloe Angyal

I re-watched this movie for the first time in a long time in May, a few days after the American Women’s Professional Soccer league announced that it was shutting down permanently. It was a disheartening and ironic backdrop to a movie that concludes with the two heroines flying away to America to play NCAA soccer, with the hope that they’ll be able to play professionally in the States after that. WUSA, which they hope to play in, would be dead by the time they graduated, having only lasted three years. And WPS didn’t even survive that long. America, it seems, just can’t muster the interest, or the money, to sustain professional women’s soccer. Nonetheless, Bend it Like Beckham remains one of the best movies about women and sport to be made in the last fifteen years.

Bend it Like Beckham was Gurinder Chadha’s first movie (I’ll be writing about her second, Stick It, a little later), and one of the most striking things about it is how finely and lovingly it draws this subculture, without making any concessions to viewers who aren’t familiar with it. There’s no didactic “these are the rules of being an Indian girl” scene the way there’s a “these are the rules of rugby” scene in Invictus, for example. They don’t slow down the dialogue or go easy on the argot; had there been big studio involvement, this almost certainly would have happened. There’s a sense that you’re being allowed inside a closed and close-knit culture, and it’s sink or swim. Fortunately, it’s also hilarious – and like I said, the subtitles really help.

The main characters, Jules (Keira Knightley) and Jess (Parminder Nagra) both have parents who think that playing football makes them bad or at least deviant women, but for very different reasons. Jules’s mother is worried that “No boy’s gonna wanna go out with a girl who’s got bigger muscles than him,” and points out that “there’s a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one of them without a fella.” Later, she becomes convinced that soccer is turning her daughter into a lesbian. Jules’s father, on the other hand, is glad that Jules is focused on football: “If she’s more interested in playing football right now than chasing boys, well quite frankly I’m over the moon about that.” For Jules’s parents, football is the antithesis of and the antidote to boys. Jess’s mother, on the other hand, says that she doesn’t want her daughter “running around half naked in front of men.” And Jess’s father agrees, telling her that she “must start behaving like a proper woman.”
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Because I wrote about She-Hulk and Judge Dredd yesterday, both comics that portray women particularly well, I wanted to pass along some credit to a project that’s become my new obsession: the Ladydrawers column at Truthout. Run by Anne Elizabeth Moore and MariNomi, the project, which launched a year ago, examines everything from how women break into the industry to how they’re portrayed in it. It’s beautifully illustrated intellectual ammunition. In the introduction, they replicate some of the work that Vida’s done for women’s bylines in literary journals, but with comics, and discover that indie Fantagraphics actually publishes a smaller percentage of work by women than Marvel. They come up with other ways to examine inequality in the industry, too, including a count that shows women author comics pages in a lower proportion than you’d expect given their employment at different companies: men, it seems, are getting more work per creator published. They’re clear about what it takes to develop methodology for these measurements, and that they’re still trying. And most recently they did a big survey about who’s submitting work and who’s getting published, and found that while 56 percent of their male respondents had submitted work and 75 percent of those creators said they’d had work published, 55 percent of female respondents had submitted work, but of those, only 57 percent had their work published. The series is ongoing, and I’m glad to see Truthout’s publishing it. Vida’s very specific measurements of women in magazines have made it so that industry can’t claim generalizations don’t apply to them. Ladydrawers could help do the same for comics.