The Draft.

Maureen Dowd writes about boys “drafting” girls.

A group of soon-to-be freshmen boys at Landon, an elite private grade school and high school for boys in the wealthy Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md., was drafting local girls.

One team was called “The Southside Slampigs,” and one boy dubbed his team with crude street slang for drug-addicted prostitutes.

The young woman who was the “top pick” was described by one of the boys in a team profile he put up online as “sweet, outgoing, friendly, willing to get down and dirty and [expletive] party. Coming in at 90 pounds, 5’2 and a bra size 34d.” She would be a special asset to the team, he noted, because her mother “is quite the cougar herself.”

Before they got caught last summer, the boys had planned an “opening day party,” complete with T-shirts, where the mission was to invite the drafted girls and, unbeknownst to them, score points by trying to rack up as many sexual encounters with the young women as possible.

“They evidently got points for first, second and third base,” said one outraged father of a drafted girl. “They were going to have parties and tally up the points, and money was going to be exchanged at the end of the season.” He said that the boys would also have earned points for “schmoozing with the parents.”

His daughter, he said, “was very upset about it. She thought these guys were her friends. This is the way we teach boys to treat women, young ladies? You have enough to worry about as a 14- or 15-year-old girl without having to worry about guys who are doing it as sport.”

My immediate reaction: this is the problem with the popularity and cultural acceptability of “rating” human beings from 1-10 based on appearance. Rating girls based on what you can get them to do sexually is the logical next step for a bunch of boys who aren’t being taught that girls are actually people with their own thoughts and feelings and inner lives.

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  • That is absolutely horrible. Their parents may have told them to get an education, but never to respect anyone.

    Peace, Love and Chocolate
    Tiffany

  • I am willing to bet that half, if not all of these guys, play lacrosse in college..just a hunch. I went to public school in Montgomery County, MD, but at track meets, we’d always run up against Landon. This behavior is consistent with how they acted way back then (1990-1992)..not all, just some.

    • It’s mentioned in the column that the lacrosse player who was charged with killing his girlfriend went to Landon

    • Distance88

      I’m a product of Mont. Cty. public schools also, and I wish I could say that this behavior is limited to private school students with entitlement issues, but sadly I don’t think that’s the case.

      And I think we all ‘rate’ our peers, rightly or wrongly, based on some criteria–whether it’s personal appearance or something else. But concocting an elaborate scoring system based on sexual encounters seems like a much deeper level of dysfunction.. one of the many gifts that keep on giving, courtesy of patriarchy, I suppose.

  • Val

    These are the same people who will be giving “ghetto parties” once they get to college.

  • Scipio Africanus

    I’d question the notion that these boys aren’t “being taught that girls are actually people with their own thoughts and feelings and inner lives.”

    Or, to re-phrase, I question the idea that these boys were taught something contrary to that idea – i.e, that they were taught that girls are valueless non-humans. My guess is these boys have received more or less the same lessons from society as the boys at their school who *don’t* engage in this behavior.

    Maybe this is just a case of a bunch of assclowns finding each other, and engaging in this. Why does it necessarily have to have a major socio-cultural component to it?

    • shani-o

      My guess is these boys have received more or less the same lessons from society as the boys at their school who *don’t* engage in this behavior.

      Look, I think it’s abundantly clear that boys who could do this view girls as objects and commodities, and subhuman. But just because other boys at the school don’t engage in the same behavior doesn’t mean they don’t view girls the same way.

      That’s like saying, people who beat up gays are just a small group of “assclowns” since the rest of society doesn’t do it. But we don’t say that, because we know that homophobia, just like sexism, runs deep and exists within many people who would never actually act on it in such a way. There are a million small and large ways that the patriarchy, and yes, major socio-cultural issues, affect women. Some are clearly outrageous like this, and some are things most of us don’t even notice until years later.

      • Scipio Africanus

        So then my question is, are very many of the boys at that school (not to mention throughout all of society) “being taught that girls are actually people with their own thoughts and feelings and inner lives.” Am I to believe that, in the year 2010* that few of them are being taught this, even the ones who don’t engage in or wouldn’t condone this type of behavior?

        I ask that question because you said this – “But just because other boys at the school don’t engage in the same behavior doesn’t mean they don’t view girls the same way.” While literally true this is leaning a little toward stereotyping because it’s a simplified conception about a group (moreso when you’re talking about boys in general), using a prior assumption (remember, this is about boys we know nothing about – the ones who aren’t involved in this) which makes this unverifiable. So the next step is that the stereotype becomes “Those boys at those school are a bunch of misogynistic miscreants – even the ones that didn’t do anything, them too.”

        (* – I make the point about 2010 because we’re a solid 50 years out from the emergence of third-wave feminism. The point being, many of the ideas and concepts espoused by that wave have become entrenched in many people’s thinking, male and female.)

  • Great. Now the cruelty of children has gotten creative. This sounds like a movie but I can’t place it.

  • Lisa

    This is sick!

  • It has a socio-cultural component because what these boys are doing aren’t merely ‘youthful hijinks’ – they were planning to advertise girls for sexual sport and exchange money for it. For those of us who work in the field, we call that domestic trafficking, the commercial sex trade, or (put simply) prostitution.

    These attitudes don’t pop up in a vacuum. They are crafted, supported, messaged to and reinforced by events and behaviors in larger society. In our kind of patriarchal society, women aren’t people. We aren’t agents or autonomous subjects. We are objects to be sold for male gratification; we are to be used for violence and degradation, to be given no more humanity than a prize stallion.

    The fact that these boys have really picked up on this message so young – and acted so entrepreneurially to it – is stunning. But it is also a sign that our raising of boys into men is failing. No one is interfering with these codes of misogyny; no one is intervening to tell these boys that girls are PEOPLE. And that’s sad. Because a world run by privileged, amoral sickos like this is not a world that’s good for women.

  • It’s just good it got caught early. Attitudes like these lead to rape, and when the attitudes get organized and openly competitive, it seems that rape is inevitable.

  • asada

    “This is the way we teach boys to treat women, young ladies? You have enough to worry about as a 14- or 15-year-old girl without having to worry about guys who are doing it as sport.”

    Would it be less sinister if the girls were boys? Then what?
    The point is how we train children to treat other ppl with respect and DIGNITY. Regardless of who they are.

    We need to tell children to treat ppl humanely, as they would like to be treated, and not as a “gender”. I hate the “delicate flower” impression.

  • asada

    @ Delia Christina

    yes, yes, I wish I had read your comment before I posted. This gets to my point in a much better fashion.