The boorish behavior of Jets fans was a bit suprising. I can understand, but not excuse, the unwilingness of the Jets and the NJ Sports Authortiy to potentially escalate the problem as well as to cause ill feeling among a portion of their customers.

It maybe that the actions of some might be assult and battery although neiter is really certain. Perhaps this can be treated as running on the feel but again the authorities are way too outnumbered to act effectively.

It was shocking that a few women were willing to comply. Given the twenty year assult on anything to do with sex and the body by feminists, as well as an all out attack on male sexuality, it is interesting what little impact, except in the realm of the PC, it has had on female behavior. What the article shows, again, is how crowd behavior differs from that of people acting alone.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I'm getting too old for this shit. I look at the newscasters on tv and they look like they're going dancing after the show - satin blouses and cleavage and four inch heels and the women are even worse - just kidding about that last part. My question is why would you dress like that and expect to be taken seriously at work?

As for the boob flasher at the stadium, I don't see much difference between her and Phyllis Schafly as far as enabling goes.

One of the guards was smoking a cigarette . . . . David Picker (NYT) 11/20/2007

Frankly, I think that explains everything.

Apparently, according to the local sports radio station, this has been going on for a long time. And, this cannot be news to the NYT sportswriters. What's the difference? YouTube. Now this isn't a dirty little secret in the Meadowlands. Embarrassing, to my mind, that the Times got scooped on this if they consider it newsworthy, by amateurs on the internet.

Easy to stop, though. A small group of women should walk through with video cameras, panning the crowd of men.

Post the videos on youtube, with a "name that A-Hole" title.

It'll end.

From the description of the thugs' behavior in the article, any woman taping them would be risking her safety. They rain down bottles and spit on women who refuse to comply with their demands as it is. Any woman, or even group of women, who lingered there trying to capture them on camera would doubtless draw down the mob's wrath. The so-called security guards would probably go on smoking and looking the other way.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this piece. I was disgusted by what the Times article described, and should have done a letter (may still be time); perhaps better to write to the NJ Sports and Exhibition Authority, with a cc to Gov. Corzine.

I can't figure out whether this comment was intended to be ironic or idiotic.

Ellen, I posted behind you, because I thought you'd understand. I grew up in a family as the only male sibling with four sisters. All of my grade school was at a small Protestant Church School. I'd never had the displeasure of experiencing a locker room until I was in 9th grade, and I had much more than my share then, because I was active in several sports. I spent a couple of winters up in the North Central, and went ice fishing a sum total of one time. A major contributing factor was that the same trash passed for conversation in the lake ice sheds, when they were drinking quantities of cheap beer. That was enough for me to know I'd be one hell of a lot more comfortable in the company of women who were my friends.

I've never been married. At the same time, I have never ogled strange women or wolf whistled or talked sexual trash. in that direction either. It is a valueless activity, because I do not will to engage in physical relationships with strangers, and I do not desire to harass them either. Sexuality if far too intimate to share with strangers, and most acquaintances too. I am uncomfortable when a stranger cuts my hair because of the proximity. Over that last couple of years, an old friend who knows me very well often comes visiting with a few hair styling tools in her purse.

I am well aware that workplace harassment is a problem; a few times I have aided and supported a female coworker's complaint. It isn't right, and it is still prevalent in society as a whole. Remember, I grew up with four sisters. Throughout my whole life, I have always had very close female friends. I'm on your side here.

Now for qualifiers and an explanation regarding my previous post. Firstly, don't ride the high horse of gender differences; because I have close personal friendships with women, I also know that there are some women who play the same sort of game in reverse. It is nowhere close to being as prevalent as it is in men, but it is real. I have been groped in the workplace by both women and gay men. They were not pleasant experiences. The workplace is not a proper forum for physical expressions of sexuality; they cause entanglements that inhibit production. I have better natural defenses against this than the vast majority of women, because I am a little over 6 feet tall, healthy, and have been told many times my stare can be withering along with being daunting. I have also learned from some female friends over the years, just how creepy some men are. One very long term friend has worked at a county hospital for nearly 3 decades, and believes that this is just reality, it is a trait of some humans, and will never be coerced out of their personalities. I view it as a perverse and distorted playing of the alpha game by individuals not suited to even be betas. I don't play the alpha game for a very simple reason: I possess no inclination to be a sheep-herder. I do not want a flock. That is a useless responsibility and would impair my personal freedom. I seek equals.

Now for the explanation: you will have little if any effect on loutish behaviors with prissy public responses expressing your revulsion. These clowns will still go back to Rush Limbaugh on Monday morning, and will still tag women with the ditto-head insults he feeds them with. Almost all of them are low status members of the herd, and they have great difficulty producing original ideations. Understand that they are grass chewing cudsuckers, and treat them with proper derogation. You need to return fire, make them understand that there will be liabilities incurred for their acting like baboons, and the cost will be a piece of what they value; something they believe they do not possess enough of, and that is their public projection of manhood. They must learn that the sword cuts two ways and that there is a decent probability that it will come swinging back at them. This was well understood twenty-five years ago. If this is not done, nothing will change. There are many times when passivity will work, and when it is the preferable route to a goal. This is an exception.

Because of your ability to engage in strong rhetoric at TMPCafe, and to hold your own opinion in the face of strong dissent, I believed you would understand, I am sorry that you did not, and apologise. Still, there was more than just sarcasm in the previous post: It will validate in many specific cases. Football spectating has a strong underlying homoerotic component for many. Look closely at the fans the next time football is on a TV near you. Why was there such outrage about a woman's exposed pastied nipple at a Superbowl halftime festivities? It was well beyond what can be attributed to American Puritanism. I've played a lot of football in my life. This included being part of sandlot games when I was far and away the oldest player. I stopped in my mid 30s, because I decided the one or two day rebound from the twists and scrapes were not worth what I derived from playing, and instead I played racquetball for well over a decade once to several times a week. Now I slowed that down quite substantially, and have begun to play tennis again, because it is much lower impact, and I am not getting younger. I do not do this for the competition. It really isn't about winning. There is a state of mind I can reach when I play some sports, that I have a difficult time finding doing anything else. It is a release of everything mental, except a very tightly focused present reality, where almost the totality of my consciousness dissipates, and I am reaction; a kind of being now. It refreshes and intoxicates me. Watching a football game on TV or from the stands is boring at the best of times, and always a waste of time which could have been better spent.

I am glad Ellen, you had me worried, feeling a bit guilty, and thinking I'd misjudged. Besides, look what I just found, a Fox news analysis that's just wrong from so many different angles.

Fox News gets ahold of a lackey executive in the Jets organisation, Matt Higgins, senior vice president of business operations, who immediately points a finger of blame at the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA), which manages the stadium. Senior VPs are often only patsy targets with high-falutin' sounding names set-up to take flack for senior executives,

Fox got lucky and gets a guy who wears two hats on the same executive board, George Zoffinger, NJSEA President and CEO. I think that a publicly published telephone number is a part of the management contract, and maybe even that Zoffinger too is nothing but a front shill to shield the financial principles of NJSEA from unwanted attention. First thing, Zoffinger admits impotence, then points the finger of blame at the NJ Sate Police. After that he offered up this as a rationalisation:

Zoffinger said that for the 2007 football season, eight women were tossed out of Giants Stadium for indecent exposure, seven of them from Jets games and one from a Giants game. So far, he said, a total of 148 people have been thrown out of Jets games and 35 have been arrested for bad behavior, compared to 174 ejections and 44 arrests at Giants games.

But punishing the males for their derogatory cat-calling isn't easy, he contended, partly because of the large number of raucous fans at games and partly because cheering doesn't necessarily warrant disciplinary action if it isn't accompanied by foul language, object-throwing or other behavior that is against the law.

"In a crowd of people chanting, it is extremely difficult to single out a person you would eject or arrest," said Zoffinger. "We crack down as much as we can. If a crowd of 100 is chanting, 'Take off your top!', we try to convince them it's not a good idea. We often get ridiculed for trying to do that. But as abhorrent as it is, I'm not sure it's a crime. ... We can only do so much."

One thing they can do, he said, is nab the women who bare their breasts and the men who pressure them by using obscenities.

"We arrest the women because that's a crime," Zoffinger said. "If [the men] say, 'Show me your f— t—, we can arrest them. If there is bad, vulgar language involved, yes, we do eject them, every single time. ... Boorish behavior will not be tolerated."

Catherine Donaldson-Evans, "NFL, Giants Stadium in Hot Water for Breast-Baring Ritual Among Fans", Fox News, November 20, 2007

 

That's right youse ladies; you're in Northern Jersey now, not the Pine Barrens, and at the Meadowlands during a football came for rudy's sake; where's your respect? Keep your breasts properly attired at all times while on the Meadowlands property during football season, and when we feel like seeing breasts, we'll head over to Tony Soprano's strip club, where we can deal with them on our terms.

Donaldson-Evans worked so hard on this piece, she actually grabbed a pull quote from an earlier broadcast Fox News discussion panel for the 'feminist' view:

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf lambasted the "Girls Gone Wild" types of stadium shenanigans as "barbaric" and "reprehensible," and said the practice could lead to sexual violence.

"This is a sign of the degradation of public morality in America," the "Beauty Myth" author fumed during a FOX News Channel panel discussion. "I don’t want my daughter to be exposed to this."

A feminist writer gets a double book plug for one appearance on Fox News? Quick check the publisher for Murdoch ownership. Somehow I have the sneaky suspicion that Naomi won't have to change her lifestyle much to successfully keep her daughter away from the Meadowlands Gate D on football Sunday, when the Jets are at Home. It's not like she has to go out and dump her season's tickets cheap on the open market.

The NFL is no stranger to the problem of public breast-baring, thanks to the very famous and very costly "wardrobe malfunction" halftime number by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake during the 2004 Super Bowl on CBS.

"Football is about one thing — it’s about testosterone," said Steve Mason of 710 ESPN Radio. "This isn't especially shocking. I don’t think you want to bring the kids to Gate D any time soon."

Mason is a testosterone connoisseur, and educated in the intricacies of provenance that are a part of its varied bouquet, He can discern it origins, blindfolded on aroma alone, whether it be Gate D at The Meadowlands, or from any of the public restroom facilities along the NYC Subway Routes, or at LaGuardia,and JFK.

----------------------------

Hello Twin Cities! Are you ready for the RNC's 2008 Convention?

This actually surprised me. I'm out of touch, I guess.

Of all pregnancy-associated injury deaths (n = 1993), 617 (31.0%) women died as a result of homicide, ranking homicide as the second leading cause of total reported injury deaths among pregnant women and postpartum women, following deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents (44.1%). The rest of the pregnancy-associated injury deaths were attributed to unintentional injuries (12.7%), suicide (10.3%), and other (2.0%). Analyses in this report are based on these 617 pregnancy-associated homicide cases, which represent 8.4% of the total 7342 reported deaths. A matched birth certificate was available for 98% (n = 305) of these pregnancy-associated homicide deaths that occurred after a live birth (n = 311), and a matched fetal death certificate was available for 93% (n = 13) of the deaths that occurred after a stillbirth (n = 14).

Jeani Chang, MPH, Cynthia J. Berg, MD, MPH, Linda E. Saltzman, PhD, and Joy Herndon, MS, "Homicide: A Leading Cause of Injury Deaths Among Pregnant and Postpartum Women in the United States, 1991–1999", American Journal of Public Health, 2005 March

Homicide is an infrequent event but is a leading cause of death for women of reproductive age. Jeani Chang, et als.

So, recognizing that factoid ----

Why then, can it be concluded -- solely on the basis that the woman's death by homicide occurred within 12 months of actual or anticipated partum -- that the death was "pregnancy-associated" -- a term pregnant with meaning?

Ah, Chalmers Johnson -- our own St John searching out the great American polity for signs and portents of the coming Armageddon.

Whenever I think of football I remember the quote from Rollerball when the corporate boss was trying to cool off Johnathan E's spontaneous superstardom: The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. Thus I lost interest when Joe Montana retired, not being a corporate lackey to the best of my ability. In Paleofootball it was the LA Ram's uncanny Les Richter - he retired and I lost interest.  In Baseball, Willy Mayes retirement turned the game into grey mayonaise for me.  

In Richter's day NFL slaries were around $15K, and players had to (unsuccessfully) negotiate fifty bucks for each pre-season game, and items like per diem $12 and a ticket home, laundry $15 and so on.  Of course a Snickers bar only cost a dime then,...

So, yes, I'm bored too with professional sports.  It's the same old plot, played over and over into eternity.   

Neoboho

Twelve months post-partum is the time frame used for "pregnancy-associated", and I started noticing references to the term in published work about the early 90's. this was the best study I located in about a 45min search, although my searches for medical studies is a bit inhibited, in that I do not have access to many paid subscription journals, nor am I likely to subscribe, and a useful hack of mine for about 2 1/2 years has gone l33t mainstream, so it is itself of limited utility.

This study was actually fairly cautious about finding a causal relationship between "pregnancy associated" deaths, and deaths in which pregnancy was a cause. The first paragraph in results:

For the years 1991 through 1999, 7342 deaths were reported to the PMSS. A majority of the reported deaths (57.2%) were pregnancy-related (e.g., they occurred during or within 1 year of pregnancy and were causally related to pregnancy). A total of 1993 deaths (27.1%) were pregnancy associated and injury related. The remaining 1149 (15.7%) deaths included those that were pregnancy associated but not caused by injuries or pregnancy complications and those that were not pregnancy associated (e.g., the time interval between the end of pregnancy and maternal death exceeded 1 year).

Then in the Discussion section:

When interpreting this report’s finding that homicide is the second leading cause of injury-related death among pregnant and postpartum women, it is important to note that our findings regarding homicides involving pregnant and postpartum women are similar to national statistics on homicide among all women of reproductive age (regardless of whether they are pregnant or not).

Statistical risk factors in women's deaths that occur from conception until 12 months post-partum (including fetal deaths) was how the results of this study were broadly presented.

they also mentioned that data dcollections varied from differing locales, and some other problems with even distribution, but omitted one I believe is germane. That is a possible over reporting from Urban Hospitals distorting their finding that living in an urban greatly increased risk. My rationale for this is that urban centers often tend to be community or MedSchool related, and both are more likely to keep records usable for statistical analysis than are small rural hospitals.

I was trying to be nice about correcting the misinformation that homicide was the leading cause of death in pregnant women, without using a hand sledge, although I am still surprised by the data. In case you're thinking that the 12 month post-partum inclusion in the population skews the data in a manner that understates homicide in pregnant women; it seems that the reverse may be the case, but the mention of this was formatted without good clarity. a sort of apples and oranges comparison:

our findings that more than half of the pregnancy-associated homicides occurred among postpartum women (compared with just one fifth of the women whose deaths occurred during pregnancy)

This is a statistic that cuts both directions.  It reflects a predilection of males towards aggressive and dominating methods, as well as a a female predilection toward passivity and acceptance. Both sides need to be worked on if there is ever going to be a change.  A belief that acting violently will result in punishment affects behavior.  Believing that his physical violence against a partner will bring about a future where he awakens super glued to a sheet or underneath a sheet that has been stapled to the bed would have positive results. Better would be the belief that it will result with his being ostracised from his social group.  An even better behavior modifier would be not being attracted to males prone to violence in the first place.  Women need to understand why an assertiveness of themselves, alone as an individual, is an essential element of life.

Also, the 1988 datasets that show a very high correlation between spousal separation and violence caused injuries are 2 decades old.  Do you know of any more current data, and if so, does it indicate any trend away from this?   If not, it indicates a complete failure across the board of all attempts to mitigate spousal abuse. Two decades is long enough to perceive changes in society.  Much of this is so alien that it is difficult to comprehend.  Both my upbringing and personal choices in friends cuts against the grain.

Do you honestly believe that spousal relationships are a slave/master OR dominant/submissive arrangement? I certainly do not want a relationship like that. I prefer a partner who'll watch my back, not show me hers down on one knee.

As I wrote previously though, if women who break-up with abusive partners are also significantly more at risk to being injured in violent acts, and this extra risk has not greatly decreased over the last two decades, there is an across the board failure in societal attempts to decrease domestic violence.

This is all foreign to me. I once got mad enough in an argument with a girlfriend that I body-punched a refrigerator hard enough to fracture the knuckle that attaches the little finger to my right hand. I moved out the next morning, which was before I'd even seen a doctor about my hand. It was out of my house, and I picked-up an out of town contract job for 6 months shortly after to give her a chance to get it together and move out, while I paid the mortgage, taxes and the utility bills. It seemed fair, we'd been together 6 years, but there were relationship issues which were not going to be resolved. I will not live in a combative relationship, life is too short. We've remained friends.

Victims are often a causative factor in the victimisation, but you have gone way over the top with what you intimate.

I am willing to wager that there is a very high correlation with males who abuse their spouses, and males who had a father who abused their spouse(s). It's a weird-assed aberrant behavior that had to be learned somewhere. If not their dad, maybe a close uncle or two. Another thing I'm willing to wager on: it is unlikely that severe injuries from an abusive spouse happened in the first incident of abuse; it is more often a behavior that escalated over time.

If someone walks out into an intersection because it is their right-of-way without checking for cross traffic first, and gets hit by a drunk running a red light, were they irresponsible? Is that also "blaming the victim"?

If I explain to someone who downloaded an email-virus and ran the program, because Windows does not enable viewing file extensions by default, so the email attachment's filetype was hidden behind somfilename.txt.exe, but all they saw was somefilename.txt, and clicked it on, infecting their computer; is that blaming the victim or explaining what happened? If it happens to them again, shouldn't the explanation be given with a bit more force?

If a friend shows up on my doorstep late at night battered and bruised by her loser old man, I give her first aid, a place to sleep, but a day or two later accepts the loser's apology, then returns to him, and I call her a fool; am I blaming the victim, or being a friend?

You intimate evil in what I've said, but none of us live in a vacuum, and being beat up by a partner multiple times is not tempting-the-gods, nor is it suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's playing the lottery with the mortgage money; it's looking for the run-away train standing on the railroad tracks.