Hey teenage boys! Getting bored with fantasy football? Tanking in your NBA fantasy standings? Blew it with your MLB fantasy draft picks?
Why not try forming a Fantasy Slut League instead?
It’s simple: male varsity athletes compete with each other to rack up points for documented sexual activity with female students (you can work out the details of what constitutes “documented,” and the girls you draft don’t have to know they’re drafted), but you get the point.
Piedmont, California, is a wealthy island in the middle of Oakland.
It is nominally – and literally – a city on a hill, overlooking the rest of Oakland, and it was here last week at the – insert “irony” sound affect – Annual Freshman Assembly On Date Rape Prevention, that the existence of the Fantasy Slut League was revealed to parents and students (that is, the few students who didn’t already know about it).
One of my former bar managers attended Piedmont High, and while the FSL wasn’t around back then – it has existed as an “open secret” at PHS for the last five or six years only – he told me of house parties where wealthy parents would leave their teens alone for the weekend or weeks at a time, and mountains of coke reminiscent of “Boogie Nights” – and its attendant behavior – were there for the taking.
Piedmont churns out the leaders of tomorrow: the bankers, lawyers, doctors and other white collars who will call the shots. My bar manager, a heavily tattooed chap who loves nothing more than to spend the day at the skate park, is the exception to the rule.
Okay, so how bad is this?
The school principal issued a statement condemning the behavior, but also saying “because we do not have specifics about participants or victims, our focus is on education and understanding moving forward, not discipline for past activities.” The school did conduct something of an investigation, though, and made note of a few things:
“Many students (male and female) were aware of it and participated.”
“Participation often involved pressure/manipulation by older students that included alcohol to impair judgment/control and social demands to be popular, feel included and attractive to upperclassmen.”
“Fear that participation in the league could have in-school discipline consequences and affect future college acceptance.”
The reactions from Piedmont parents ranged from “duh!” to “this is borderline rape.” I checked out the local on-line newspaper, the Piedmont Patch, and stopped reading after about 12 pages of single spaced comments (the comment section is at 19 pages and growing).
Let’s let Piedmont parents speak for themselves:
“They only care because they got caught and how it might negatively impact them and not the ones they took advantage of.”
“It could be legally defined (and in my opinion as a mother of a 15 yr old girl who attends PHS) as rape.”
Another female commented,
“There are no criminal allegations or instances here. Seems to me the bigger problem is the use of the term ‘slut’ and its perception that all the varsity athletes disrespect women. Guys try to hook up with girls everywhere whether they call it a fantasy league or not. And why are most of the outraged posters on here women? If the girls varsity teams had a ‘fantasy manwhore league,’ would everyone be as outraged? I doubt it.”
“Comparing this to RAPE is insulting to those who have actually suffered from rape.”
And what do the students themselves have to say?
“As a PHS grad I find this disgusting but not surprising. The administration at PHS is weakened by ignorant wealthy parents who take no responsibility for the actions of their spoiled rotten children.”
“Maybe we should have made an Entitled Douchebag League and tallied up every time a guy was sexist or derogatory towards a girl.”
“Girls, young and old, attended ‘DPs,’ or ‘dance parties’ and drank alcohol (during pregames which happens at your houses, parents) without any input or encouragement from guys. The only thing the ‘league’ did was tally any time a girl hooked up with a guy at one of these parties. What the parents need to understand is that you should be blaming the parties your 15-18 year old daughters go to not the league. Regardless of if this league existed girls and guys would still be drinking and partying and ‘hooking up’ at the same exact rate if the league did not exist.”
This last comment jibes 100% with my own high school experience.
On weekends you went to house parties. Boys got drunk. Girls got drunk. And everyone prayed to get lucky with the opposite sex – whether that meant talking about movies you both liked…
…or finding a spare bedroom or dirty futon in the middle of the living room.
There were no on-line forums back then in which to brag about (or more accurately, exaggerate or invent) your successes, but we certainly talked about them at lunch on Mondays.
“The FSL does not motivate behaviors, it is a forum for recounting them.”
This reminds me of something my son, who plays varsity football at his high school, said when I asked him what his coaches typically say in the locker room during half time (my son’s football team is 0 – 6, by the way).
“Football doesn’t make character, it reveals it.”
I asked my son if his school had a Fantasy Slut League. He said no. After all this press, I wonder if they’ll be putting one together soon.
And what of the perpetrators? What do they have to say?
“Hi, I’m ‘x,’ and I am one of the founding fathers of FSL. I helped set this league up because me and my bro’s threw down so hard all the time, and pulled tons of chicks (your daughters) that we thought we would spin a little twist on fantasy football and get points for various sexual encounters. Did we have parties? Yes. Did we have specific FSL parties in which we would only invite girls on teams and get them really drunk and slip them some ketamine and hook up with them? Of course not. Nobody was raped or harassed or pressured into racking up points. The girls didn’t even know about this, and even when a few found out, they took it as a challenge to try and get MVS.”
Entitled douchebag? Check. Sexist braggart? Check. Serial exaggerator? Probably. Date rapist? …
