Who you gonna blame
The star of the game
Or the no-name girl in the marching band?
Quarterback, Kira Isabelle
I just heard the CBC play some songs from the CCMA show (Canadian Country Music Awards). First, a sensitive song about a young girl in the marching band who is date-raped by the star quarterback of the football team, who then posts pictures of her naked on the internet. (The chorus is “Who you gonna blame/The star of the game/or the no-name girl in the marching band?”)
The ever-tactful CBC followed this with a presentation of “Day Drinking” by Little Big Town. “I know you know what I’m thinking/Why don’t we do a little day drinking? Day drinking! Day drinking!… Ready get set, baby here we go”. Sung with that bombastic pseudo-rock stadium gusto: woohoo!
Maybe the CBC programmers were doing a little day-drinking of their own.
Incidentally– or not– I note that line in the chorus– “who you gonna blame/ the star of the game/or the no-name girl in the marching band” captures nicely a sentiment expressed by many women about the issue of date-rape, but which I find problematic in this sense: it is no doubt true that too often, the famous athlete or favorite son or celebrity miscreant, is automatically believed because so many figures in authority have a vested interest in believing him. After all, he is the star; she is a nobody. Maybe they really believe him, maybe not, but she, after all, is still a nobody.
And I note that “Quarterback” is not necessarily about date-rape– it might well only be about betrayal, though the chorus makes less sense that way.
I simply point out that reversing the automatic belief– which many women seem to do– is equally offensive, and when the argument is put that way– who are you going to believe?— the implication is that the woman should always be believed instead of the man. The implication is that women never lie when claiming that the sex was non-consensual.
And the ongoing curse of these issues is that, in the majority of cases, it is simply her word against his. Confronted with this issue, many women (and many sympathetic men) respond with “why would she lie about something like that?”. That’s not an argument, and even if it were, the answer is not that hard to find: is it so hard to believe that woman might consent to sex with a man because she believes it is the beginning of a relationship, but, soon after, when she finds out she was used, she wants him punished?
Or there might be a more exotic explanation, as in the case of Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair.