Julep: same-sex schools, underage drinking, and parenting fail

Girls, I imagine you've all seen the media coverage about Savannah Dietrich ... today's C-J article really got me thinking. Have you seen it?

My first response to the headline - these guys took photos while they sexually assaulted a young woman because they thought it would be funny - was, what little @$$holes. And I still think that.

But then I thought: when you were in college, would you have been the least bit surprised to hear that a bunch of guys you knew were sitting around drinking one night, one of them passed out, and the other guys took his pants off and took "funny" photos of themselves messing with his genitalia? I wouldn't swear that didn't actually happen at least once while I was in college. And if it had (or did), I am sure those guys showed a bunch of people the photos, and the other guys laughed, and the girls rolled their eyes and said, "I didn't need to see that, y'all are such @$$holes."

See, if they had done that to a guy, society would have said it was funny. It's just not funny to do that to a girl.

Personally, I don't think it's funny either way. But to me, this whole situation offers a troubling insight into the lack of sensitivity that can develop when boys spend all of their time around other boys. Nobody has ever called them @$$holes for doing this kind of stuff. And they have lost the boundary line between behavior that may be considered funny in the locker room and behavior that is appropriate in a mixed-gender context.

I also see this as a serious failure of parenting. Those boys have mamas and daddies who should have been teaching them for the past sixteen years that you don't touch other people's private parts (or let them touch yours) without explicit permission, and you don't give or ask for that permission when people have been drinking, and you don't humiliate your friends and acquaintances for the humor value you can get out of it. Did they think their sons would magically absorb the concepts of dignity and respect for others because they sent them to Catholic school? Think again, people. You've sent your boys to spend 35 hours a week (more, since these boys are athletes) surrounded by two thousand other teenage boys. You have an obligation to counteract the hothouse of hormones they are stewing in.

And while we are on the subject of poor parenting ... what the hell were Savannah Dietrich's parents doing while their teenage daughter was entertaining a bunch of teenage friends at their home and drinking herself into oblivion? Were they some of those morons who say, "well, they're going to be drinking anyway, I'd rather have them doing it here?" I respect Savannah for sticking to her guns and speaking out about the prosecution, but I hope she has learned a lesson about her own boundaries. And her parents get no gold stars from me that their daughter didn't know better than to get blotto drunk with a couple of @$$holes.