In response to the gang-rape case involving members of Duke’s lacrosse team, Dave Jamieson writes on Slate about the unique messed-up-edness of lacrosse, framing it as a perfect storm of jockdom, class elitism, and the permissiveness of contemporary university life:
More than any other sport, lacrosse represents the marriage of athletic aggression and upper-class entitlement. While a squash player might consider himself upper-crust, he can’t prove his superiority by checking you onto your ass the way a lacrosse defenseman can. And while lacrosse may share with football a love for contact, it is far more socioeconomically insulated than the grid game (except in odd places like Maryland, where it’s managed to cross class lines). Some aficionados take pride in the fact that their sport was invented by Native Americans, but I don’t imagine many members of the Onondaga Nation end up playing lax at Colgate.
Still, how could college lacrosse players be any more misogynous than your typical football-team steakhead? Perhaps it’s because, unlike their football brethren, an unusually large proportion of college lacrosse players spend their high school years in sheltered, all-boys academies before heading off to liberal co-ed colleges. Most guys from single-sex schools are able to adjust. Others join the lacrosse team. The worst of this lot become creatures that are, in the words of a friend of mine, “half William Kennedy Smith, half Lawrence Phillips.”
Of course, at my alma mater, we didn’t have issues like this. Our ultimate frisbee team was too stoned to get into trouble.
There’s also probably something to all the carrying around of a large, flare-headed stick.