Selective Outrage

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One of the things that a friend of mine posted on Facebook today was a story about Cincinnati Reds legend and all-time baseball hits leader Pete Rose admitting in a filed court document that he had sex with a girl who may have been underage at the time (during the heyday of the "Big Red Machine" and their back-to-back World Series championships in 1975 and 76). She and others were furious. (Quick background: Rose is suing former special counsel John Dowd, the man whose report brought Rose down over betting on baseball back in 1989, including Reds games, for "defamation of character" because Dowd claimed in a radio interview that part of the initial investigation into Rose revealed that Rose had a memorabilia dealer set Rose up with underage girls for sex during Spring Training, when they were 12-14 and Rose was 34 [and married]. As part of his explanation Rose filed a statement that admitted a sexual relationship with a girl he believed to be 16 years of age during the 1975 season.) Yeah, the guy's a sleaze ball. I've thought that for years, since he permanently shattered my respect for him after all the years of believing him when he said he didn't bet on baseball when he admitted he did. I realized then that Pete Rose, the player, was the best I ever saw; however, Pete Rose, the human, was so low he made politicians look honest. The problem, however, is that we as a society are very selective about whom we label "pedophiles" in this regard. I'll bet you a dollar to a donut hole that Pete Rose wasn't the only baseball player having sex with under-18 girls...or the only sports figure (Wilt Chamberlain and his claims of 20,000 sex partners, anyone?)...or the only celebrity. Jack Nicholson, legendary Academy Award-winning actor, said he had sex with over 2,000 women of "Every age...their mothers... some of them with their mothers.” Where was the outrage? Name a rock star in the 70s and I'll bet you they had a long line of underage girls waiting outside their dressing room every single night. The Eagles were notorious for their post-concert sex parties known as "the third encore." And, if it's the "Pete was married" part that has them outraged, two of the Eagles (Randy Meisner and Don Felder) were married when this was going on, too (in fact, Felder said in his book that it was his infidelity that broke up his marriage [duh!]). Not to mention the songs about these things: "Jailbait" by Ted Nugent (who had more than a few underage girls in his time, but now most people seem to hate him for his uber-conservative politics that make Rush Limbaugh look like Bernie Sanders), "Christine Sixteen" by Kiss, "Hot Blooded" by Foreigner ("are you old enough?"), "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police (complete with a reference to the book Lolita), "What's Your Name" by Lynyrd Skynyrd...and all those "sweet sixteen" songs. People sing along with them, cheer the singers, and don't even think about what happens. Why is that? Well, my opinion is that, in most of the cases, the groupies (my generation's definition of the word, that is) were willing participants. That's why they were at the show: to score with the band. Someone accusing a celebrity of forcing them is quite another story. Knowing that all of these celebrities were engaging in this kind of behavior (or at least suspecting it), people still bought the albums and the tickets to the movies. It's a little hypocritical to now say "shame on you, person A for doing that" while you're on the way out the door to see person "B"'s next movie. That's what happens when we have selective outrage: no one is certain of which direction the moral compass should be pointing. Here's Elton John's take on the groupie scene, the B-side to "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" in 1974: