Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
No you aren’t, at least, not to a lot of people. Kane was the second highest-selling jersey last year behind Crosby. It’s not because a huge number of jersey buyers don’t believe the victim or want to normalise sexual assault, it’s because it’s a hockey jersey. In the same way people can enjoy Woody Allen the director and not Woody Allen the person, people can love Patrick Kane the player and not Patrick Kane the person, and wearing his jersey shows support for his professional life, not his personal one.
Without getting into the discussion of “is being accused enough to be treated as guilty,” I’d say a lot of people rightly have no problem separating the man from the athlete, but I understand not being able to as well.
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I used to differentiate - I thought there was no reason to not enjoy R Kelly's music just because he peed on that girl and has a history of raping underage girls. Then I had to confront R Kelly's history, and when you know more about that man, the lyrics of 'I Believe I Can Fly' take on a different meaning.
Bill Cosby is the person who got me into stand up comedy. When I was 11 years old, my parents bought me a 20th Century Masters CD of Cosby's greatest hits. Less than six weeks before that entire story blew up, I had a twenty minute conversation with a friend about how Bill Cosby was, in fact, the best stand up comedian of the last 100 years.
My mother is as militant-feminist as it gets, and wouldn't stop asking me if I'd seen Midnight In Paris. No, I haven't - Woody Allen rapes.
The art is not separate from the individual. Patrick Kane is a great hockey player, and a terrible human. There was evidence of this before his rape accusation, when this millionaire beat up a cab driver over pocket change. That's a bad dude. His goal celebration literally contains a finger blast. #### that guy. He plays on a team with Toews and Keith - if you want a jersey, you have two options who didn't beat up an innocent man and weren't accused of sexual assault. Kane's jersey being the 2nd best seller behind Crosby is frankly disgusting.
These people aren't our friends. I don't know R Kelly. I don't know Floyd. I don't know Kobe. I don't know Ribeiro. I don't know Gilmour. I don't know Voynov. I know that what they have done means I won't ever wear there gear, and neither will my kids (if/when they exist). Why is there a dividing line about what they do at work just because what they do is extremely publicly visible?
If I were a machinist, and I was a great machinist, the best machinist who'd ever worked a drill bit, and I worked in the Foothills industrial park, my friends and colleagues and clients would not say 'oh, but you should see him work a lathe' (I don't even know if that's how that works) when confronted with evidence of my raping.
I'm not saying stop being a fan of the team, I'm not even saying stop being a fan of the guy - there's enough reasonable doubt to let someone convince themselves Patrick Kane is not a rapist. He wasn't charged.
I just don't see how you put these names on your own back and walk around. There's a difference between ignorance and wilful ignorance, and I guess I find the jersey thing so reprehensible because it seems to fall very much on the wilful side of the ledger.