While we were busy visiting family and such in North Dakota, we didn’t do much (OK, any) of our regular blog reading. As such, we missed the start of the Erin Andrews saga, by which someone apparently shot video of ESPN’s Andrews naked through the peephole of a hotel room in which she was staying.

Most people, of course, realize that this is the worst kind of sick act and invasion of privacy. On the other hand, there’s a part of us that isn’t shocked that something like this could and apparently did happen — despite how terrible it is.

To the vast majority of male sports fans on the Internet, the Andrews explosion is fairly harmless. She is an attractive woman working in sports who happened to come along at a time when that would be a big deal. Bloggers and commenters can make the requisite borderline statements concerning Andrews without creating a more serious obsession in their minds. That said, the collective weight of the Andrews explosion is almost certainly a factor in the awful thing that has happened.

We would liken this, in some ways, to parental warnings on video games or some such thing. They exist because one of every X kids might get the wrong idea about the difference between real and fake. And, similarly, we would argue that the person who made the video — much like the kid who might exhibit violence after playing a video game — didn’t act specifically because of the blogosphere’s obsession with Andrews (or because of specific violence in the game). The tendency or ability to do such a thing already existed in that person. To say otherwise would be to deny, to an extent, personal accountability — something we abhor.

But we will make sure that everyone within shouting distance understands that while those who had some fun with the Andrews meme along the way aren’t complicit in the crime, they are part of a fabric that has a distinct dark side.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.