Peter Croce Project

I suppose it’s true that the members of Spur Posse, a group of relatively affluent Southern California adolescent boys, are also ‘regular guys.’ Which makes their sexual predation and homosocial competition as chilling as it is revealing of something at the heart of American masculinity. Before a large group of young women and girls—one as young as ten!—came forward to claim that members of Spur Posse had sexually assaulted and raped them, these guys would have been seen as typical high school fellas. Members of the group competed with one another to have sex with the most girls and kept elaborately coded scores of their exploits by referring to various athletes’ names as a way of signifying the number of conquests. Thus a reference ot ‘Reggie Jackson’ would refer to 44, the number on his jersey, while ‘David Robinson’ would signify 50 different conquests. In this way, the boys could publicly compete with one another without the young women understanding that they were simply grounds for homosocial competition.

When some of these young women accused the boys of assault and rape, many residents of their affluent suburb were shocked. The boys’ mothers, particularly, winced when they heard that their fifteen-year-old sons had sex with 44 or 50 girls. A few expressed outrage. But the boys’ fathers glowed with pride. ‘That’s my boy,’ they declared in chorus. They accused the girls of being sluts. And we wonder where the kids get it from?