Barstool Sports, for the uninitiated, is the broquivalent of those gossip blogs that talk about how fat female celebrities are, interspersed with dumb jokes about the girth of the blogger's dick. They're also hosting a series of parties at locations around the country. But some students at Northeastern University say the Barstool Bros aren't welcome, largely because they think rape is hilarious.


Barstool's Blackout Party (the "worlds biggest blacklight party") is scheduled to come to Northeastern on Feb. 2. According to an editorial in Northeastern's Huntington News written by student members of a group called Knockout Barstool, "it sounds like a good time until you realize that the blog is riddled with writing that perpetuates negative ideas of what it means to be a "man" through degrading women and normalizing rape culture." What are they talking about? Let's take a tour of some of Barstool's grosser statements.

On rape: "Just to make friends with the feminists I'd like to reiterate that we don't condone rape of any kind at our Blackout Parties in mid January. However if a a chick passes out that's a grey area though." On the hiring of a new TV sports reporter:

At the very least NESN should offer me prima nocte with Jenny Dell for nailing this before anybody else. Anyway great hire by them. The beautiful thing here is I'm already in love with Jenny Dell so it dovetails perfectly into me stalking her without skipping a beat. [...] PS –- I wonder if Jen Royle still thinks you don't have to be an absolute smoke bomb to get this job? Welcome to the real world honey. Everybody thinks like us, they just won't come out and say it. On a game of tag that led to a boy's sexual assault charge:

I sexually assaulted chicks on the Tag playground on purpose. That shit doesn't just accidentally happen. So the moral of the story here is that this little 6 year old is definitely probably gay. Not some sort of rapist. Doesn't deserve sexual assault on his record. But he's gotta have the gay. Because in this life you don't accidentally grab cock. Whether you're playing tag or not. You touch another man's dick, you've got the gay. Plain and simple. So expunge the assault charges off this kid's record and just stamp his file with a big old warning "GAY." Let the other kids in school know to protect their dicks next time they're waiting to be tagged unfrozen during Freeze Tag. On more rape:

[E]ven though I never condone rape if you're a size 6 and you're wearing skinny jeans you kind of deserve to be raped right? I mean skinny jeans don't look good on size 0 and 2 chicks, nevermind size 6′s. Because unless you're Jessica Biel they just totally smother the ass. So it's almost like this guy had no choice but to teach her a lesson.


I can't say I'm particularly shocked by any of this shit. Awful dudes have been filling the internet with rape jokes for other awful dudes to laugh at since there was internet to fill. And Barstool Sports isn't even especially original — its style owes a lot to the aforementioned brossip blogs, like The Superficial and Drunken Stepfather. Still, just because their grossness isn't new doesn't mean it deserves university support. KO Barstool tells us the Northeastern administration has tweeted that it doesn't officially endorse the Blackout Party, but hasn't issued a statement beyond that. In the editorial, the KO campaigners write,

We demand Northeastern University and its administration stand for women and denounce Barstool Sports and the NU Blackout Party. These organizations do not represent the values of our community nor our institution.

It's hard being the ones standing up against rape jokes, especially when your adversary is also offering college kids a big party. Comments on KO Barstool's Tumblr speak to the difficulty of being the one calling out bro grossness ("please keep this protest going because I literally laugh at every time Barstool puts up a post about making fun of you guys, it's absolute gold"). And KO Barstool has been threatened online by someone calling himself "El Pres" — in response to the Huntington News editorial, he wrote, "I'm going to rape you for that." "El Presidente" is the handle of Barstool's editor. Whether Barstool's "presidente" himself is taking the time to threaten college students with rape in their newspaper comments sections, it's clear that a number of people at Northeastern and elsewhere regard KO Barstool as feminazi bonerkillers who hate fun. Which is too bad because every time someone equates being a played-out, bro-y asshole who makes stale rape jokes with having a good time, a piece of actual fun dies.

Letter: Knockout Barstool on the Blackout Tour [Huntington News]