Photos: ‘Hate Week’ stoopidity abounds in Iowa City, Ames

Welcome to the Red Zone, the three months overlapping fall semester and football season during which the majority of sexual assaults on college campuses occur. The fourth week of the Red Zone this year is “Hate Week” in Ames and Iowa City, when students embrace their rivalry by trash-talking on bedsheets draped from their windows, porches and balconies. It all culminates in the Cy-Hawk game at Kinnick Stadium on Saturday evening.

Hate Week signs are not all bad. There are some decent puns, though few clever enough to be noteworthy, and plenty of harmless buffoonery and posturing; “Idiot Stoopid Uuniversity” and “Bitch Im Herky” do it for me. There are crass references to current events and figures — Dolly Parton (“ISU Killed Dolly”), Lindsay Clancey, Charlie Kirk (“The Better Kirk has Sadly Passed”), Epstein, Diddy, the hazing video at a UI frat that went viral earlier this year, Matt Campbell transferring to Penn State and taking many ISU players with him.

There are allegations the rival team lacks good hygiene (“State Fans Wash with Manure”) or sexual experience (“ISU Fans Think a Clitoris is a Dinosaur”), and you’ll find endless incest jokes (“Reverse Cowgirl Banned in Ames; Can’t Turn Back on Family”), hog references (“State Humps Pigs,” “24 million Pigs in Iowa and they all go to U of I”) and a few gross scatological narratives that will make you gag.

One of the most worst — and most common — motifs is sexual assualt. It’s not the public depiction of sex or aesthetic crudeness I dispute. I’m an advocate for celebrating sexuality, including consensual dominance and submission, in all kinds of art — even mascot smut if that’s your thing. I am no prude or pearl-clutcher.

But I revile the exploitation of rape culture as a celebration of collegiate sports, especially given the prevalence of sexual assault among college students — including campuses on which Gender Studies programs have been defunded.

Outside of the odes to rape culture and the harmless buffoonery, there’s still plenty of cruelty flapping in the breeze. Fatphobic, transphobic, homophobic and racist insults are evidence that the less-evolved are still among us, even in higher education. At least it’s easier to explain those to your kids as you drive them to school: “The people who made those signs are assholes.”

I’m not a football fan, but I’m the mother of my own college student now, and this is a call to parents everywhere: come get your undergrads and talk to them about consent and sexual assault — and the fundamentals of a good joke. 

Jordan Sellergren is the publisher of Little Village.