Photo Courtesy of Zach Catanzareti
Barstool Sports is a plague among young men. The brand is built on toxic masculinity, racism and misogyny. People – more specifically white, college-aged dude bros – eat it up. This past week, Insider released a story involving sexual misconduct allegations against Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports and Asshole-in-Chief. These allegations – which Portnoy adamantly denies – are infuriating, but ultimately unsurprising. This is a man who built an empire on harassing women on the Internet. One would hope that allegations like these would encourage people to finally jump off the Barstool bandwagon. However, die-hard fans or “Stoolies” uphold the vile standards which Barstool and Portnoy pride themselves on.
Portnoy’s a real stand-up guy who knows his audience. Whether he’s making rape jokes, saying derogatory things about women or using racial slurs, his fans are ready to stand by him and attack anyone who dares to criticize their fearless leader. Portnoy famously deemed himself “uncancellable” in 2020, and that unfortunately seems to remain true today. His adoring cronies stuck by his side and “canceled cancel culture” by buying record numbers of his likely mediocre frozen pizza. A strange response, but what else would you do when your idol is face to face with “woke cancel culture?”
It’s a shame – again, no surprise – that this 44-year-old man child has so many people in his corner. Portnoy’s culture of misogyny and abuse is an 18-year tradition, and he’s recruited the best and brightest to help him further his agenda. He and his cohorts have said and written some pretty horrific stuff in their time with Barstool. Highly inappropriate comments about minors, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism … the list goes on seemingly forever . What’s even crazier is the sheer amount of women that work for the company. Their management team bravely asks, “How can our company be misogynistic when it’s run by women?”
Erika Nardini became Barstool’s CEO in 2016. She seems to love the culture there. In May, Nardini was quoted in a Forbes article saying, “One of the greatest things about Barstool Sports is that we embrace people from all different places, with different ways of thinking.” Erika, I don’t know if you should embrace Barstool’s record of racial slurs and sexual harassment. Those are not “different ways of thinking.” That’s just being a piece of shit, and enabling that behavior is disgusting.
The fact that this company remains successful is mind boggling. Sure, a casual sports media outlet is something people can get behind. But everything else Barstool and Portnoy stand for reflect issues and bigotry that run deep in the U.S. as a whole. The way Stoolies have reacted following the allegations against Portnoy reemphasizes the lengths his fans will go to defend predatory behavior. It’s hard to say what the final straw will be for Stoolies – if there ever is one. Even if these allegations manifest a reckoning for Portnoy, the culture he’s established goes far beyond his presence at Barstool. There is nothing about Portnoy or Barstool that is worth defending. Supporting Barstool does nothing but show your morals are as low as theirs.
