Using and Abusing the Labor of Others: Barstool and American Chicks
by The Rival Editorial Board
Dear Readers,
We need to talk about Barstool.
Barstool AU and AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS are direct affiliates of Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports. That alone makes them complicit in a long-standing and well-documented culture of being institutionally misogynistic, racist, classist, and homophobic. Dave Portnoy is the face of Barstool Sports. Dave Portnoy has also been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, responded to his documented use of racial slurs by touting that he’s “uncancellable,” promoted right-wing conspiracies- including disinformation about the Coronavirus pandemic, and perpetuated anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes while mocking anyone who dares feel offended.
Barstool AU is Barstool. It’s but a cog in the system of an organization that promotes a culture that is toxic for everyone except for those privileged enough to overlook it (or colloquially, as Barstool would put it, the “boys'' they're saving Saturdays for). Forgive us for thinking that memes aren’t worth overlooking a tacit endorsement of abuse, but we've found ourselves asking the same question Alex Moskovitz for the American Agora posted back in January: Why does Barstool American still exist?
We digress. With our newest beef with Barstool AU and AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS we just wanted to talk. I can start first. I was at work when my phone started blowing up with Instagram notifications. Naturally, I ignored it because I attend an outrageously expensive university and I need to make enough money this summer to not starve in DC. When I saw what had happened, I was aghast. Apparently, two TikToks were made within a short period of time about the same extremely mainstream subject with the same extremely mainstream trend. Obviously, that means that we stole the idea (though we at least had the decency to use the correct pronouns for Wonk Cat). We’ll give AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS credit for being “first” by a couple of hours, as none of us even saw CHICKS’ Tik Tok until we were accused of copying it. Certainly, though, Barstool should understand that coincidences happen sometimes. (See Below)
A Tweet from The Rival American posted 4/22/21 next to a post by Stool American posted 4/23/21
Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that we used their labor for profit. That’d be pretty fucked up, right? AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS put time and effort into that, and we just took it. Too bad that seems to be the Barstool way of life.
Exchanging content for compensation isn’t anything new; that’s how Hollywood works. You exchange creative talents with the expectation of something, either money or credit. Yet with the rise of the internet and “commentary culture,” we see those expectations slipping away, and now one can submit to a meme page or to a youtube commentator and expect to receive 0 compensation, despite them using your labor for direct profit. Which in itself is messed up; people deserve something for their labor: money, respect, acknowledgment? Since Barstool and AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS have gone to this much trouble to make sure they were properly credited for a popular meme, surely they’d extend that same ethical standpoint to their own platforms, even if it is not expected of a typical meme page.
I had some free time, aka my unpaid 20-minute break at work, so I went through AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS page and counted 132 posts that I suspect are submitted content, none with credit. Some with people commenting, “hey is this you” and tagging someone completely different who seemed surprised to end up on this page, indicating that AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS did not receive this content from them, the creator, creating another ethical dilemma we’ll dive into later on. This lack of credit isn’t even limited to submitted content, they don’t even tag the person who made the Tik Tok for them, despite claiming that they deserve proper credit for all their hard work. What a shame too, because it looks like a hard working person made those posts and they deserved the credit they deserved. Now you may be asking yourself, “well, maybe they just didn’t know how to give someone credit!” Don’t worry, they quote Alexandra Cooper from Call her Daddy and still managed to give her credit. So it’s not a question of incompetence but rather laziness.
Admittedly AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS is a pretty small fish in the pond that is AU meme pages. So maybe we shouldn’t expect much from a page that can’t fight their own battles. A big fish like Barstool though? They definitely hold themselves to a higher ethical standard; after all, they are the ones that insist upon crediting AMERICAN UNIVERSITY CHICKS.
As my therapist always says, “you are not your parents'', so even though Barstool’s parent company is known for creating a more toxic environment than Chernobyl, maybe Barstool AU went out of their way to “punch up,” only making fun of people in positions around and above themselves; ie, making fun of Barstool GW/ Hoyas, or Sylvia Burwell. These are pages and people who can take the hit, not some random people existing on campus. But no, Barstool is still just for the “boys”, by the “boys”, and at the expense of everyone not part of the “boys” or what the “boys” represent.
Take the infamous “quad couples” Barstool started posting this past semester. Now are some of these “cringe”? Sure, and I agree that the “quad couple” probably should have toned it down, but at the same time, they are human beings. Human beings with feelings, and who more than likely did not consent to be submitted to Barstool and then ridiculed in front of thousands of other people, and people who while, yes, probably deserved a few awkward looks by people passing by, still didn’t deserve to be cyber bullied about it.
Barstool American capitalizes by using their platform to punch down. What’s more, the network of Barstool affiliated accounts often pile on and mock anyone who raises a concern that their posts perhaps go to far.
Other posts attempt to publicly shame others for far more innocuous things. One post makes fun of a man who appears to be an AU faculty member sitting on the bus and reading a book about feminism. Another shows a student apparently boxing his shadow outside of KOGOD, and another reposts a video of a prospective student being overjoyed just for Barstool’s comment section to deem him cringe for simply being happy to have the chance to go to the same school that we all chose to come to. Did Barstool ask these people if they consented to appearing on their platform? Most of Barstool’s posts are user submissions, often featuring such incidences where the people in question likely had no idea they were even at risk of being photographed or filmed. Are these incidences really worth a couple of laughs at the risk that the people in these videos feel violated or taken advantage of? Especially for something as frankly dull as reading on the bus, or god forbid, missing the bus.
When the “cringe” well runs dry, Barstool likes to panhandle on main. They beg their audience to submit content, and yet at the same time blame those same people for being “boring”. Admitting that they cannot maintain their audience without their audience doing the hard labor of content creation. So much so, that they recycle posts, acting as if it’s a new submission a year apart. Say what you want about The Rival, but we don’t try and trick our audience with old memes, and we make it a priority to always try to punch up instead of down.
Why make new content when you can just recycle it?
Maybe at this point, you’re questioning, “doesn’t Barstool give back to their audience by hosting events?” And sure, they do co-host events, but is that really an even exchange? Their audience is still paying for it, this time quite literally. Barstool co-hosts parties and events to boost the Barstool brand, to get us to look past the many flaws in their organizational values, and ultimately create more money for problem child millionaires like Dave Portnoy.
Barstool does not even use its unquestionably large platform for the good of the larger community. They have over 12,000 followers on Instagram, and just a few over a thousand followers on Twitter, and yet they decided to use their significantly smaller platform to protest the destruction of the AU community garden. On April 21, 2022, Barstool posted a protest of this destruction on Twitter, and posted nothing on Instagram. Yet, just a few months before they found the time to boost and become heavily involved in a petition calling for Subway footlongs to be covered by meal swipes. Much like their counterpart, this is not a question of incompetence but rather laziness, a lack of care, and the inability to break the rank of the corrupted organization they are a direct affiliate of. Heaven forbid their platform is used for anything that requires a moral backbone to support.
We could go on with Barstool’s twisted relationship with their audience or the way they perpetuate Greek life on campus, but that’s a topic for another time. We don’t care to sit around and gatekeep popular Tik Tok audios and Wonk Cat memes. The Rival is not perfect and we will never claim to be. Case in point, we are but an often satirical college publication. We nonetheless do our best to uphold our organizational values that we as a staff believe in, and we challenge others to do the same.
TL;DR The Rival is sorry that we posted a common meme literally anybody that has ever been to AU could have come up relatively shortly after you. Next time, we’ll credit Alexandra Cooper for you. Also, it’s really fucked up that this is the hill you want to die on, just saying.
With all the love you deserve,
Team Rival