There is a definite hook-up culture at LSU, but hey, it’s college — that’s to be expected. 
What is surprising, and disturbing, is our rape culture.
Until recently, I did not know there was even such a thing.
It was brought to my attention by Abdellatif Devol, a third year law student at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Devol is being charged with multiple counts of forcible rape and sexual assault after two women came forward saying that he raped them.
You did not misread that — he allegedly raped two women, and this guy is in law school. 
But law school or not, I was under the impression that it was common knowledge amongst civilized people that under no circumstances is rape condoned or just some minor thing.
You just don’t do it. It boggles my mind how this can be lost on so many people. 
At the end of the day, people are responsible for their own actions, but those actions and behaviors can be heavily impacted by cultural and parental influences.
Think about it, if a child grows up playing violent video games, listening to music that is demeaning to women, watching violent movies, a 24-hour news cycle that acts as a highlight reel of human cruelty and trashy television where people of both sexes debase themselves in public for the shock value, one can begin to wonder how whole generations are not psychopaths.
Perhaps the only thing staving off a full embrace of this culture of sex and violence is good parenting.
I’m from your stereotypical middle-class family — that’s two parents, still married, one older sister and a dog. Growing up, like any other product of the ’90s, I had a Nintendo 64, watched “Star Wars” and had to endure some god-awful music on the radio.
Despite the violence I witnessed on television and movies, and the disrespectful music I heard, it never took hold of me. I turned out to be a fairly nonviolent guy and I make it an effort to try to be as respectful to women as possible.
The reason is that as a kid, I knew with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty, that if I ever displayed the behaviors I witnessed in media and video games, that I could kiss my ass goodbye, literally.
The Sword of Damocles that hung over my head was the ever present threat of the legendary “Elephant Belt”, a weight lifting belt my dad converted for disciplinary purposes. It never had to be used on me or my sister; the very sight of it was enough to make us penitent and contrite.
Along with regular church attendance, time spent outdoors and on schoolwork and a basic instilling of normative morals, my sister and I turned out to be decent human beings.
So often we see and hear about parents buying their kids an Xbox or PlayStation and letting the gaming console do all the parenting, or allowing their young adolescents watch the vitriol on television these days, and then we wonder why they turn out introverted, anti-social or disrespectful.
There is no excuse under the sun for what rapists do. Rapists’ actions are disgusting and they need to be punished accordingly. At the end of the day, we all make our own choices, and they choose to be sub-human. However, we cannot discount the possibility that those choices may be influenced by the world we grew up in or the parenting we received.