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'Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Don't Rape': Amy Schumer Presents 'Football Town Lights'

By Emily Cutler | Videos | April 22, 2015 |

By Emily Cutler | Videos | April 22, 2015 |


Amy Schumer might be your secret spirit animal. Or your new pretend best friend. Or maybe she’s just reading your dream journal.

Because last night, she gave us all of the things we love (Friday Night Lights, over-sized wine glasses, not raping women, Josh Charles,), and wrapped them in amazingly biting satire. See, it’s funny because of how heartbreakingly accurate and desperately needed it is.

“How do I get through to you boys that football isn’t about rape? It’s about violently dominating anyone who stands between you and what you want. You gotta get yourself into the mindset that you are gods and you are entitled to this! The other team, they ain’t just gonna lay down and give it to you. You gotta take it!”

“Clear eyes, full hearts, don’t rape.”


“My team, my rules. You don’t like it? Don’t let the door rape you on the way out.”

Oh, Amy.

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According to the sketch writer, Christine Nangle, the idea for the sketch was inspired by the Steubenville rape case.

It wasn’t just the brutality of the rape itself — a teenage girl was assaulted by multiple football players while she was too drunk to consent — but the aftershocks of that earthquake that intensified Nangle’s horror: how the picture of the victim’s unconscious body circulated among classmates and neighbors; later, how the high school football coach, Reno Saccoccia, allowed convicted rapist Ma’lik Richmond to rejoin the team.

“I just remember getting so sickened by it that, and by the fact that it wasn’t a bigger story,” Nangle said by phone. “I just remember sitting there thinking: there’s got to be a way into this, sketch-wise.”

Nangle clearly put a lot of thought into how to create the sketch without conflating rape culture with Friday Night Lights, and obviously without minimizing the horrors of rape.

“It was conscious choice not to put any girls in it,” Nangle said, partly “to not necessarily show the boys as malicious monsters” but really to make the story about “trying to figure out the messages that they’re getting. I don’t want that to say that any of these guys who do terrible things aren’t in charge of their actions, but in this particular sense, I wanted it to be about their surroundings.”

Source: ThinkProgress