Let’s face it; we’ve all had shit jobs in our youth. Whether you bussed tables, moved furniture, or canvassed door-to-door trying to sell storm windows, we’ve all done something we didn’t want to do in order to scrape by.

For Lucie Lytes, that meant posing nude for a pay Web site. The Alberta native did it so she could afford to move to Toronto, where she hoped to become a dancer and a DJ.

Eventually, Lytes got what she wanted: she would spin records at clubs and strut her stuff with the Toronto Raptors Dance Pak. But her dancing days came to an end last week when the Raptors found out about her Web site pics, which Lytes posed for under the alias Lindsey Marshal.

Now forget for the moment that the Raptors Dance Pak perform in outfits often more revealing than the ones Lytes wore in her Internet pics, and forget that their routines are more physically suggestive than any still photograph could possibly be. The real hypocrisy is that the men the Dance Pak are cheering for are notorious for using women and supporting their exploitation on a rampant level.

This is not to say that the current Raptors are a group of drooling perverts, but past Raptors have a less than envious resume. When the team acquired legendary center Hakeem Olajuwon last year, everyone looked at his rebounding skills and playoff experience, but no one bothered to comment on the paternity suits he was involved in. And when you look in the Raptor’s history books, you’ll note that the franchise’s first basket was scored by Alvin Robertson. That book will not note, however, that Robertson was once jailed for beating his wife after he returned from a trip with another woman. Robertson was given community service.

Perhaps the saddest irony is that of the NBA’s much-publicized involvement with the Atlanta Gold Club strip joint fiasco. League stars such as Patrick Ewing and John Starks, not to mention-that’s right, former Raptor Antonio Davis-were all mentioned as patrons of the club where dancers would perform sex acts on players for cash. The whole incident came out when the manager of the club, Thomas “Ziggy” Sicignano, testified at the racketeering trial of club owner Steve Kaplan in 2001. Davis threatened to sue over the inclusion of his name in the trial, and why wouldn’t he? He’s married with two kids.

In 1998, Sports Illustrated exposed the NBA’s philandering ways, revealing that stars had sired a baffling amount of illegitimate children around the US. The “league leaders” included Shawn Kemp, with seven, and Larry Johnson, who had a total of five kids with four different women. Also on the list were legends Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas.

It would seem that the message here is that if you’re a male athlete earning millions of dollars and the adoration of impressionable children everywhere, you can beat women, solicit sex acts from them, and impregnate them without taking any sort of responsibility for your actions until a court of law demands it.

Of course, if you’re a 19-year old female making next to nothing, and you reveal the final six inches of your body not otherwise covered by your skimpy cheerleading uniform for a couple thousand dollars, you’re out on the street. Apparently there’s no place in the NBA for that.