It serves Matthew Johns right that he was dumped yesterday from The Footy Show over a group sex session with former Cronulla Sharks teammates in New Zealand seven years ago.
His "apology" on the Channel Nine program last week to pre-empt revelations about a team gang bang with a naive 19-year-old woman in Christchurch showed he has little remorse.
For whom was he concerned? "For me personally, it has put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment … For that I can't say sorry enough." No mention of "Clare", the young woman who wept through the ABC's Four Corners expose this week of rugby league sex scandals.
Clare, described by a detective as a "nice girl … young, naive, not worldly, just a growing up teenager", said she was suicidal for years after the incident.
The NRL chief executive, David Gallop, was suitably "distressed" this week. But his legalistic solutions to the ongoing sex problems plaguing rugby league have proven spectacularly unproductive. Gallop's gender adviser, Catharine Lumby, and the fellow feminist academic Kath Albury, helped design the NRL's program to reform players' attitudes towards women five years ago. But "Play By The Rules" can't be said to be a rip-roaring success.
It would not be surprising if it has been counterproductive, when Lumby expresses unusually tolerant attitudes towards group sex, or, in the parlance of rugby league, "the bun".
In studies of sexual behaviour, less than 3 per cent of people reportedly admit to group sex. Yet "the idea that group sex is aberrant is a very particular view", Lumby told the ABC in 2004, at the height of the Bulldogs rugby league sex scandal. "I mean, group sex happens in lots of kinds of communities and the issue should be about consent, not about group sex - it is my belief, having studied sexual and gender politics."
Lumby and Albury are also co-authors of The Porn Report. In a submission to last year's Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children they sided with those libertarians who view concern about the phenomenon as moral panic.
This is the value system which informs the NRL's gender re-education efforts for footballers as young as 17. Who could blame the players for being confused? Lumby emphasises "consent" and this week she declared a tough line on misbehaving footballers. "It's my view that, in all sports, if someone is charged with a serious crime they should be stood aside."
But emphasising a legalistic notion of consent, without moral context or any expectation of women to modify their behaviour, leaves players unmoored from the real consequences of their behaviour. It is putting an unsustainable pressure on the ability of young footballers, perhaps drunk, insensitive, or carried away by group dynamics, to discern the subtleties.
As the Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson pointed out: "A woman involved in degrading group sex can still be traumatised whether she consents or not." Clare told the program she felt powerless to stop what was being done to her by a "long line" of players. "I thought I was worthless and I thought I was nothing. And I think I was in shock. I didn't scream and they used a lot of … mental power over me and, and belittled me and made me feel really small like I was just a little old woman."
Plenty of young women are neither assertive nor articulate enough to stand up to charismatic older football stars. Johns was 30 at the time, and married. He knew better.
It would be a rare woman who would willingly consent to such an experience, without being damaged in some way, with low self-esteem or imperfect understanding of what was happening.
Yet to state this fact is to be condemned as moralising and prudish and out of touch with modern mores. As outrage about continuing rugby league sex scandals grows, it is not just the behaviour of a few predatory players being condemned, but the uber-masculinity such contact sports represent.
It is unfair to expect men to bear full responsibility for sexual mores as the boundaries of acceptable practice are blurred. Young women are told they can act and dress any way they please, and it is men, alone, with their supposedly filthy, uncontrollable sexual desires, who must restrain themselves.
It turns biology and the history of humanity on its head, and creates particular problems in multicultural societies. Our era's turning point in sexual politics confuses women as much as men.
The zeitgeist is captured in the staggering success of the Twilight series of teen vampire books, which sold 22 million copies worldwide last year alone. The first of four books, Twilight, introduces Edward, the handsome lead vampire who heroically restrains himself from sucking the blood of his girlfriend Bella, and turning her into a vampire. She wants him to give in to his bloodlust, but also trusts him not to hurt her. The book depicts a chaste but passionate erotic relationship.
The popularity of the books among young teenage girls gives a profound insight into their enduring emotional needs, lately suffocated by a heavily sexualised culture which cheapens their natural modesty and intense romantic longings.
It also reflects the postmodern expectation of men that they exercise the tortured superhuman restraint of an Edward, or be branded a barbarian.
There is no understanding that female sexual attitudes have always been the most successful regulator of male sexuality - not politically correct re-education programs that are exercises in legal risk management for the NRL.
devinemiranda@hotmail.c om
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