I wish I’d said that

Rachel Hills has written a great piece for the Dawn Chorus about how the public reactions to Kyle and Jackie O and Matthew Johns says a lot about how we treat people who have been raped. There is still this disgusting public attitude that if a woman isn’t a virgin, then clearly she’s a dirty slut and is only making it up. I work in a newsroom where a story about the rape of a male is considered far more newsworthy than the rape of a female, instead of it being an horrific experience regardless of which hole is violated.

Anyway, this post is “I wish I’d said that” and John Birmingham on his Brisbane Times blog said it perfectly:
In what moral universe does interrogating an underage girl about her sexual history, while she’s hooked up to a polygraph and sitting in front of a live microphone, strike anyone as anything other the basest, most grotesque and abusive form of media exploitation imaginable?

Showing the bodies

I was cleaning up my inbox and I found this opinion piece by Michael Vistonay about the Johns-Sharks group sex story. He writes that rather than being about moral outrage (don’t get me started on the issue of consent!), the story has more to do with the power of the media: people were outraged because they saw the distress of the woman involved. He writes that if we hadn’t seen the woman’s profound trauma and grief, the Four Corners story would be just another report into footballers behaving badly.

Which made me think about terrorism and natural disasters. Dead bodies are rarely shown, creating this idea that only cars are killed in car bombings. The pictures of car bomb victims are awful. They’re naked because their clothes were burnt off. And their skin is charred and limbs bloated. It’s so undignified and so human. Maybe if more of these images were shown, there would be greater action on behalf of rich nations like ours to do something about it?

I wonder how the photographers who take these photos – and no doubt need counselling afterwards – feel when their work is sanitised? Let’s just pretend that no one was hurt so we don’t feel queasy.

Where did feminism get Miranda?

I almost stayed away from it it all day. Almost. But Miranda Devine is up to her usual feminist-bashing, blaming all the evils of the world on feminism.

Apparently it’s feminism’s fault that rugby league players like a gang bang, and the whole Matthew Johns story is about the media’s war on masculinity. Because – as we all know – the media is notoriously run by feminists, what with the long line of male editors at the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Age, and The Daily Telegraph.

According to Ms Devine – and she can thank feminism for allowing her to keep her maiden name and be Ms Devine – this feminist-controlled media has been blaming war and domestic violence on rugby league. Riiiiight. And how she goes from the feminist mainstream media hellbent on destroying masculinity to teens having clinical sex, devoid of emotions, is impressive. She writes there’s also chaos in the mating world and feminism is to blame. Take that, feminism! But Miranda, without feminism, would you be writing in the Sydney Morning Herald?

Derr, Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph is running a Justice for Women NOW campaign after a government taskforce found the legal system was humiliating for sexual assault victims. The uproar over the Matthew Johns “group sex consent scandal” is another good reason to plug this campaign. However, with a prominent part of their website treating women as a bunch of “phwoar” body parts with girl-on-girl action for the hetero masses, it seems they still have a long, long way to go.

The Daily Telegraph's web editors clearly didn't get the memo about the Justice for Women NOW campaign.

Annabel vs Miranda

Annabel Crabb in the Sydney Morning Herald writes: “Why would a group of blokes come together, as if drawn by some invisible gravitation force, and gather in a room to masturbate with each other? What do we ordinarily call that behaviour? Let’s say it out loud: it’s the gayest thing ever”. You should check out the whole piece, it’s great.

Compare that to Miranda Devine’s opinion piece – and I so dearly want to stay I don’t take the bait, but sometimes you just have to. Miranda, dear Miranda, thinks the issue is about group sex – which clearly offends her. Apparently, anyone who gets up to anything other than missionary with the lights out must be damaged in some way. But this is the really disgusting bit: “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.”

Yawn. One more time for the slow kids up the back. Rape – and I’m not saying the Matthew Johns group sex consent scandal is about rape – but rape happens when a man decides to rape a woman. It doesn’t matter what that woman is wearing. Burka-clad women in Afghanistan get raped, so it’s got nothing to do with mini skirts. She then says modern society is like the Twilight series for teen girls, in which women have “natural modesty and intense romantic longings” and men are tortured by their superhuman restraint in not raping everything with a heartbeat.

Get the name right

It makes sense that journalists and editors give big stories a name. It makes headlines easier and means they can be referred to easily. Children overboard. Iguanagate. Nipplegate. But when the name is wrong – as it is in the Matthew Johns case – it affects how people understand the story.

Having spent yesterday checking out reader comments on news websites, about 80 per cent of them are along the lines of “she consented, group sex isn’t illegal, what’s the problem?” followed by many nasty names for the woman who appeared on Four Corners. (Reading the transcript, it’s appalling that the coach of the Newcastle Knights is using the term “risk taker” to justify bad behaviour off the field. Get a grip man.)

Calling it the “Matthew Johns group sex scandal” implies that the scandal is that he had group sex. It should be called the “Matthew Johns group sex consent scandal” – because the issue here is over consent, and both sides disagreeing over consent, and that if you consent to sex with one or two people, it doesn’t mean you’ve consented to sex with the ten big rugby league players who climbed in through the bathroom window to rub their penises in your face and jack off while waiting their turn.

The other thing is Johns’ repeated comment that at no time did she say no. At a guess, I’d say at no time did any of these 12 blokes ask if it was ok.