Kyle fail, Jackie O fail, media fail

Reading comments on news sites over the last few days, it’s clear that most people – or most people who post comments on news sites, which may or may not be the same thing – don’t get why Kyle and Jackie O should get their butts kicked for asking a 14-year-old girl about her sex life. They think the problem is that when the girl revealed she had been raped, Kyle asked if that was her only sexual experience. (Thereby calling rape a sexual experience, rather of a violent one.)

But as much as he makes my skin crawl, I have to cut him some slack on this one as we’ve all said something dumb when put on the spot. Because what he said is not the problem.

Kyle, Jackie O and their producer should indeed get an almighty kick up the bum for deciding that strapping an underage girl to a lie detector and getting her mother to ask her about sex would be entertaining. The mother aside, that at least three adults did not think there was anything wrong with this situation is disturbing.

But then the story is reported as “Kyle, teen, rape revelation on air, stupid comment” and so it’s not surprising that readers don’t get it. Rape counsellors are interviewed to comment on Kyle’s stupid comment and no one is asked whether the segment should have been on air in the first place. And what we end up with is a large section of the public who think Kyle and Jackie O have been taken off the air because he said something stupid. Which means as journalists we haven’t done our jobs properly.

It also means that each time there’s a new “scandal” – The Chaser, footballers, take your pick – more people think each story is a media beat up.

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.

Blaming the victim, again

In the Sydney Morning Herald today is a court story where the focus is yet again on the victim, not the perpetrator (which always sounds like a nasty vibrator). What’s unusual is that the victim is male – a cop who is now wearing the proverbial short skirt and asking for it.

When Constable Robert Hogan took Corporal Aristotelis Koutsoubos to court for biting him on the face, the other bloke’s lawyer used details from Hogan’s Facebook page to show he was a bit of a knob who liked to drink. Helpfully the paper includes two photos ripped straight from Facebook, all of which makes it a story about Hogan, not about Koutsoubos who committed the crime.

But it’s a bit further down that really pisses me off.

“In another case, Saftwat Abdel-Hady was not so lucky.”

Abdel-Hady drugged and raped a woman, and photos of him on her mobile phone were used as evidence. But he was just unlucky, right?

“After a double dose of the sleeping pill Stilnox, his victim did not remember events before he indecently assaulted her at his Mosman apartment.” This makes it a story about the victim. If you haven’t done so, check out Anna Greer’s excellent article on the passive voice.

Later, the two journos call the pictures on the victim’s phone “happy snaps”. Oh what joy, what a lark.

And then this sentence, which makes Abdel-Hady out to be the poor victim of technology:

“The evidence helped to jail him for nearly six years despite his continual denial.” I could be wrong, but I reckon most rapists deny it.

Arndt you helpful

Bettina Arndt always cracks me up. You have to laugh otherwise you’d blow a head gasket. Her latest assertion is that “withholding” sex causes problems in a relationship, so women should have sex when they don’t feel like it because it will keep their husbands happy. Why take one side over the other? Why not say that men should never ask for sex because their partners feel pressured?

Arndt says it’s our “wifely duty” to attend to our “husband’s needs”. (From what I’ve read there’s no mention of husbandly duty to attend to a wife’s needs.) In her eyes, a man’s needs are more important than a woman’s. I would have thought she’d know from her experience as a sex therapist what happens when resentment builds in a relationship.

The cracker comes in an opinion piece she wrote for the Canberra Times: “As terrible stories of marital rape and sexual violence claimed the public’s attention, women’s right to refuse sex became fundamental to decent relations between the genders. The new rule was the sex must wait until women are well and truly in the mood. But that was where we went wrong. The assumption that women need to want sex to enjoy it has proved a really damaging sexual idea, one that has wrought havoc in relationships for the past 40 years.”

Excuse me? The assumption that women need to want sex to enjoy it has proved a really damaging sexual idea? Havoc in a relationship is more important than a woman’s rights? Excuse me while I burn my bra. Telling women they should have sex when they don’t want to sounds suspiciously close to saying rape is ok. Sigh. (I’m not the only one bothered by what Arndt is saying: check out Helen Pringle and Ben Pobjie writing in New Matilda.)

Last year Queensland Police chucked a hissy fit over an article I wrote about police in Cairns saying sex attacks would be reduced if girls didn’t get so drunk. They were trying to tell people to be responsible but in the process they blamed rape on the victim. Seems to me we’ve spent so much time telling girls how to avoid being raped that we forgot to tell boys not to be rapists.