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.