bolt nails it.....although id have prefered he wrote about the budget...?
Column - Yes does not mean yes
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Andrew Bolt
Friday, May 15, 2009 at 07:33am
MATTHEW Johns is out of a job because yes no longer means yes, after all.
Seven years ago the rugby league star had group sex with a 19-year-old fan, along with at least four of his Cronulla teammates.
But even though the woman said yes, Johns - as most of us now insist - should have said no.
He’s learned that consent does not trump morality, whatever he’s been told by fashionable ethicists.
That’s why he’s been dumped by Channel 9 and Melbourne Storm, and that’s also why one of those ethicists - the National Rugby League’s own gender adviser - should be sacked, too.
I’m talking about Prof Catharine Lumby, a post-modernist of the University of NSW and author of grants-backed studies such as Why Feminists Need pr0n, who was quoted this week saying the Johns case was a “wake-up call” to other men.
In fact, the case should be a woop-woop-woop wake-up to Lumby, who for years seems to have told NRL players there’s nothing wrong with precisely what has now cost Johns his job.
Hear it from Lumby herself, in an interview she gave in 2004, when the NRL first took her on as its gender adviser.
ABC reporter: There have been stories of a culture of group sex in rugby league. What do you think of group sex? Do you think it’s OK if it’s consensual?
Lumby: Speaking as an academic, I think that there’s no problem with any behaviour which is consensual in sexual terms. That was Lumby’s doctrine - what adults did to each other even in the most crowded of beds was fine as long as all agreed to it.
And as long as the players showed “respect” to the groupie as she tottered out afterwards. As if.
So when six Canterbury players were accused in 2004 of pack sex with a young woman (no charges were actually laid) and the media was agog at lurid stories of other NRL team-bonding gang bangs, Lumby urged us to chill with our silly “moral panic”.
“The idea that group sex is abhorrent is a very particular view,” she sniffed.
“What matters is that we avoid asserting moral beliefs as moral truths.”
And what mattered most of all was that the players simply got their groupies to agree to whatever was being done to them.
As the $1 million Playing by the Rules Project that Lumby and her team developed for the NRL proclaimed, all that players really needed was “ongoing education about how to negotiate sexual encounters in a way which ensures informed consent is always obtained”. Never mind what was actually being consented to.
This kind of teaching did actually work, you may be surprised to know, but not in a way even Lumby would like.
The ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday tracked down Charmyne Palavi, who collects footballer lovers. One NRL player had shown her a film he’d taken on his phone.
Said Palavi: “He goes, ‘we picked up this one girl and there was like seven of us on her and everything’ . . . and he goes ‘we just filmed her to say that she consented to it’.”
All good, then, right?
Wrong, of course, yet how often this “consent” furphy is used to dodge uncomfortable debates on morality.
Take the excuses made last year for not damning Melbourne photographer Bill Henson for stripping and taking soft-pr0n pictures of a 13-year-old girl, posed moodily with her breasts exposed.
But she’d agreed, Henson’s many defenders protested. She’d consented, the girl’s giddy parents insisted. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that trusting to consent means - for a start - trusting that people are smart enough and strong enough to work out all by their uncertain selves what’s good for them.
In the Johns case, it’s now clear that the 19-year-old woman was neither that smart nor that strong.
Five days after the sex, she went to New Zealand police to complain of assault, bitterly regretting what had happened.
Despite interviewing about 80 witnesses, the police found no proof that any of the men who’d had sex with her over those two hours had had it against her will. All said she was willing. Johns said she’d literally asked for sex.
Even now, Det Inspector David Long, in charge of the case, says: “I’m completely satisfied that we got full and truthful accounts at the time and that no crime was committed.”
Nor does the woman herself claim she told the men to stop. At most, she’s said she was “in shock” and “they used a lot of like mental power over me”.
I don’t doubt that she did feel powerless, or at least intimidated and on show, and if she was indeed smart enough to work out at the time that the sex was wrong, she was not strong enough to insist.
Yet even though she consented to the sex - or didn’t object - the woman was still left feeling so “useless”, so “worthless” and so “really small” that her life collapsed. She developed a post-traumatic stress disorder and turned to drink, shut herself away, cut her wrists and still howls in shame when she talks of what happened in that bedroom.
She can’t forgive Johns and the other men: “If I had a gun I’d shoot them right now. I hate them, they’re disgusting . . . “ she said.
But bad judgment is not the only problem with insisting only on “consent”, not morality.
Consent also means it’s every man for himself. That you can do whatever you can force some silly or intimidated woman to agree to, however much it will hurt them.
If this teenager consented to group sex, there was nothing more for Johns and his mates to know. Indeed, none seemed to think they had a duty to protect this young woman from what degraded them all.
She agreed. End of questions. But it hasn’t been the end of the regretting.
That’s what Lumby’s fashionable morality never factored in - the weakness and stupidity of people. Their impulsiveness. Inexperience. The way their judgment gets washed away by booze, or lost in the crowd.
For a Lumby, even a young NRL buck in a bedroom with a naked girl and his mates is a perfectly rational moral agent. And the girl, too.
For a Lumby, the idea that such flighty people be handed moral rules worked out over centuries of collective mistakes and regrets is almost an insult - a crime against freedom.
“Morality is a blueprint for living that someone hands to you,” she’s tut-tutted. But “ethics is a zone we all enter when we find ourselves, by choice or necessity, negotiating those rules”.
Negotiating, in this case, until someone says “yes” to group sex.
Well, a girl in Christchurch did say “yes” when morality would have shouted thathe say “no”.
See her crying now. See Johns weeping, too, on A Current Affair, having heard the “yes” that a Lumby once swore was all he’d need to keep him safe.
How could he have ever believed something so amoral? And how could Lumby ever have seemed to teach it?