No Swans Song

- One hotel room. Every man on trial.

The Swans fiasco had it all. Here was feminism’s prized foe — brash young footballers hoovering up millions for kicking a ball — caught in the mother of all own goals. An early morning hotel frolic, paid strippers, industrial quantities of drugs, and a sexual assault allegation. Christmas had come early for the culture warriors.

And boy, did they line up to tar and feather the five young men caught up in it. Captain Callum Mills set the tone early, fronting the cameras looking suitably shattered to declare that the whole sorry affair had caused him to “put the mirror up” — not just at his five teammates, mind you, but at “all men within society.”

Every bloke in the country, apparently, now owed the nation an apology for something that happened in a hotel room he’d never set foot in. “We need to do better,” Mills intoned, apparently unaware that most men were fast asleep at 5am that Monday morning, not haggling over spanking surcharges in a Melbourne hotel room.

The men in sports journalism were quick to show they were on the right side. “Guys, it’s us. We’re causing this. And we’ve all got to do more to stop it,” wrote Rohan Connolly in The Canberra Times.

The Governor-General weighed in too, declaring herself “shocked and troubled.” Funny how selective this moral crusader’s troubles are. Not a word on 27-year-old Oliver Conroy, lured last month to a Brisbane car park by a fake dating profile and killed by seven teenagers — two of them girls. Not a word on the homeless Afghan man charged with stabbing two women in separate Melbourne street attacks in the same week Mostyn spoke out. Not a word on the Perth man charged with threatening to “hunt down and kill” Pauline Hanson. Not a word on the ABC’s skit joking about sodomising and torturing Gina Rinehart to death — “satire,” apparently, when the target is a woman who votes the wrong way.

Gradually, details of what apparently took place in that fancy Melbourne hotel room leaked to the press. The ABC reported, citing police sources, that players paid extra to snort drugs off the dancers’ bodies. A woman agreed to three slaps at $50 a pop but copped a fourth for free — and that’s what blew up the room. As one commentator quipped, if that’s really all there was to it, it belongs in the Small Claims Court, not a police investigation, and a national media circus.

What was a real hoot was our esteemed Prime Minister finger-wagging at the Swans, lecturing them that they “needed to do better” — only for it to emerge that one player had allegedly quipped about having “done an Albo” during the hotel frolics, a nod to the PM’s own “melons” moment re that gift from the Japanese leader. Some role model.

From the media, the Swans and AFL hierarchy, right up to the PM and GG, we have had a pile-on which has ignored the requirements of due process. They talk of “victims”, when nobody has been charged, let alone convicted. And offer apologies which clearly imply guilt. In a bid to placate the frenzied feminist response, those who we most expect to avoid speculation and to respect the rule of law, have trampled it underfoot.

Note that there’s some talk of “inappropriate touching” and “unwanted touching in private areas.” It’s entirely possible there’s a serious sexual assault at the heart of all this scuttlebutt, and if so, it needs to be taken seriously. But there’s widespread public disgust that the women concerned have already engaged their own sleazy ambulance-chasing lawyer, one of whom told breakfast radio the case represented “the most disgusting actions and behaviour I have ever heard about in my 28 years as a lawyer.”

Well-known commentator and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann summed up the mood succinctly, responding to news the women were preparing to sue both players and club: “This whole thing sounds like a shakedown.”

What was encouraging was the lively online commentary, with men and women objecting to the moralising and anti-male bile. Here’s a classic example:

Meanwhile, female journalists have been milking the whole kerfuffle for all it was worth. “What do we do with our rage? What do we do with our grief?” asked Caroline Overington in The Australian. As a Swan’s ambassador, she argued that women fans in particular would not take well to the idea that all the “family friendly” messaging was no more than a marketing tool. “They believed in the Swans. Now they feel like they were taken for a ride.”

Last week there was a media campaign urging people to support the Swans’ women’s team in Sunday’s historic double-header — then walk out when the men took the field. Never mind that the five men actually caught up in the scandal weren’t even allowed to play.

What was really odd was the genuflecting to the Swans’ women’s team throughout the fallout, with apologies flowing for damage done to the brand by the men. Odd, because nobody extended the same courtesy when it was women misbehaving. When Matildas’ captain Sam Kerr was hauled into a London court — accused, after a drunken taxi dispute, of racially abusing a police officer by calling him “f---ing stupid and white” — nobody rushed to apologise to the Socceroos for the reputational hit to Australian football generally. She was eventually acquitted, but the damage to the “brand,” if that’s the currency we’re trading in, was done all the same. Funny how that works only one way.

When it came to reporting last weekend’s Swans’ games, the AFL Women’s own account claimed the women’s team had run out onto the SCG in a “see of red and white,” a typo that rather summed up the week. Here’s that rather sparse sea:

Overington wrote about the hundreds who walked out after the women’s game — but what she failed to point out was that, even with numbers down for the men’s game, the crowd was still double that of the women’s. The men’s team went on to win by over 50 points and was greeted by a standing ovation.

Good to see that so many loyal Swans fans had the good sense not to taint this team of hardworking, talented men by the foolish behaviour of such a few. That’s cause for celebration.

There was a very telling tweet this week about how regularly there seems to be a “massive outbreak of hysteria over male sexual behaviour.” The tweeter suggested this could have something to do with “maintaining control for the feminist complex that runs Australia.” Indeed.

Hardly surprising then to see Teal MP Zali Steggall this week showing her feminist credentials by nudging Albanese in Question Time, invoking Australia’s “crisis” of violence against women — with the Swans scandal as Exhibit A. Albo didn’t miss a beat, declaring that “every woman and every girl has the right to feel safe and must be safe at all times,” before announcing domestic and sexual violence would be a special agenda item at next week’s National Cabinet.

Funny, that — a foundering government suddenly handed the perfect moment to look like it’s doing something, riding a wave of manufactured male-shaming all the way to the next taxpayer-funded knee-jerk reaction, the next tilt of the scales of justice a little further away from due process and a little further towards guilty-until-proven-innocent. That is, as long as the accuser is a woman and the accused is a man.

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