Natural men scolded into timidity
Miranda Devine
May 21, 2009
As the mother of two junior rugby forwards, the wife of a former prop and daughter of a one-time flanker, it is time for me to come to the defence of violent sports and the men who play them.
The attacks on former Footy Show star Matthew Johns, rugby league and men in general - branding them as dangerous predatory brutes who need to be chained, scolded and nagged into submission - have gone too far.
The initial criticism of Johns was warranted, after revelations last week that he and his Cronulla Sharks teammates, during a 2002 tour of New Zealand, engaged in a gang bang with a naive 19-year-old woman, who in the ensuing years became so distressed about her degradation she tried to kill herself.
But since then, Johns has been crucified, with demands he name his teammates, sponsors threatening to pull out of rugby league, a school principal banning NRL players from visiting classes and mothers stopping their sons playing the game.
You always know when zealotry creeps into a story there is another agenda at work - and that is that the Johns case is a beachhead in the war against masculinity, waged by those who think the only difference between men and women is cultural.
This notion of a socially constructed "gender" has been the central idea of the women's studies movement since it began in the 1960s, with its aim to produce an androgynous utopia. But the culture has changed and there are still men who refuse to act like women - damn them - even if they do have smooth, hairless chests.
Among the last bastions of traditional maleness, rugby league and other violent contact sports were always going to be in the line of fire. Sex scandals are their weakest points.
In the past week, with the Johns story the latest in a long string of such scandals, rugby league has been held up as an example of the worst of mankind, its attitudes leading to rape, domestic violence, war and general bad behaviour.
Thus, Roosters forward Willie Mason is stalked by cameras on a night out this week, so that a quick slash in an alley outside the Golden Sheaf in Double Bay becomes a monstrous crime, with pictures of him urinating behind a tree splashed all over newspapers and the internet, and his club hauling him before its disciplinary committee and fining him $2000.
No one enjoys the smell of urine in the street but Mason's discreet call of nature was hardly a capital offence in the scheme of things and at least he was wearing a nice suit.
Meanwhile, the Premier of Victoria, John Brumby, publicly defends the alleged drunken abuse of Thai police by a middle-aged Melbourne woman accused of stealing a beer mat from an Aussie bar in Phuket as just a little "fun in a bar". Imagine if she had been male and a rugby league player to boot.
Killing off rugby league isn't going to stop men being aggressive and sexually motivated. In fact, such games are the few outlets boys have left for excess physical energy.
In sanctioned team violence on the football field, young men can test their courage and express what it feels to be male, to have testosterone surging through young bodies, building huge muscles and attack instincts for which society has little use any more. It is teaching them, not to be violent but how to control their violent urges.
One of the best young rugby players I know, a gentle and confident teen, was once expelled from preschool and diagnosed by a teacher with attention deficit disorder because he had so much pent-up energy. Thankfully this later found expression on the football field rather than being drugged out of him with Ritalin.
The new androgyny has also expected that women, too, must change, particularly in their attitudes towards sex. Popular culture today presents a narrative in which the liberalisation of sex has travelled on an inevitable continuum from the 1960s to some Brave New World free-for-all where Huxleyan teens engage in clinical couplings in which the only things to be negotiated are safety and consent.
Where once girls were told that sex without emotional attachment would leave them feeling hurt and used, now such ideas are regarded as judgmental and moralistic. Instead girls are taught the most anti-woman thing of all - to judge their worth and the worth of others by "hotness" - that is, how sexually desirable they are, even if they are only 12.
The ensuing chaos in the mating world stems from this disconnect between what popular culture tells girls and boys they should want and how it really makes them feel.
In the end, men's drives aren't all violent and predatory. Most have a deep, possibly hard-wired, desire to be noble and chivalrous. That's why in situations such as the Port Arthur massacre, so many men died shielding their wives or women around them.
Chivalry was once the province of the fighting man - the knight in shining armour who behaved with gallantry, honour and courtesy on the battlefield and off and was always proud to help the weak and defenceless. But decades of androgynous feminism have stamped on chivalry, deriding men who opened doors or stood back for women as being sexist and patronising.
It would have been better for women if feminism had appealed to men's better natures.
