Lets speculate

Regarding the NRL/Matthew Johns scandal, Andrew Bolt knows who to blame:

If Johns is sacked, why not Lumby?

Catherine Lumby’s crime offence?

[…]#

That’s not what he’s learned at all. Well – he’s learned that consent doesn’t trump the commercial interests of major entertainment corporations. He’s learned that he’d better stick to their arbitrary version of public “morality” – in this case, that group sex is WRONG BY DEFINITION – if he wants to keep those jobs. And if Lumby were his PR adviser, and had told him that Channel Nine wouldn’t mind if he were revealed to have engaged in group sex, then she’d certainly deserve to be sacked for that – clearly she’d have been astoundingly wrong.

But the main thing Johns is in trouble for is allegedly NOT following Lumby’s subsequent advice, that “informed consent” is vital.It’s that there’s an open question as to whether he stood by as the girl was effectively raped by the other team mates.It’s the allegation – which may be untrue* – that he stood by as a girl was effectively raped (again, only an allegation) by his team mates.

Because – and it staggers me that a prominent newspaper columnist doesn’t seem to get this – consenting to sex with two men does not equal consenting to sex with any man who happens to walk into the room. And standing by while a woman is raped would itself be a crime. (If that was what in fact happened, in respect of which all we know is that the NZ police have investigated those allegations and decided not to prosecute.)

It shouldn’t, in 2009, be all that difficult for any functioning adult to understand.

But Bolt thinks{…)#

Now, responses to this incident have run the gamut from the misogynist “if she said yes to two she said yes to all” to the puritan “group sex is wrong and should be punished”. Bolt’s attempt to blame it all on his cultural war opponents lurches awkwardly from one extreme to the other – if you were to try to tie it together, the only sense you could make is that he blames all participants for falling short of his personal moral code, and thinks that the harm described – the harm of a rape – is simply the consequence of such a failure. He wants to blame Lumby’s focus on consent for an incident that is claimed by the woman now not to have been consensual – for the players she advised allegedly NO FOLLOWING HER ADVICE. following her advice.

[…]#

*We have no idea what occurred on that night, and are not alleging anything. We are commenting on the general issues raised by the subsequent discussion. Mr Johns has not been charged with any offence, and the allegations against him that are being widely discussed in the national media are just that – allegations. We know nothing more on the specific incident that prompted the debate than that.

Update##

There have been some minor changes made to this post to make the above note doubly clear. Obviously, this post is about the general issue, not the specific incident in question. It is responding to Andrew Bolt’s thoroughly disturbing suggestion that consent is merely a “furphy” – and his ridiculous attempt to use the incident to try to get a “culture war” opponent sacked.