Friday, May 16, 2014

Phallic Friday - alcohol, footy players, social media, women

This week, in Sydney, another big news story was about a footy player in trouble for the harassment of a girl. It's a really touchy subject and I'm not entirely sure where I stand with these issues. You never hear the full story in the news, so I can't comment on what happened, but I'll air some general views about these kinds of incidents.

Usually these incidents occur with more than a dash of alcohol thrown into the situation. Alcohol and sex are a wicked combination and I've been around enough pubs and men to know that it's pretty easy picking up (and picking a fight) when it's late and people are pissed.

Footy players are elite athletes. The elite athletes I know play hard - at everything. So when they're drinking, they go hard. When they're picking up, they go hard. When they're picking a fight, they go hard. It seems the nature of their competitiveness.

When I was a teenager, my Mum had a friend whose husband coached an NRL team. I was a huge NRL fan (not of his team though) and she knew I was. She made me promise not to get involved with footy players. She told me that they had women throwing themselves at them all the time. They could pick a different woman every night - or more than one a night - so they didn't know the word 'no' and its association with women. And this is in the 80s, not now. Before camera phones, and the social media saturation of news. And rape then was something no one talked about, and very few would lay charges.

She never told me stories, she never said what happened, she just warned me off them. I listened because she was so intense and serious. She did let me meet her hubby and some of the players when their team played mine - got a few autographs that day. But she made sure I caught the train home too!!

So footy players, sex, alcohol and women can be a bad combination, and always has been. Add in social media, and it's rife for problems.

But there are some decent footy players around. You just have to know which ones to pick - and the pub may not house the best ones! I wrote one in Deep Diving, out in September, but he's imaginary - damn it!

2 comments:

  1. I guess it's easy to tar one footy player with the same brush and you're right, what's in the news is never the whole story. At the same time, so much money & resources gets put into professional athletes now, trying to 'teach/train' them how to behave. You get the nice boys, who seem to become good men. Jonathan Brown at the Brisbane Lions springs to mind & Gary Ablett Jnr. There are good ones there. There are arseholes too. But that's just the real world - that doesn't have to be football. I bet there are nice guys and arseholes in a bank, too.
    Good post Ms Cate.

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    1. LOL yes! Good point, Lily, there are arseholes everywhere, as well as good people too. Nicely said.

      Thanks,
      Cate xox

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