"Don't you go writing what I said about those Abos."

How is this even possible? Has Mal Brown been living in a big plastic bubble in an attic somewhere? Can he read?

I love Australia to death and I'm all too aware that this kind of attitude exists all over the world and in some places it's much worse. But still, sometimes living in this country simply fills me with shame.

In praise of women's tennis

As I type, Elena Dementieva and Justine Henin have been on the court for two hours and they're not even halfway through the second set, which is at deuce, two-all. It's the most beautiful, forceful, elegant match I think I've ever seen: two evenly matched slender blonde stars of the game, both having a good night and whupping each other all over the court except when doing delicate precision work at the net. It's like watching a magic cheetah trying to catch Tinkerbell.

UPDATE: and the unseeded, unranked Henin has just beaten the world no. 5 in straight sets, 7-5 7-6.

I always did like John Alexander

"We don't need dreary old feminism any more, it's all irrelevant [sic], we're equal now, we're empowered."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


UPDATE: Mindy's comment has alerted me to the fact that this is a very ambiguous post. The above quotation is attributed not to John Alexander but rather to assorted young women I've heard expressing that opinion in recent years. The hollow laughter is my response, and the link explains why. John Alexander actually comes out of it looking really good.

Bonding: just some slurry in bunny ears

Mere days after the volcanic explosion of a giant and pulsating boil on the muscular Aussie arse (otherwise Sarah Ferguson's 'Code of Silence' on Four Corners on May 11, including an interview with the girl who was pack-raped by involved in so-called "group sex" with a number of players and staff from the Cronulla Sharks in Christchurch seven years ago) and the resulting dismissal by Channel Nine of former player and 'personality' Matthew Johns in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy by a TV station that has done more to promote and legitimise misogyny and sexism than any other single entity in the country (I originally mistyped 'Bonding' as 'Boning' in the title field up there)... Mere days after said explosion, as I say, with blood and pus still dripping from the walls of TV studios and football clubrooms everywhere, a Melbourne non-league Australian Rules football team has been fined $5,000 for hiring a stripper to perform before a game, as -- and this was how I heard it described by a club official on the radio -- 'a team bonding exercise'.

A team bonding exercise?

Some of us think it's more just a variation on the theme of bukkake. Or possibly not even a variation. And they'd probably think that was a team bonding exercise as well.

I mean, 'bonding'? How does that work in this case, exactly? You get together to degrade a woman; that much is clear. From the Four Corners transcript (this is a different woman, talking about another different woman):

SARAH FERGUSON: There is an even more sinister side to this technology, Charmyne claims to have been shown a video recently, by a young player on his mobile phone.

CHARMYNE PALAVI: He goes we picked up this one girl and there was like seven of us on her and everything and he goes to me, and we um, but I said you're going to get in trouble for that type of thing, like you can't do that. And he goes, please, he goes we just filmed her to say that she consented to it.

And that freaked me out. This girl was actually in her 20's and told me what they did to her. He said they made her put bunny ears on cause Easter's coming up and made her give head to all of the players one after the other. Made, like I don't understand the term, like we "made her do it."

SARAH FERGUSON: Yeah, and do you know who she is?

CHARMYNE PALAVI: No, I asked him who she was, not knowing that I would even know her, and he goes oh just some slurry from around Cronulla.

So, you get together to degrade a woman ... and that gets you together? Que? How does that work? Apparently the idea of the stripper was to 'gee them up', or, as some commentator unselfconsciously but hilariously put it on the radio last night, 'pump them up', which would seem to support what some of us have suspected all along: that sport is really only a slightly more organised substitute for the raping and pillaging that all manly-men would want to do all the time if only there weren't a lot of silly laws against it.

I was offered a unique insight into the way a certain kind of male mind works when some slurry from around North Adelaide (and a total stranger to boot) came up to me in the pub one night many years ago and said, and I quote, 'Do you f*ck?'

Not 'Where have you been all my life?', 'Hello', 'What's your name?', 'Nice haircut' or even 'Nice tits', but 'Do you fuck?' The correct reply to this, which I gave, is 'Not with the likes of you, shithead,' but I later gave this question and its wording a great deal of thought. To a certain kind of man, there are only two kinds of women. A woman either 'f*cks' or she doesn't. And if she does, she f*cks everybody. Which is, like, consent, right?

And in the meantime, given the height, weight, strength, fitness, world view and subcultural norms of most rugby players, and Charmyne Palavi's own, erm, unique take on these matters, there's one thing of which I am very sure: it's only a matter of time before she finds out what "made" means.

There must be some kind of psychoanalytic logic to this 'team bonding around the degradation of one woman' business, but I'm too tired and too revolted to work it out, so I offer Prahran and Cronulla this truly charming, subtle and hilarious little video instead. I'm sure they'll just love it, and it'll give them some great new ideas.

Penis envy alive and well: who knew?

In today's Age there is an account by sports writer Greg Baum of the terrific tennis match last night between teenage rocket Caroline Wozniacki, the eleventh seed in the Australian Open at only 18, and Jelena Dokic, of the tragic and dramatic history thus far. The article will be read on and offline by tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people.

I watched the whole match and it was full-on, played with great pace and power but also featuring a lot of the delicate touch and mixed-up play that players such as Hingis and Henin won all their Grand Slam trophies with.

Greg Baum's take?

The match was a beauty, a slugfest, played at take-no-prisoners tempo, worthy of the men's draw.

Now if slugging and imprisoning are your favourite things then yes of course the men's draw will be your cup of tea, along with rugby, ice hockey, heavyweight boxing, the AFL in melee mode, and gladiators v. lions and bears. If not, if you prefer different aspects of the game of tennis -- precision, skill, quick thinking -- then perhaps you won't think to make evaluative gender comparisons but will rather take each kind of spectacle, and each kind of player, of whatever gender, on her or his own particular merits.

The match was indeed worthy of international competition at the highest level. It was worthy, at its very best moments, of past greats like Navratilova and Court. But is 'worthy of the men's draw' really the highest compliment you can think of? Give me a break, Greg Baum. Shift your great fat lazy paradigm.

Australian Open, day 1: the good, the bad and the ugly

THE GOOD

-- Alicia Molik's commentary. Possibly the most intelligent, articulate and personable player Australian tennis has ever produced, Molik has played most of the women on the tour and is very familiar with their games. I've been watching big chunks of boring matches in the lead-up tournaments just to listen to her.

-- Todd Woodbridge's commentary. He's also very smart, and pulls no punches.

-- The sight of 16-year-old Bernard Tomic winning the first set of his Open debut game. Australian teenage boys have been getting publicity for all kinds of stupidity and excess over the last year or so and it is very refreshing to see a tough, talented, focused, hard-working kid playing controlled, thoughtful tennis on his first big day out.

-- The return to form of Jelena Dokic, and, one hopes, the continued absence of her daddy.

-- John Fitzgerald.


THE BAD

-- Lame second-string TV 'journalists' doing the rounds with their mics looking for 'features', which mostly means asking incredibly lame and vapid questions of people like Bernard Tomic's father and coach John, who obviously just wanted to sit and watch his kid play tennis but answered the inane questions politely and calmly.

-- Channel Seven's apparent indifference to the basic courtesy of pronouncing other people's names properly. They ought to research the pronunciation of the name of every player in the draw and then drill all the commentators in all the names until they can pass a test. NB this applies in particular to Russians and Frenchpersons. NBB Cricket commentary would also benefit from this practice.

-- John Alexander's apparent inability to notice, much less mention, any other player on the court if Lleyton Hewett is present.


THE UGLY

-- The cod-French pronunciation of sponsor Garnier of its name in its ads as 'Garny-air', to which one must listen approx 10,000 times a day if one has the telly on to follow the tennis while doing other things. But I have whinged about this before.

-- The appalling sexism that infests every level of Roger Rasheed's commentary. This is a hangover observation from last year, and one can only hope that Channel Seven sent him to re-education camp over the winter, or at least keeps him away from the women's games this year.