Why I love Annabel

Stolen from SMH

Group sex and 'bunning': it's all Greek to me
Annabel Crabb
May 14, 2009 - 1:48PM
"Am I missing something?" I thought to myself early in the week, as the Matthew Johns controversy thundered on with a life of its own, and yet it seemed that Johns would press on at The Footy Show.

I mean, no one wants to be judgemental, or anything.

And I'd hate to be thought a fuddy-duddy.

But you don't have to be especially judgmental, do you, to harbour some reservations about someone who is unfazed about being joined, at the business end of a date, by nine or 10 workmates with their pants off?

Aberrant behaviour can be survivable.

The West Australian Government boasts as Treasurer a man who is famous for theatrically sniffing the freshly vacated seat of a female staff member.

Hell, a search engine and 15 keystrokes (K-E-V-I-N-R-U-D-D-E-A-R-W-A-X) are all it takes to summon a visual reminder of the weird stuff our Prime Minister gets into when he thinks no one is looking.

But this is a bit different. A lot different. Eleven guys lining up in front of a 19-year-old is a lot different.

"I left the room. I only went back in to check that everything was OK," Johns said on Wednesday night, halfway through the Nine Network's half-hour torture of Johns and his wife, an interview so intensely voyeuristic that, after 20 minutes or so, you felt about as bad as if you'd been in the room yourself.

Went back in to check that everything was OK?

OK in an "all my mates having orderly sex with the girl I brought back to my room" sort of way?

One of the things that's most baffling about this whole affair is the extent to which a small part of the population apparently considers this sort of stuff unsurprising.

And hats off to David Gallop, by the way, whose stubbornly, insistently normal responses to this behaviour provide an island of sanity.

The closest thing I've heard to a justification is that it's some sort of complicated team building exercise.

Perhaps that's true, although if it was team building, it's obviously failed, seeing that at least half a dozen unnamed blokes from the room that night seem fairly happy for Johns to take the rap - to a devastating extent - for everything they did.

Where are those guys?

Where's that famous team spirit?

But surely somebody, at some point, needs to cut through the forgiving fug of psychoanalysis and evaluate this quaint league tradition (apparently it's called "bunning", a new word for most of us) for what it is.

Strip away the fame and the adulation and all the trappings.

Strip away the girl, even, and ask the obvious question.

Which is: Why would a group of blokes come together, as if drawn by some invisible gravitational force, and gather in a room to masturbate with each other?

What do we ordinarily call that behaviour?

Much criticism has been made that the players who engage in "bunning" are exploiting these girls for bestial sexual purposes.

I don't know.

Those girls are being used all right, but I reckon they're being used as beards to disguise the otherwise perfectly obvious, screaming queerness of what's going on.

Come on. Are you kidding?

Let's say it out loud: it's the gayest thing ever.

And these are the same blokes who can't wait to climb into dresses for stunts on The Footy Show. Don't think we're not putting two and two together.

So come on, chaps.

If you want to get together and celebrate your oiled, toned bodies in the celebrated Greek tradition, then go ahead.

Just leave the ladies out of it, will you, and do us all a favour?