A particular football culture in Australia is under fire for the attitudes towards women and sexual consent. There has been a number of sexual assault allegations over the years, in 2005 the Bulldogs National Rugby League football team allegedly gang banged a woman in Coffs Harbour. The woman was used as part of a celebration. No one was prosecuted even though there was rape allegations. At the start of 2009 Manly Rugby League star Brett Stewart was charged with sexual assault of a teenager after a booze-fueled season launch in Sydney. Now later in 2009: A New Zealand woman says a night of group sex involving former rugby league star Matthew Johns when she was 19 has led to significant trauma. These scenarios got me thinking about surfing, and some of the ugly stuff I have come across in our culture.
The Party
(Story heavily influenced by “Country Girl” by Peter Bowes, in Kurungabaa, Issue 1 Volume 1)
At the party the boys are drinking, hard.
The text goes out to Emily, a girl who is known to ‘put out’ and has a few friends who do too. By the time they girls arrive everyone is pretty messy, and the music is blaring as the boys imitate their garden tools as dances, like ‘the sprinkler’. A few crew throw old boards on a bonfire as a sacrifice for better surf, the swell has been flat for weeks.
The party spills out of the house as more crew turn up. There’s a big shed in the backyard, and the light doesn’t make it behind the shed.
Dark. Black. Spiders.
Emily is stumbling around, charming all the boys with a touch or a flick of her hair. She’s hot. Tanned body. Bikini lines. Short shorts. Her friends look untouchable, they’re all hot too. But then again the boys have beer goggles on.
Mick’s blood boils and heart beats faster as he ushers a drunken Emily behind the shed. He’s the most brazen of the boys, always ready to ‘have a crack’ at the ladies. And Emily is called ‘fair game’ because the cooler wine is having a dramatic effect on her, and she’s had sex with some of the boys before.
A few other blokes creep behind the shed to see what is going on. They peer and stare. Most have not had sex before.
Emily is on her stomach. Mick’s panting. One of the boys crawls forward and asks if he can join in. Emily nods her head groggily, turns over and unzips him. The boys line up, each wanting a go. None last long.
Emily gets fed up.
It’s pathetic. She wrestles to get up. The boys keep taking turns.
Fear.
The boys don’t realise their large muscled bodies tower over Emily, or how strong they are.
Tears.
Laughter. Slapping of backs. Handshakes. Some boys don’t join in, and just watch. They’re unsure at what is happening, or what to do.
The last boy finishes, and stumbles back to the party and music and dancing and fun.
Emily lies there until everyone goes home, and then sneaks away.
Sobbing. Emily’s favourite dress is torn.
The young surfers at the party were not prosecuted. Nobody found out they had raped a girl. Some didn’t think of it again, others thought that Emily was a slut and asked for it and would do it again, while some didn’t understand at all what had just happened because they weren’t thinking about Emily.
Was that her name?
A wise old bloke has once told me, ‘surfers can be sexually brutal, like many other boys and men, and sometimes without realising it’.
***
Sometimes group sex – gang banging – can go very wrong. When you take part other blokes may make you feel like a bit of a ‘legend’ as they egg you on. And you can be swept up in the bodies, sweat, heat, and action. The girl quickly becomes just a piece of meat the boys are using to bond through. Her name means nothing to them.
Some blokes will talk about the gang bang the next day. It can feel like a bit of an ‘adventure’. The sexual experience ends up not being about sharing the experience with the girl, and everything about bonding with your mates. The opinions of male friends can become paramount, at the expense of the trauma of the girl who will remain emotionally, if not physically scarred, for life. Imagine the terror of being controlled sexually, and the horror as you felt and dreamed it over and over.
Think about it, hard. What if it was your friend, sister, cousin, girlfriend, aunty, mum?
Mateship can get ugly when teamed up with sex, if you let it. You can see this in the play Black Rock by Nick Enright. The play is based on real events that happened at Newcastle beach in early 1990s, a tragic rape and murder of schoolgirl Leigh Leigh by young surfers at a party, where a group of ‘mates’ closed ranks and didn’t speak out.
In the 1997 film, directed by Steven Vidler, Jared the main character is 17 years old and lives with mum who is divorced. He has little to do with his father. His best mate is Richo, who has just returned from a long surfing trip. There are various moments where Richo and Jared bond through surfing and fighting. At a party a girl, Tracy, is shown laughing and kissing a boy on the beach. Jared is watching from atop a cliff. A group of boys turn up. They rape Tracy, but Jared does nothing to help. Instead he runs away. Tracy’s friend Rachel finds her dead body.
Jared is suspicious that it was Richo who killed Tracy. And agonises over whether to put his mateship with Richo first, or whether to sacrifice the bond and tell police. After lots of arguments, where the other boys label Tracy a ‘slut who deserved it’, Jared tells the police.
The fact that Jared doesn’t intervene when he sees the rape happening, and is so torn up about ‘dobbing’ on his mate, shows how strong male-to-male bonding is. It also shows how sexual experiences with girls can actually come a distant second-place to mateship with the boys.
But this sort of behaviour is pretty far from mateship. A real mate does not refuse to stop what is happening when someone is being hurt, abused, or sexually assaulted. Being a complicit bystander means acquiescing to this sort of behaviour, and not caring about what the girl the boys are going through and the consequences.
***
Rule number one about sexual experiences, whether group or otherwise, is consent. I repeat, consent.
If a girl stops talking, and ceases to have any say in the sex she may be scared. A real mate stops and ask everyone present if everything is OK. The girl is not going to be turned off by this, but happy she is classed as a mate too. And if a bloke is not taking part, he still needs to have the guts to stop what is going on if things are getting ugly, and ask again. Real mates check that everyone feels safe.
Sometimes people will not say things are getting ugly, but they will feel it. It is important to also pay attention to bodies. Are some bodies appearing scared or upset? We use body language to work out if someone wants to hook up, so we can also use non-verbal communication to pick up if somebody isn’t comfortable. But it is important to not just rely on body language, but to also stop and ask what going on and if everything is cool.
Sometimes though, we’re too smashed or dumb to pick up on body signals, and need to actually ask questions like: what do you want to do? Are you feeling OK with this? This care makes for better sex because sometimes the girl asks: actually, could we do it like this? It very well could be something new and very hot.
While a person may consent to having sex one time and in a particular way, it does not mean that they do the next time. Safety and consent is an ever-changing, and personalised, relationship that has to be worked out each and every time.
A good mate of mine Moira Carmody taught me about consent and care during sex – ‘sexual ethics’. Moira has read and written about this stuff for over twenty years. He r idea is that we all need to learn less about the mechanics of sex and reproduction, and more about hooking up or issues of consent or how to negotiate difficult situations or how to stop things get out of hand. As Moira said
“Young people have their own ideas about what they’d like to learn about ethical and safe sexual relationships … they also want more opportunities to address the complexities of intimate relationships”.
Sex education tends to focus on the ‘threats’ of sex like pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But there also needs to be the chance to learn about how to pleasure others, hook up, how to hear and understand ‘no’, what consent means and how to ensure it is present, and how to communicate what you want to do sexually. It’s a sex-positive education and not meant to ‘scare’ young people off sex. Moira’s research shows that sex-positive young people are more responsible users of contraception anyway. Silence around sex-positive messages implicitly shames our experiences of bodies and emotions and sensations, and limits the ability for sex to be safe and gratifying.
While older blokes used to give me advice about sex pretty often they were misogynistic and sexist and knew nothing about safety and consent themselves. They were also to be absent when things got hot and heavy.
My habit was to turn to my mates for sex information, since they were the ones closest at hand – at the parties, beach, sheds, and the like. But they were not armed with much information, or have ready access to the type of sex-positive information we needed.
Moira interviewed a bunch of young blokes and has found that after giving them sex positive messages they felt more confident about making sure sex is fun for those involved, and about intervening in situations when they are getting ugly. In fact, they learned when something was ugly. Before they didn’t realise how to identify when things were getting out of hand.
The blokes who did classes with Moira learned that it is their responsibility ‘manage sex’ and it’s not just up to the girls. And being unsure and uncertain was shown to be OK, and asking how to proceed didn’t mean rejection but new opportunities. There is no need to have contempt for ‘feminine’ qualities like feeling vulnerable, weak, or passive because they are a part of sex for men too. Also, fear of being the one who is fucked and contempt for those who are is unnecessary because there is no right and wrong way to ‘do it’. Blokes aren’t hard, invulnerable, and active and not passive. It’s all about communication and learning to be comfortable with variety, and being willing to imagine manhood and sex differently.
***
Expectations about the relationship between sex and manhood can change during any experience. Take for instance ‘schoolies’ week on the Gold Coast. It’s a week where young people from all over Australia come to the Goldie after finishing year 12 at high school. Everyone parties hard, surfs, and parties some more. It’s where Jarrah and his mates learned about hooking up with girls.
Jarrad can feel the bass thumping through the sand under his feet. The boys have been drinking and they’re watching a group of girls singing.
‘Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Don’t ch wish you girlfriend was a freak like me? Don’t cha?’
‘Damn straight’, mutters Jarrad.
Jarrad figures there nothing to be gained by sitting back and watching. He moves up next to one of the girls and begins shaking his hips and moving his hips. One two, one two.
The girls are outgoing. And they arrange to meet up the next day.
The boys take the girls up into Currumbin Valley in the hinterland behind the Goldie. The girls are from Melbourne and are keen on all the lush green vegetation, and cool rock pools.
Jarrad tells the girl he is keen on, Aleisha, that she looks hot in her bikini. Aleisha laughs and says he isn’t too bad himself with his boardies hanging low around his waist. He hides his half mongrel by diving into the water. They talk for ages that day, and everyone seems to be pairing up.
That night the lounge room at Jarrad’s older brother’s place at ‘Mainy’ – Main Beach – is the scene for some drinking and hanging out. To get Aleisha in the mood Jarrad shares some chocolate with her, and talks softly in her ear.
Then Jarrad goes for it and begins to pash Aleisha. He’s nervous and uncertain so uses his tongue like an epileptic eel and pushes too hard. Aleisha backs off. Looks him in the eyes, and says ‘no, like this’.
Aleisha tilts her and begins kissing him gently while cradling his hair. Slowly it all heats up. Aleisha flicks her tongue over Jarrad’s, and tells him to grab her hair while kissing her neck. This is good, thinks Jarrad. He’s got a half mongrel again.
The music begins to loop, and prompts Jarrad looks around. Everyone is into it. Jarrad’s mate Mitch looks over and gives him a wink and a smile.
Jarrad tries to undo Aleisha’s bra while still stroking her hair. It has to be done with one hand. But he’s not real dexterous with his fingers, and bras tend to be an enemy. He slips his hand under her top, Aleisha giggles. He works out that it is not a back fastening bra, but a front fastening. He feels for the clasp, pinches it by pushing his thumb back while keeping two fingers on the hooks, and they release. Stoked.
Aleisha pulls him into a bedroom. Pretty soon they are grinding up against each other, and things are sweaty. Hang on, ‘I’ll get a condom’, Jarrad says.
‘Hurry’.
‘Mitch, you got a dom? Mitch? Where’s Luke?
Jarrad finds Luke drunk in the Kitchen with another girl, who is also very wasted. Luke is trying to get her pants off and she’s mumbling ‘no’.
‘Nah mate, no go’, say Jarrad and tells Luke to ‘back off’. They carry the girl to the couch and lay her down so she’s comfy.
‘Hurry up Jarrad’.
‘You got a condom Lukey?’
‘It’s my only one’.
‘You don’t need it mate, seriously’.
‘Awww, alright’. The boys high five, Luke stumbles outside with a beer. Mitch walks by with a drink for his girl, and slaps Jarrad on the back. ‘Nice work’, he says. Jarrad sprints back to the bedroom. Aleisha is under the covers squirming.
Jarrad and Aleisha play around. Jarrad knows nothing and he whispers it to Aleisha. She laughs and says, ‘then you’re all mine’. Aleisha begins telling Jarrad what she likes. Pretty soon Jarrad’s confidence grows because it all feels good. It all starts slow and builds up. Aleisha really likes it when he nibbles on her ear and neck, and then inner thigh. The she pushes his head down, and grinds herself into his face.
‘Slow Jarred, slow’
Jarard doesn’t answer, his mouth is full.
Moaning.
‘OK, now it’s you turn’, Aleisha says.
‘Holy shit’, thinks Jarrad.
It’s all over quicker than Jarrad would have liked, and Aleisha is curled up with him. Jarrad is tired.
Half way through the night Jarrad realizes his arm is stuck under Aleisha, and he can’t feel it. It’s gone dead from lack of blood. Jarrad tries to put Aleisha off. It doesn’t work, so he wrenches it out. Aleisha doesn’t wake up. Jarrad shakes his arm but reels back in pain as the blood returns, and pins and needles run through his skin.
While getting a drink of water Jarrad can hear lots of laughter and giggling, and kicks his toe in the dark on the way to the fridge. Seems like everyone is getting a bit. Luke is passed out in the garden out front. It’s been a good night.
Back in bed Jarrad positions his pillow lower down the bed than usual, and curls in behind Aleisha. But this time he puts his lower arm over his head. He nicknames it the Superman spoon. But he can’t sleep, and begins using the outstretched arm to text a mate on his phone. He wants to tell the boys about tonight.
The next morning everyone is pretty groggy. Everyone hangs out together over breakfast. Jarrad’s brother has told him that you never rush off after sex because it’s bad form. For a few days the parties with Aleisha and her girlfriends continue.
The boys drop the girls off at the airport for their flight back to Melbourne. Aleisha gives him a long pash goodbye. On the way home the boys high five each other, laugh their heads off at their sexual incompetence and compare newly found skills. Jarrad thanks Lukey for being prepared with condoms, and Lukey pats Jarrad in the back in thanks for pulling him off the girl when he and her were too drunk to be doing it, and helping him hear the ‘no’ loud and clear
Jarrad never saw Aleisha again, even though he called her a few times and they talked for ages.
Jarrad and his mates got it right. The important thing is to reward each other with a sense of pride, affirmation, and belonging when we learn about sexual ethics, and everyone has safe sexual fun. And we can bond through feelings generated by sharing this knowledge that emphasises stoke and safety, rather than just ‘getting off’ and ‘sexual conquest’. A pat on the back or handshake can mean a lot if one of the boys has stepped up to stop things getting out of hand, found out more about what girls like, and made sure sex was safe.
It’s real important for blokes to think about sex and sexuality more so we can stop a whole system of beliefs that are a real problem – homophobia, sexual bullying, sexual exploitation, unsafe sex, and sexual assault and violence.
Clif I hope your stories make it into the high school reading lists ..
The sad thing for me as a female of the species is how women believe that subjecting yourself to the ‘gang-bang’ experience is actually empowering to them. I have no objection whatsoever to consenting adults indulging in any sexual activity. It is the gender-politics behind people’s actions that needs to be addressed.
I sincerely doubt that a drunk or otherwise insecure or abused teen or post teen woman has any real concept of the idea of “consent” in a gang bang situation…asking her what she likes so she can maybe feel like a “mate”..part of the group culture..is considerate, but sad.
why perpetuate such a culture in the first place..and that goes for both genders.
thanks for putting this out,it raises more questions than answers.
one clue in the puzzle is Catherine Millet’s..”the sexual diary of catherine O”
Here is my thinking Dr Rob (up for debate of course, but it is where I am at so far):
I cannot and should not simply police or ban sexual behaviour. Society can’t do that now, and haven’t ever been able to (except for homosexuality and look how that went – homophobia)(the church has had a good shot but I don’t like their persecution model at all). What are the suggestions for doing it in the future and how would we avoid such persecution/guilt/shaming?
Maybe next it would involve banning the “missionary position” because the VAST majority of sexual assault happens in pairs; between a man and a woman? What about office work? This is where the majority of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace takes place.
It is a slippery slope.
I can either bury my head in the sand and pretend the sexual behaviour (like group sex) isn’t happening or find ways of negotiating and helping young people negotiate when it is. And it IS happening as all my research on sex and young people shows, and many academic research and sexual education program research shows.
This sexual behaviour will always happen whether my morals think it right or wrong. So we must work out how to show people how to deal with the situation.
And who am I to say that people cannot partake if it is consensual and negotiated safe and mutually pleasurable for everyone?
The drunk/drug angle is about showing how even with this intoxication we have to deal with situation because these factors can be involved, and young people have to know how to stop behaviour or get people out of difficult situations because under such circumstances it is is VERY HIGH risk.
IMO: To focus on “group sex” is to get hung up on a peripheral issue; safety/consent/mutual pleasure in sex in general is what we need to aim for.
thanks for your thoughts.
this is a really good post because, as I say, it raises more questions than answers; as a result.. it causes one to actually think or critically examine perspectives..and anyway,
I’m all for breaking out of the hypnotic conditioned torpor that passes for common daily conciousness or awareness ..as much as possible.
one of the thoughts that occurred from reading your post(and certainly not to be hung up on a peripheral issue) is what constitutes “consent”, INFORMED consent, in gang bang situations.
my hunch is that for the most part..all parties concerned are operating fairly robotically with the driving motivators being fear, insecurity,and a culturally induced penchant for violence and domination.
pleasure as such, is secondary…and mutual pleasure,when considered, is defined in sado-masochistic terms with a heavy dose of misogyny thrown in for good measure.
i know there are exceptions,but given the almost overwhelming force of current cultural conditioning,
i think those exceptions have to involve some pretty remarkable people..(Catherine Millet coherently makes her case)..and so for the most part think gang bangs typically occur absent anyones informed consent, and must be a pretty degrading soul depleting experience for all concerned.
i’ve always thought of surfers as having a ridiculously privileged spot in this world; and i’ve always felt we have a particular role to play on land that involves our own “indigenous’ knowledge… and a part of that is the taking on of the “role modelling” function when appropriate and needed, which perhaps is your main point.
in this instance the keys are,as you say..”safe,consensual, mutual pleasure and respect”.
thanks again for getting these things out there.
Since the Matthew Johns thing started unraveling in the media, I’ve been trying hard to settle on what I think about such things. I don’t just mean what down over there in New Zealand with the Sharks, but what has gone down so many times over the years in so many different situations.
When I was young I was very uncritical about such practices. It seemed to be something that happened from time to time and I was always a bit confused about it all. I was never sure how I felt about it – what was cool, what were the limits, what was wrong.
When I was about 14, I remember hearing a story that spun me out. A couple of beaches away, a girl had been stacked then pissed on and finally cut by a broken bottle. A bunch of us young blokes were listening to the story. And although we were all shaken, none of us had a clue on what would have been an appropriate response. We looked to the older guys present for a lead but they didnt say much. I think one said the chick was a mole, another said the blokes were fuckin eggs. We listened for more but that was it. We just hung around spitting on the promenade waiting for the subject to change.
This was just one of many times growing up when guys I looked up to didnt lend a hand with a bit of low key mentoring. Wish they would have, would have made a lot of things a lot easier for me and those that I inadvertently influenced.
I used to be disgusted by the serial episodes of bad behaviour from NRL players. I judged them to be overpaid, bully boy gronks running on steroids and ego. I found little to admire in them.
Now I’m starting to think they have been let down by their managers, coaches, administrators and role models. A lot of them never finished school or were ever exposed to anything much beyond football. They were inducted into a community and wound up behaving accordingly. I wouldn’t excuse them for a minute but after thinking about it, I wouldn’t want to make decisions on how to behave based on the input they’ve had. Hoping that young men are going to go through puberty and stumble onto integrity, accountability and manliness without a bit of a lead is fanciful.
I really liked Clif’s piece. I liked how Jarrad’s brother passed on a bit of wisdom and I liked how Jarad had Luke’s back when he was pissed. By being a mate and speaking up – he made a real difference – not just for his buddy but to the girl who was also involved. I hope my daughter meets guys like this when she grows up.
‘A bunch of us young blokes were listening to the story. And although we were all shaken, none of us had a clue on what would have been an appropriate response. We looked to the older guys present for a lead but they didnt say much.’
That passage rings so fucken true Mark.
When your role models go missing what do you say? How do you act? Too insecure to speak up. Too young to know what to say anyway.
I hear you Stu. A moments silence for every kid who looked for an answer and came up with nothing . . .
When I was a teenage girl, I worked in a place where I was surrounded by men who were the Big Fish (at the time) in my local town. And their sons.
For a variety of circumstantial and relational reasons, I was privy to many of their conversations and stories and it always struck me that the older guys – the married, responsible fathers as I saw them – encouraged the recollection of stories by the boys and made big judgements on the girls involved. They kind of lived vicariously through the teenage boys and young men, living certain experiences through them that they probably had never had themselves. And these were only the conversations I was actually allowed to hear.
Even as a wide-eyed, naive, inexperienced teenage girl discovering her own world of desires and physical pleasures, I could see how complicated this stuff was and was going to continue to be.
It taught me early on that the only way to survive the town with some kind of acceptable reputation in tact was to avoid certain boys so that they couldn’t talk about you in that way. It didn’t mean that I stopped exploring my own developing sexuality – not at all! – but it negotiated with how, what and with who. (Even then, with care and consideration, I was variously the subject for rumours of group sex, lesbiansim and impressive promiscuity- regrettably none of them was true.)
Hearing how the older men encouraged younger crew to talk and what to try, made me determined that my own name would not come up in such conversations. As role-models, those men impacted on me greatly – the morality of being a sexual teenage girl, for me anyway, was defined by not wanting to be spoken of as a thing to be done, experienced or to be ridiculed.
What a shame.
Thank you Clifton.
Wow, this is such a big subject. Very reassuring to hear that many guys don’t support disrespectful behaviour towards women. Also interesting (though unsurprising) to see them talk about a lack of leadership/guidance from the older guys. Mark, I think you are on the money. I believe this is really the issue, a lack of cultural guidelines (not necessarily moral) which has resulted in initiations into ‘manhood’ that involve destructive rather than healthy, structured (and necessary for testing personal boundaries) risk taking. Self-respect translates into respect for others. Drinking to disgusting levels, racing cars that endanger other people’s lives, taking serious drugs and gangbangs are a poor substitute and do result in a ‘degrading soul depleting experience for all concerned’.
mate,
i should be working and instead I found your blog. amazing post, this one. should be printed out and given to every teenager. but not only: sexual abuses are not age related, as you discuss so well
let’s educate friends and foes, let’s share this post with everyone
hugs
what a dumb story.
feel free to contribute