Listen to the blog version.
A group of drunk footballers hire some entertainment for a night, something goes wrong, and a complaint gets made. That's the shape of it, stripped down to the bit nobody disputes. Everything else — what exactly happened in that hotel room, who did what to whom — is currently a matter for Victoria Police, so I want to clearly say: for the purposes of this piece, I'm assuming no rape occurred. That's not a claim about the evidence. I don't have any. It's a premise, chosen deliberately, because I want to isolate a question about reasoning from a question about criminal fact, and the two get hopelessly tangled the moment you let them share a sentence. I am simply using the latest incident as an illustration of a principle.
And let me say the other obvious thing before somebody says it for me: I don't condone what the Swans did. I haven't seen anyone condone it. Whatever the players are alleged to have done, they're facing internal punishment and an ongoing investigation, and I think that's exactly as it should be - more on that later.
There's a separate, better question buried under this one, about why this particular flavour of misbehaviour turns up so reliably in male sporting clubs. Something is in the water there. I'm not answering that today; but suffice to say, a sporting club functions as a complex system, so there are multiple threads to pull on and it is easy to make everything unravel. It may be convenient to blame an individual, but doing so without understanding the role the code, the management, the culture, the expectations, the personal lives have all played, but it is not particularly useful in solving the problem.
What I want to look at instead is the quality of the arguments circulating around this story — mine included — because pointing out that an argument is illogical is not the same as disagreeing with its conclusion. I can think you've reasoned badly and still end up standing next to you. So consider this an exercise in judgment, not a verdict on the case.
Start with the industry itself, since it's the part everyone tiptoes around. Whatever the website copy says, it's broadly understood that adult entertainment is (a) adult and (b) "extras" are for sale in this line of work, and that these are not naïve women wandering into an unfamiliar situation. Most will have their own well-worn stories about handling drunk men in rooms exactly like this one. Their job, by its nature, involves offering themselves as an object of a room's attention. All of that is true and none of it licenses what may have happened next. Misbehaviour is misbehaviour. I raise it only because it's relevant for what comes next, not because it excuses anything.
Here's a thought experiment: Run the night again, but everyone in the room is gay — the players, the hired entertainment, all of it. Someone slaps someone else, throws something, does whatever's alleged to have been done here. Does it read the same to you? Does it read the same to any man OR woman watching? I suspect the discomfort shifts, and that shift is worth mulling over, because it tells you something about which parts of your reaction are principle and which parts are reflex.
If you insist on absolute relational symmetry, then apply it without the emotional subsidy.
In the male world, respect is not a default baseline granted by birth or biology; it is a currency earned through competence, restraint, and boundary enforcement.
If you step into a room fuelled by cheap booze, high testosterone, and transactional intimacy, you have stepped outside the zone of polite social fictions. That applies to the men holding the drinks, and it applies to the women taking the cash.
Which brings me to the point: you cannot demand equal treatment and special treatment in the same breath. That's not a comment on strippers, or footballers, or this incident specifically — it's a comment on a logical structure I see constantly, and this story just happens to be this week's occasion for it.
If your position is that women should be treated exactly as men are — same standards, same scrutiny, same lack of deference — then you don't also get to invoke vulnerability as a trump card when the standard becomes uncomfortable. You can't run both premises at once without contradicting yourself.
Take the parallel case of single-sex spaces. Plenty of women (I happen to agree with them) feel it's inappropriate to share a bathroom or a changing room with a biological man, and that feeling is entirely reasonable — but the same instinct, applied consistently, has to extend the same courtesy back the other way. A women's shelter and a men's club are the same category of thing, logically, even if they don't feel like the same category of thing. Demanding one while abolishing the other isn't equality. It's just a different hierarchy wearing equality's clothes.
It was aggressive feminists who came bashing doors down in the name of equality, and when all the doors are open and the traffic goes the other way, it becomes a problem.
My own answer to this doesn't come from humanism, but from a complementarian reading of the biblical account, where men and women hold equal dignity before God while being, deliberately, not the same — different in what's expected of them, different in how they're meant to be treated, different in role. That foundation is why I think women should be treated with particular care, not despite the difference but because of it. The purely humanistic notion of equality doesn't have that foundation available to it, which is precisely how it ends up demanding two incompatible things and calling the contradiction progress.
My view is simple: dignity is inherent, but safety is procedural. Some people seem to want the freedom of a lawless party and the safety of a Sunday school. You do not get both.
None of which changes what should happen next. The players deserve real consequences — I'd go as far as the club forfeiting its season, so nobody mistakes internal embarrassment for accountability.
But consequences and grace aren't opposites and can coexist. A man who's made a first mistake, who's genuinely sorry and wants to keep moving forward with his life, shouldn't be made to personally carry the accumulated weight of a culture that was rotten long before he walked into it. Punish the act. Don't conscript the individual as payment for the whole club's sins. We should at least acknowledge that when you throw a young man into a crucible of endless adulation, a lot of money, free time, boundless temptations whilst every whim is catered for and never needing to really grow up properly; the forces of character corruption become irresistible.
Many of us criticising from the sidelines may not have been able to resist either.
