The Misogynist and the Dummy

It has been a week and a half since the episode of The Footy show where Sam Newman in his inimitable manner demeaned women in general and Caroline Wilson in particular and offended anyone on the planet with half a brain*. I know this is an almost weekly occurrence, but this segment did not just step over the line, it left it several miles back in the distance.

I think I might just be able to speak about it without losing my cool.

I didn’t see the incident. I long ago gave up trying to watch The Footy Show - it is too dull, too stupid, and too unrelated to football to hold my attention. But I did see a very unhappy Caroline Wilson fronting up for work at Footy Confidential the following Monday night and taking Garry Lyon to task. For anyone who did not hear about it read Sam Lane’s excellent article for the full details.

Over the days that followed I discussed these happenings with many people and had a pretty tragic back and forth with my partner about the lack of interested the football community had in setting things right.

Partner: why don’t the AFL do something about it?

Me: Well the footy show is made by Channel 9 so the AFL can’t control it.

Partner: But couldn’t they boycott and tell the players they’re not allowed to go on the show?

Me: The players aren’t contracted to the AFL they are contracted to their clubs, so the AFL would have to get all of the 16 clubs to agree to the boycott. And even if you could get 15 of the teams, the president of Collingwood is Eddie McGuire and he sort of works for Channel 9 a bit. And even if you had a few of the clubs boycott, some of their players have individual contracts with Channel 9 so they wouldn’t boycott anyway.

Partner: That’s shit.

Me: Yep.

The truth is that while a boycott is a extreme response there was nowhere near the amount of interest in this story and community outrage that there should have been.

The only vaguely prominent article written about it was by another female journalist and Andrew Demetriou gave a bullshit, “check out how much good we’ve been doing with our rights and responsibilities stuff over the last few years” answer when asked about it on Offsiders on Sunday morning (Caroline Wilson was sitting on the couch opposite him while he said it too). Where were the articles from the men of the game and the media who do respect women? The deafening silence leads me to doubt there are any at all.

Caroline Wilson levelled a lot of her criticism at Garry Lyon. As the host of both The Footy Show and Footy Confidential he didn’t even have to courtesy to stick up for his colleague. I am a loyal Melbourne supporter and have long defended Lyon as he has compromised and embarrassed his way into a successful media career. I have little doubt that he apologised off-air, but his miserly on-air apology and the lack of any attempt to make amends for his part in allowing the segment to happen at all, let along continue, has saddened me.

On-air was where an example needed to be made for all those viewers that thought Newman was funny or that the segment was appropriate. The response from Lyon, Craig Hutchison (who was on The Footy Show at the time) and Channel 9 was far from adequate. I doubt I will be so vociferously defending Lyon from criticism in future.

The reality is that until individuals like Sam Newman (and there are many more than just him in the game and the media – including, it appears, Garry Lyon and Craig Hutchison) are publicly held to account for their behaviour and for their unacceptable attitudes towards women nothing will really change. I doubt whether they even realise why what happened was inappropriate and offensive.

Watching Before the Game on Saturday night a friend asked whether I thought they might have considered replacing Peter Hellier with another woman on the panel instead of Mick Molloy. Sadly, I doubt it. A token woman on the panel is seen as all that necessary for television programs and the game to claim that women are equal in the game.

There is no women’s round this year – not that the AFL ever put any effort into promoting it or recognising women as anything more than mothers and taxi drivers anyway.

Sorry, I may have lost my cool anyway.

* Not The Footy Show’s target demographic to be sure.