"Effluent" Australians say the darndest things

The latest Big Brother controversy has been canvassed to death by now, and just about every second blogger has expressed an opinion on it. (And now I'll give you mine.) It's not so much the incident itself that disturbs me the most--until this week I had never heard of "turkeyslapping" and it simply wouldn't have occurred to me that, in this modern secular liberal democracy of ours, the practice of holding down a woman against her will while another "slaps" her in the face with his penis would be considered by anyone to be a good idea. So I'm still coming to grips with that one. Evidently I don't attend enough cocktail parties in aspirational Australia.

No: what disturbs me the most about this incident are the endeavours by some, starting with the producers of Big Brother themselves, to either downplay the seriousness of what frankly amounts to deprivation of liberty and sexual assault, or to go as far as claiming that the victim "deserved it." Hoyden-About-Town highlights a selection of choice comments that have appeared on Ausculture Jess's blog, and here are some more:

Camilla is to blamed. She incited all this. If she had act a bit morally decent, the guys wouldn't have done it.

"If you want respect, act like you deserve it"

Respect

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Camilla was probably begging for it, its obvious shes a cock starved slut from what shes said in the past, john and ash should get a million each and should sue camilla for getting close to his cock the skanky whore

shagger mehard

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Camilla was into it, she was hang'in for a bit of cock. Had the camera's been turned off she would have sucked it for all she was worth. BB without cameras would be just one big orgy, now that's an X-Rated version that I would been keen to watch, instead of this tame teeny-bopper crap!

Big banana

The wowser brigade from the PM down have had a field day with this (if you'll pardon the pun), but here's something they won't like. The "Howard Years" have witnessed an intensification in the backlash against feminism in Australia, though it began much earlier, and I'm beginning to wonder if sentiments such as those posted above--as well as the infamous incident itself--are symptoms of this conservative desire to put women back in their place? A few years ago the PM remarked: "We are in the post-feminist stage of the debate." Hmmm. If the "shagger mehards" of the world are anything to go by, perhaps he was right.

Like I said, the wowsers won't like it, but just as the times apparently suit the PM, maybe they also suit Ashley and John.

UPDATE: For intelligent, thoughtful Big Brother commentary--as much as that sounds like a contradiction-in-terms--look no further than Eye on Big Brother.