YOUNG women who want to have casual sex - maybe even casual sex with footballers - could learn a lot from the guy who taught me how to ride a motorbike.
Jack* loved mounting powerful machines. He threw a leg over every chance he got. But the veteran biker never kidded himself about the dangers of the road and passed his pessimism on to his students.
Expect the worst, he told us. Prepare to brake at every intersection. And never, ever assume car drivers will respect your rights as an equal road user. "Is it fair?" he'd say. "Of course it isn't. But what's the point of saying 'I had the right of way' if you're lying in hospital in traction?"
Jack's defensive riding message - that sometimes safety trumps self-righteousness - makes sense when it comes to young women and sex, because it acknowledges the risks without (a) shaming, blaming and defaming the victims or (b) attempting to enforce unrealistic prohibitions.
As we all know, the moral conservative approach to female sexuality is that it is too powerful and dangerous to be messed with outside of marriage. From high school scripture teachers to Islamist extremists, the argument is the same: women's sexual magnetism is too strong and men's self-control is too weak. To preserve the delicate social equilibrium, therefore, ladies must be locked safely away and men must be forgiven if they lose control after exposure to too much bare bosom.
This, of course, is highly offensive to all sexes. Women are not dangerous social bombs who should be accessed only by specialised male technicians wearing safety gear in the form of wedding certificates. Amazingly enough, it is also quite possible for us to go drinking in micro skirts and have absolutely no interest in being the patty in an NRL sexual burger.
Men, meanwhile, are more than meat puppets whose penises click on to autopilot at the mere mention of female flesh. For chaps to claim they are held hostage by their biological urges is an appalling deflection of responsibility.
To return to a motorcycling metaphor, if men are busted speeding on a feisty Yamaha R1, they can't blame the bike no matter how hot it looked, getting about with its cross plane crankshaft hanging out the way it was.
Still, in the light of yet more sorry footballing sex scandals, I can't help thinking that the popular alternative to the moral conservative position, the one promoted by raunch culture extremists, has its flaws, too.
In an ideal world, women would be able to do whatever and whoever they wanted and damn the consequences. Like motorcycling, however, casual sex has dangers as well as thrills. The numerous nasties include diseases, drop-kicks, double standards and scary new recording devices.
(Back in the good old days, sexual regret only lasted a weekend and we were the only ones who remembered the dire details. Now, thanks to the rise of porn-sharing websites, our Saturday night swinging-naked-from-a-chandelier mistakes have the potential to haunt us forever, and the entire world - not just the rest of the footy team - may be watching through the bathroom window.)
Telling young women to go cold turkey on casual shagging is unrealistic and taking things way too far towards the Taliban end of the spectrum. But, like L-plate motorcyclists, they need to know that keeping safe means learning how to ride defensively.
If Jack was instructing young women in the ways of the sexual speedway, he wouldn't mince words. He'd issue a blanket ban on alcohol and say go easy when revving on unfamiliar roads or machines. He'd tell them to enjoy their sport but never ever to assume that other punters would respect their rights as equals (especially if those punters happened to have ovoid balls and quads the size of Kombis).
It isn't fair; and it certainly doesn't mean that women who come a cropper are in any way asking for it (bad things can happen to even the safest of speedsters). But pretending casual sex is hazard-free is as dangerous as pretending it's somehow possible to put a stop to it altogether.
* Jack's name has been changed.
[via The Australian]