Garry Lyon, Billy Brownless and sleeping with your mate's missus: why is it only about the blokes?
Gay Alcorn
It is pointless to get outraged about sexism, double standards, male honour and female temptresses. You just have to laugh
Billy Brownless and wife Nicky Brownless with Garry Lyon and wife Melissa Lyon arrive on the red carpet for the Fight Cancer Foundation 20th Annual Red Ball at the Crown in Melbourne, Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012. Photograph: David Crosling/AAP
Tuesday 16 February 2016 16.04 AEDTLast modified on Tuesday 16 February 201616.26 AEDT
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Sheilas, you gotta laugh. There is no other sane reaction to the story now obsessing much of Melbourne, football mad to the point of madness at any time.
It is pointless to get outraged about sexism, double standards, male honour and female temptresses. Just laugh.
For those outside the bubble of Melbourne, Garry Lyon and Billy Brownless are both former star
AFL footballers who have done well for themselves as media commentators. Lyon is the co-host of the popular Footy Show and
Brownless is its routine funny man. They are, reportedly, best mates and their former wives, Melissa and Nicky, were good friends too.
The marriages fell apart some time ago – the Lyons’ around 18 months ago, and the Brownlesses’ last year.
Over the past few days, it has emerged that Lyon had an affair with Nicky Brownless. Exactly when that started is not clear, although the Age reported without naming a source that the former Geelong star feared it was “up to four years ago”.
That claim has been denied, with Craig Kelly, the manager of both Lyon and Brownless, saying the affair began after the marriages broke down.
Lyon’s management has announced he is suffering depression and is standing down from his media commitments, including the Footy Show and a column with the Age. Brownless is reportedly devastated.
If you live outside Victoria, these men are very famous in a very small world.
How can I get over my husband's infidelity?
All this is personally traumatic, if tawdry, and I know it’s private and I shouldn’t be even reading it. Yet I am devouring every word because it’s Melbourne at its delicious worst – the scramble for every detail, the faux moralising, the hand-wringing about who is getting sympathy and who is not, the tsk, tsking about sex outside marriage.
Melbourne loves to think itself hip, but scratch the surface and we revel in the opportunity to judge the sex lives of others. This story will go on and on until one day we’ll all wake up feeling dirty.
So what’s to laugh about? It’s the predictability of the story that is ludicrous, the lack of irony in the unquestioned assumption that this is all about male honour, that women have little to do with who they sleep with, presumably because they’re either up for it all the time or they “belong” to certain men.
The Herald Sun, the country’s biggest selling newspaper, broke this story at the weekend. Mark Robinson, the paper’s chief football writer, is upset that Channel Nine, which broadcasts the Footy Show, is supporting Lyon, but saying nothing about the hurt of Brownless.
“Let’s cut to the chase,”
Robinson began. “Garry Lyon slept with his best mate’s missus and has left a trail of destruction.
“The Footy Show is a blokey, blokey environment, which is ironic because the one thing blokes don’t like is one bloke sleeping with another bloke’s wife, or ex wife, or ex girlfriend. It is an unwritten rule between blokes.”
Someone should make a T-shirt out of that. How else can you react? You can fulminate about the assumptions that “the missus” Nicky Brownless had nothing to do with a consensual affair, that she’s a bit player in a code between men.
You can be furious about what this might say about sexism at the heart of Australian culture, assuming that the AFL, as it likes to think of itself, is the prism through which we are obliged to discuss our moral quandaries. After all it launched a “respect and responsibility” policy about the treatment of women in 2005.
Last year, AFL head Gillon McLachlan felt moved to tick off Brownless, an MC at a junior football function, after he yelled out “here come the strippers” as a woman and her 18-year-old daughter passed through the luncheon.
McLachlan said Brownless’s remark was a “very silly mistake” in part because he was the “father of two young girls”. Brownless apologised.
Perhaps you can choose to take seriously what Lyon’s former teammate David Schwarz said of the affair. “If Garry had’ve punched Billy, it might have been done and dusted”.
But an affair with your mate’s ex-missus? “It’s just not acceptable – it’s not on. It’s taboo. How many times have we been told – don’t do it off your own pier? There’s plenty of fish in the ocean.”
Plenty of fish in the ocean, David? Grit your teeth or guffaw. This is a dying world of a certain sort of man. I like football, but I don’t look to it to provide leadership on anything off the football ground.
It doesn’t deserve it. It doesn’t earn it. It yearns to be taken seriously, so surely ridicule is the best revenge.
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This is how the Herald Sun reported the “coming out of hiding” of Nicky Brownless – presumably, they staked her out. “Mrs Brownless, wearing a black dress, ankle boots and Louis Vuitton shoulder bag, left her five-bedroom home accompanied by her two young adult daughters, lifestyle bloggers and Instagram stars Lucy and Ruby.”
Nicky, the paper noted, was a “glamorous mother of four”. Honestly, is this worthy of critique, or contempt?
The whole thing is a reminder of the Wayne Carey affair in 2002. Carey, a champion North Melbourne player, had an affair with Kelli Stevens, the wife of vice captain Anthony.
It was all a little sordid – they were caught at a party coming out of a toilet cubicle together.
The affair was doubtless extremely painful for everyone – both men were married at the time and they were team-mates – yet it was framed entirely as a mate’s “betrayal” of a mate, the women not bound, presumably, by any code of honour not to sleep with their friend’s husband.
It was as though they were invisible, without minds of their own, their central power their attractiveness to men.
A recent interview with Kelli Stevens, in which she refuted Carey’s version of events, started thus: “Kelli Stevens still has the same alluring, charismatic beauty which ultimately led to Wayne Carey’s downfall, but right now she’s wearing her angry face.”
Her beauty led to Carey’s downfall? Cry at that, if you like. Shake your fist. But the best reaction, surely, is to roll your eyes.
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-mates-missus-why-is-it-only-about-the-blokes
