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Commentators have taken a fleeting glance at the Sydney Swans scandal, applied the wonderful simplicity of Karen Logic and immediately concluded that the entire nation needs to repent in sackcloth and ashes.

Five Sydney Swans players breached club standards by partying into the wee hours of Monday morning with strippers who — through the miraculous alchemy of public relations — quickly progressed from crude ‘strippers’ to ‘private performers’ before finally being universally revered as ‘exotic dancers’.

It’s alleged that one player sexually assaulted one of the women.

The serious allegation is rightly being investigated by police.

Separately, the Sydney Swans suspended the five players for the rest of the season because they should never have been out until 4am, let alone brought girls back to the team hotel.

Fair enough.

But watch what happened next.

From Five Players to a Nation of Misogynists

In the blink of an eye, the misbehaviour of five players became evidence of a culture problem among all 44 players on the Sydney Swans list.

And before you could say ‘believe all women’, the Sydney Swans culture had become evidence that the AFL itself was rotten to the core.

And before excitable journalists could find Mitch Brown’s phone number for comment, the AFL had become evidence that male sporting culture was utterly corrupted and completely irredeemable.

And in the time it took a person to type ABC News into their web browser, sporting culture had become evidence that Australian masculinity was toxic.

And with all the confidence of Julia Gillard staring down Tony Abbott across the Parliamentary dispatch box, Australian masculinity was declared to be prima facie evidence that Australian men were misogynists.

So there you have it.

We travelled from a hotel room at the Melbourne Pullman to the entire Australian male population without even stopping for evidence.

This is the rhetorical equivalent of blaming every Toyota Camry owner because one Uber driver double-parked his car in Mosman.

The trick is conflation…

Unfair Generalisation

Individual behaviour becomes institutional behaviour.

Institutional behaviour becomes social behaviour.

Social behaviour becomes national character.

And at each stage, the original facts become less important than the increasingly satisfying national sermon.

There’s nothing wrong with examining sporting culture.

If professional clubs tolerate contempt for women, reckless behaviour or a sense of entitlement, then of course they should be held accountable. Obviously.

But accountability requires precision.

It requires distinguishing between an allegation and a proven fact, between the conduct of five individuals and the conduct of an entire club, and between a genuine institutional problem and the increasingly desperate desire to discover one.

You can’t establish that every footballer, every AFL club, and every bloke in the country is a misogynist merely by repeatedly widening the circle until everyone everywhere is standing inside it.

Otherwise, we aren’t investigating the actions of five blokes in a Melbourne hotel room; we’re shamelessly using those actions as leverage to deliver a pre-determined guilty verdict on 13 million men.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.