Thot report #592

Yes, I'm talking about this again.

The first thing I'd like to mention, is that I recently went down a YouTube rabbit hole, and discovered that there is a whole sub-genre of videos, which are labelled "ASMR", but are actually young women doing pornographic radio-plays, with just a still image from a Japanese cartoon as the video. I find this interesting, because most of the "ASMR" thottery I've seen up until this point has been unquestionably visual-oriented—young girls in low-cut tops giving blowjobs to lollipops, and so forth; but this stuff is entirely auditory. Not only is it something that I didn't know existed, it didn't even occur to me that there'd be a market for it. And yes, I know phone-sex hotlines have been around for decades, but I assumed that the internet, and it's unfathomable abundance of hardcore imagery would have killed that off. Apparently I was wrong.

And now, on to the main topic of the day.

Last Sunday, the family had a little bit of a get-together for the NRL finals. Disappointingly, NSW teams won both of the men's games, but on a positive note, QLD walked all over their opposition, to secure the women's premiership two years running. Oh, and this was despite the fact that half of their team from the previous season was playing for the other side. Have I mentioned before how much of a legend Ali Brigginshaw is? Anyway, it was a much-needed victory for the nibblings, since this year, their home state has bombed out of the AFLW, AFL, NRL, and the netball.

However, the most interesting part of the day was that one of the older nibblings spent the entire time glued to his iPad. Okay, okay, that's neither interesting nor unusual, I hear you; but what was interesting, was that when I asked him what he was doing, he informed me that he was following the game on social media. Now, why you'd choose to read comments from random strangers about something, rather than just watching it for yourself, and talking to the people around you, I don't know, but it did get me curious. I can remember earlier in the year, there was all that hoo-ha about that photo of the female AFL player that attracted a lot of derogatory comments; so I decided to see for myself what crowd-sourced commentary was like when it came to rugby league.

Firstly I'd like to mention that Facebook is horrible, ugly, annoying, and hard to navigate, and if I knew anybody who had a personal or professional website that looked and functioned like a Facebook page, I would immediately advise them to change everything. I also don't know what people are primarily using it for now, since there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot in the way of interesting conversation going on there. Secondly, I don't understand how people use Twitter. "Following a conversation" doesn't feel at all like following an actual conversation. It feels more like being in a room full of mentally retarded people who are all just spouting out half-coherent thoughts and non-sequiturs. Actually, now that I think about it, it probably feels more like being stoned to the point where you can follow what people are saying for a sentence of two, but you can't string any of it together into anything meaningful.

So, that brought me to Reddit … which basically functions like an old-fashioned forum, or the comments section in a blog … so at least I know how to follow and make sense of it. I ended up reading through the threads on both the men's and women's grand finals. Here's what I found:

1) 99% of the abuse was directed at the refs and the TV commentators, not at the players.

2) Apart from jokes poking fun at how badly the Dragons and Broncos men's teams did this year, I only saw one comment comparing the female and male athletes. This was meant with a half dozen replies along the lines of: "Yes, thank you, everybody here is well aware that male athletes perform at a higher level than female athletes. You are not contributing anything new or original to the conversation. If that is all you want to talk about, please kindly fuck off and let the rest of us enjoy watching the game."

3) When it came to the men's game, there was a lot of old school jokes about NRL players being knuckle-dragging morons. There was one crack about a player being a "big ape", which I guess you could have interpreted as being racist, if you were really trying; but I don't think it was meant to be, given the context. Apart from that, I didn't see anything else which could be construed as racist; which I actually found a little surprising, considering half the players in the league are Pacific Islanders now.

4) This may have been a factor of how much longer the men's thread was than the women's, but it contained a higher percentage of sexually themed comments than I would have expected, and it also contained the most explicit comments. One person described a male player as having "great blowjob lips", and another bloke was giving commentary on which parts of the game he was masturbating to. Which leads me into the next point:

5) A lot of the sexually themed comments, for both the men's and women's games, seemed to be homoerotic in nature. I know that lesbians are massively over-represented in elite sport—and especially in full-contact sports—but I don't know if that's also true for the audiences of said sports. I guess it wouldn't surprise me. How popular footy is amongst gay men, I have no idea.

6) Most of the sexually themed comments in the women's threads were directed at a handful of specific players, and a lot of them made reference to Instagram. So I went and looked at said players Instagram accounts. And here's where we circle back to the topic from earlier.

It never occurred to me, that there'd be internet thots who are also elite athletes. Now, I get that if you're young and beautiful, and you spend a lot of time working out, you'd want to show off your body. But there's posting the odd photo of yourself lifting weights, or flexing, or wearing a tank-top that shows off your rippling abs; and then there's having a social media account where 30% of the content you post is just you bending over in a g-string while looking over your shoulder and making a kissy-face.

Of course, I can remember how shocking and scandalous it was, back in the day, when sporting celebrities would do raunchy photo-shoots; so this isn't entirely new ground. What is new however, is how the internet has changed things. First of all, these girls are running these social media accounts themselves, which basically disarms any argument you might get over exploitation. Secondly, this isn't like a magazine here, or a calendar there. They're putting out a constant stream of content, and intentionally cultivating a devoted audience of literal wankers. The point being, should anyone be shocked, or surprised, or even upset, when said wankers then show up on sports-discussion forums, talking about how great their favourite athlete's arse is?

Then you have the questions of whether this hurts women's sport as a whole; or tarnishes the brand of the NRL; and whether professional athletes have a responsibility to be good role-models; and whether employers should be able to discipline or sack people for things they do or say outside of work - and that's not even taking into account the fact that NRLW isn't even fully professional, and some of these girls may be using this to supplement their income.

Interested to get some opinions on this.