Flaccid machismo at the fight

plausibly describe as hours of abuse from the oafs sitting behind them have been at pains to explain they’re not fragile wee flowers who showed up at a fight expecting the Aussie version of Jane Austen civilities.

On that point they can cease to persuade. We get it.

We also get that we really have only their account of what was done and said, apart from the phone footage that one of them took.

It’s a fair bet that the profane reluctance of her subject to be filmed might have had something to do with the dim emergence of a suspicion that she maybe wasn’t doing so out of a sense of admiration for his wit and insight.

But the women’s story of enduring hours of these self-pleasuring males delivering hearty, sustained, bellicose sexual commentary about themselves and others will be familiar with far, far too many others to be called anything other than plausible.

The offenders emerge as the worst sort of cliched boors.

And as women say, the worst of it was the inert lack of support from those around them.

It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs when we need to reassure ourselves that the reason was more one of cowardice than quiet approval , or enjoyment of, the men’s behaviour.

It’s not that they didn’t want to make a scene. A scene was already underway. An obscene scene at that. The silent ones just didn’t want to make themselves the new target. And this comes down not only to a lack of strength within themselves, but also a pretty comprehensive lack of faith in those around them.

The result was a collective spinelessness.

It’s unlikely that the bozos were relying on any sense of support from the rest of the crowd – just as it’s uncertain uncertain whether they would necessarily have been chastened, or at least silenced, had the rest of the crowd shown some... what should we call it... humanity?

But the crowd’s failing wasn’t, ultimately, just in failing to confront abusers.

It was in sending a second message to those three women. A message every bit as potentially damaging as the outpourings of the boofheads themselves: That the treatment they were enduring was something that just had to be put up with. Big lie.