Things Bogans Like

 ‘I had no idea giving pleasure could be such a turn-on, watching him writhe subtly with carnal longing. My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.’

Bylynda, curled up on the chaise lounge that she and Ben had just picked up from Gainsville for $5,000 interest free for 18 months*, quivered gently as E.L. James’ lucid, evocative prose coursed through her inner goddess.

While Ben sat in the study quietly fapped away on RedTube in the next room, Bylynda had her own moment of personal erotica.

‘His lips are parted – he’s waiting, coiled to strike. Desire – acute, liquid and smoldering (sic), combusts deep in my belly.’

This is fucked. Things Bogans Like is in no way a bastion of literary merit, and pretty much every human is guilty of slinging Dan Brown his 78c royalty at least once, but honestly DESIRE CANNOT BE LIQUID, SMOULDERING AND THEN COMBUSTIBLE. It simply can’t. Not even metaphorically.

Yet bogans the world over – millions of them – have somehow been convinced that some low rent, fairly inoffensive,  S&M fiction bearing the sentence construction of a 15 year-old LOTE student is worthy of two sequels and a reinvention of the femme-bogues’ concept of feminism.

‘”You’ve really got a taste for this, haven’t you, Miss Steele? You’re becoming insatiable,” he murmurs. “I’ve only got a taste for you,” I whisper.’

Did we mention that the protagonist’s name is Anastasia Steele? Because it is. It’s the Max Power of femme-bogue porn books.

Ms Steele is a barely-post-teen naïf who has never been with a man in any capacity (yet is somehow fully aware of how enormous her new beau’s cock is without need for comparison). Naturally, she is ‘caught in the web’ (without proof, it is certain this phrase exists either in the book or blurb) of Christian Grey, a ludicrously handsome 27 year-old millionaire who proceeds to tie her to various things and have tame, vaginal intercourse with her, during which she successfully climaxes every time, with stunning realism and exquisite prose.

‘I close my eyes, feeling the build up…pushing me higher, higher to the castle in the air.’

“CASTLE IN THE AIR”

‘Oh my…I didn’t know it would feel like this…didn’t know it could feel as good as this. My thoughts are scattering…there’s only sensation…only him…only me…on please…I stiffen.’

The she-bogan…is suddenly aware of…the existence of porn that can be…accessed in public…with…ellipses. Read on a train…at work…anywhere, really….all the while successfully raising the femme-bogue’s expectation…that her home-bogue will be…able to sustain his…mountainous erection for…long enough to bring her to climax…using…only his…knob…end and…terrible text.

‘Christian follows with two sharp thrusts, and he freezes, pouring himself into me as he finds his release.’

Christian can freeze and pour at the same time. This is impenetrable, hence deeply appealing to the bogan’s inner goddess.

‘My inner goddess is beside herself, hopping from foot to foot. Anticipation hangs heavy over my head like a dark tropical storm cloud. Butterflies flood my belly – as well as a darker, carnal, captivating ache as I try to imagine what he will do to me.’

…

‘That’s the bottom line. I want to be with him. My inner goddess sighs with relief. I reach the conclusion that she rarely uses her brain to think but another vital part of her anatomy, and at the moment, it’s a rather exposed part.’

…yes, that inner goddess.

‘We pick up the rhythm…up, down, up, down…over and over…and it feels so…good. Between my panting breaths, the deep down, brimming fullness…the vehement sensation pulsing through me that’s building quickly, I watch him, our eyes locked…and I see wonder there, wonder at me. My insides practically contort with potent, needy, liquid desire.’

The presence of so much liquid in this book is something of a reassurance to the bogan. Once it has accepted that it has a tenuous grasp on the concept of metaphor (need we remind you of the merengue at the top?), any metaphor becomes instantly salacious and literary.

 ‘”Look at me,” he breathes, and I stare up into his smoldering gray gaze. It is his Dom gaze – cold, hard, and sexy as hell, seven shades of sin in one enticing look.’

After serenading the bogan with E.L. James’ wondrous elicitation of forbidden poon tang, let us serenade you with the bogan literary review, overheard in a Melbourne workplace:

“I’ve been reading heaps lately, just finished 50 Shades of Grey” 

 “Yeah, that’s on my bookshelf” 

“Can’t wait for the next one, I’ve got it on order, 50 shades of Darker I think it is” 

 “I’ve heard it’s just as good”

Eat your heart out, E.L., if that is your real name (protip: it isn’t).

The bogan’s life path is, like the rest of us, indeterminate. As a young boaglet, the child-spawn is faced with a plethora of careers, romances, possible criminal records and fast-food/energy drink-induced cardiac arrests.

The bogan is, however, rebellious. It don’t take no guff from no one. It does what it wants when it wants. If the bogan’s parents were lawyers and judges, then HELL NO the bogan won’t work to achieve those things. The bogan will sink bulk piss, glass some cunt at Lucky Coq, then slip into a life of blissful mediocrity, in a location where it is suitably less mediocre than those around it.

This would not have been the bogan’s life direction if it was Tom Waterhouse. Had it been, the general approach to adulthood and career would have involved sinking bulk piss then glassing some cunt at Lucky Coq, before arriving at the door of Freehills and insisting that because its relatives going back into the distant past could cobble together a half decent ambit claim that it should undoubtedly become a Freehills gun-for-hire post-haste.

Waterhouse, scion of Gai and Robbie (son of Bill), is attempting to parley his family heritage at setting profit-making odds for mug punters or training large mammals to run fast while bearing a diminutive, whip-toting pilot into a suave, 21st century gambling empire. The bulk of this is done through plastering every sporting event in the world with his plastic, smirking mug via any medium possible.

Watching ads for tomwaterhouse.com.au is the worst thing in the world.

The detestable little pustule even roped his poor mum into the ad to try to give him some kind of credibility, even though she is not actually a bookmaker but a horse trainer. This is pretty much like applying for a job as a RBA economist, then offering your qualifications as ‘my mum taught a TAFE course in household budgeting’.

He also decides to trot around the betting ring toting a big white bag with his name on it, clearly forgetting the number one lesson of stranger danger – children (and adults with the stature and appearance of pre-pubescent polo players) should NOT go out in public with clothing and accessories which have your name on it. Should Tom be abducted by a lolly-bearing murderess, this fundamental error will surely be to blame.

In essence, the Tom Waterhouse pitch is thus:

Some people to whom I am related have a history of taking money off people under the mistaken impression that they have knowledge about something that is effectively a crapshoot. In particular, the womb that I squelched out of 30 years ago has some tangential relationship to gambling. Therefore if you give me money to bet, you will lose less of it.

Never mind the fact that if reprehensible arsehat actually does have any greater understanding of how gambling works, it would be in his interests to offer the bogan odds that are MORE likely to lead to his garnering bulk bogan bucks.

The ads he puts together give the bogan the distinct indication that his services will provide it with some kind of insight – assistance in making the bogan the Mahogany Room hero it was always meant to be. Looking at the site indicates that he is a bookie. A bookie with a solipsistic fetish for slathering all of his communications with that eminently, eminently punchable face.

Waterhouse tells the bogan that he has ‘betting in his blood’. The bogan, overlooking the fact that it would be much better off betting against someone who wouldn’t know Black Caviar from Furious D, goes to the aforementioned website, and puts all of its money, again, on Cunning Stunt.

Tom Waterhouse, sitting in his hypobaric chamber to keep his rubbery maw rubbery, clasps his hands together and smiles.

An apology is probably in order for the absence of posting. In the wake of writing books and holding down day jobs, many of us have decided to decamp for foreign climes for some time. And some of us had no time to post because Skyrim. Now that some are back, expect a bit more frequency with the posting.

In the meantime, here is a list of things that happened that we could have written about, should we have had the motivation. Please feel free to add suggestions.

• Teenager arrested in Bali for purchasing marijuana.
• Bogans assume he is guilty
• Bogans then assume he is innocent
• Bogans decide to wait until he’s sold his story to 60 Minutes
• Shane Warne gets engaged
• Shane Warne burns finger
• Trashmedia pay equal attention to both events
• Interest rates dropped
• Bogans took the opportunity to lament how Tough they are Doing It
• Kyle Sandilands something something
• Andrew Bolt was found to be a racist in a court of law
• Bogans blame political correctness gone mad; claim loss of free speech

What else happened?

There was once a time when claiming that bogans enjoyed the nasal whine, fierce ignorance and misguided nationalism of Pauline Hanson would be misguided in itself, and begging for a backlash. While the bogan insists that it is not racist, it is more than happy to broadly stereotype and generalise on the basis of ethnicity or skin colour. The bogan of today is, however, cognisant enough of the forces of Political Correctness Gone Mad to avoid making blanket statements in public about the country being swamped by Asians, and instead its racism was never entirely of a piece with that of Ms Hanson. The result was that the bogan was deeply conflicted over the former member for Oxley.

On one hand, it secretly agreed that it was indeed being swamped by Asians (who couldn’t drive), was having its taxpayer dollars siphoned off to layabout aborigines (who were all alcoholics) and that it was subject to reverse racism because it was neither of those things and didn’t receive sufficient support in Making Ends Meet. On the other, it was not racist. The result was a strange kind of mental stagnation, as the bogan’s rigorously programmed brain was confronted with an unsolvable paradox. The result was that Pauline Hanson really attracted only the votes of those completely happy to be racist – old people.

But that was then. The past five years has given the bogan every chance to engage in Hanson’s very public rehabilitation, as the trashmedia, short of anything it could legitimately call ‘celebrities’ settled for people that were at least ‘recognisable’. Midway through realising that her 2004 attempt to re-enter federal politics was doomed, she instead opted to fail more generally at life, by featuring on Dancing with the Stars. Immediately sensing the chance to ‘forgive’ a ‘celebrity’, the bogan instantly propelled her to the final, only to be confronted by a choice between a forgiven Hanson and an ascendant Hewitt.

After that, Hanson released an autobiography called Untamed and Unashamed, two things the bogan, rebellious Underbelly viewer that it is, certainly considers itself to be. Less mentioned is Hanson’s earlier book called The Truth, which suggested that Aborigines routinely engaged in cannibalism. Nonetheless, Hanson’s journey to bogan forgiveness is now complete, as she competes alongside a series of utterly failed semi-public figures in Celebrity Apprentice, a program that is effectively designed to see which low-rent, feckless Australian is most willing to debase themselves in order to garner a few more moments in the public eye.

Today, Pauline Hanson is comfortably ensconced in the bogan pantheon, with a lifetime of income to be drawn from her continued public exposure for no reason beyond the fact that the bogan recognises her. Once, she was (allegedly) driven to electoral fraud in order to make a crust, but from now on, she may suckle on the nourishing, engorged teat of the bogan’s ignorance. And she will.

The bogan, as we have well learned by now, has an astonishingly broad vocabulary with which to insult other bogans. All of these words tend to coalesce around a euphemism for homosexual, of course, but the myriad ways that the bogan can suggest homosexuality (the fact that homosexuality is an insult is implicit) boggle the mind. When insulting non-bogans, however, the insults tend to be limited variations on sipping/quaffing milk with their coffee or sipping/quaffing white wine from the grape ‘chardonnay’. Or calling them hippies. Bogans hate hippies.

As the political class have increasingly courted the bogan over successive generations, and the corporate world has become more sophisticated in persuading the bogan to act against its own interests, we live in a world today of growing income inequality. Meanwhile bogans remain the prime beneficiaries of the explosion in welfare payments that do little to even out income inequality.

Thus, the ‘occupy’ movement sprung up. Originating in New York as an inchoate response to corporate influence on the political process, it was co-opted (as these things always are) by many and varied disgruntled protest groups who feel the need to piggyback their drive for pushing the socialist alternative on everyone else. In Melbourne’s city square, the largest of these movements resulted in a small tent city of disparate protest movements all loosely confederated around a hatred of ‘the man’. Members of these groups tend to have dreadlocks. Unless the locker of said dreads be black, nothing spells ‘hippie’ to the bogan more than dreadlocks and/or fisherman’s pants. Ipso facto, these protests were the purview of hippies and everything they stand for is uniformly incorrect.

Meanwhile, the monumental political failure that is Robert Doyle sniffed the wind. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, having failed at every other political office he even considered standing for, realised that these people were hippies and a bogan windfall could be won by having his stormtroopers crack some heads.

The bogan, need it be repeated, is comfortably ensconced in its cocoon of normalcy. The bogan has its quarter-acre, its IKEA furniture, its large car and its porn collection, all designed to allow it to exist in such a way that it never interacts with those it finds unlike itself. Thus, it is offended by the existence of those unwashed and dissimilar who insist on appearing in public places where they cannot be easily ignored. Seeing Melbourne Police arrive in riot gear and comprehensively pound the living crap out of these people who were breaking no law is thus deeply satisfying to the bogan, which can then turn back to the news and listen to the report on how many police were injured in the operation. It will not hear that they were injured by their own capsicum spray. And it likes it that way.

With the threatened release of our new book, Boganomics, drawing ever closer, it has become time for us to whet your collective appetite with some choice snippets to be drawn from one of the 12 chapters contained therein. Today, let’s open up with a taste from our chapter on the bogan’s love of music and nightlife:

Choose your own bogan nightclub adventure

For this exercise the reader must put themself in the bogan’s shoes.

You step onto the footpath outside ‘ViperSnake’ nightclub. It is 11.30 p.m. on a Saturday evening and you have spent the previous few hours at the local pub, consuming a range of sugary and caffeine-enhanced alcoholic beverages and wailing along with poor timing to all the Whoooa-ohs and the Yeeeeah-eeaahs of the resident cover band. Those remaining acquaintances who have not already become overly intoxicated/embroiled in fights or forced to go home/to the hospital/to the police station join you at the club.

1. Upon arrival at the club’s entrance you are greeted with a long line, at the head of which stands a very enticing velvet rope. You are more important than the average person because your cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s sister knows someone who was once on Big Brother, and this level of celebrity entitles you to jump the queue as you are probably on ‘the list’. If you wish to: slum it with the regular folk for a change, go to part 2; push in, go to part 3.

2. A lengthy spell spent peering around those in front of you in order to catch a glimpse of the velvet rope has left you thirsty and impatient. You head to the bar for refreshments only to find yet another queue, this one without a velvet rope to encourage orderly behaviour. If you are: sick of waiting in lines, go to part 3; willing to wait your turn, go to part 4.

3. You have picked the wrong person to push in on: another, larger bogan. Yelling quickly turns to posturing, and then grill-getting-up-in. Your flight-or-fight response is heavily weighted toward fight at the best of times, let alone after a few drinks. The larger bogan easily accounts for you in an emotionless display of violence. You end up sprawled, semiconscious, on the footpath. Game over. You lose.

4. After repeatedly waving a $50 note under the barperson’s nose eventually proves an effective method of gaining their attention, you order a round of Jägerbombs. You consume yours in a heroic manner, punctuating this with a hearty Whooo-hooo while raising your glass aloft triumphantly. But then, as you look around the venue, an anxious feeling suddenly comes over you. This place seems pretty good, but you begin to question whether or not, maybe, the people are more celeb, the beats sicker and the drinks more explosive at some other club. You fear you are not having the most maxtreme time possible. If you wish to: leave and seek greener pastures, go to part 1; stay, go to part 5.

5. You decide to cut a lap of the place to check things out. It is extremely crowded, requiring you to push your way through the crowd, thereby inconveniencing the entire patronage of the club. You persist, regardless of the fact that you’re not going anywhere in particular. As you conclude your lap a stranger offers you a random blue pill at the low cost of $40. If you wish to: take it, got to part 6; politely decline, go to part 7.

6. You soon lose control of your bodily functions. You end up sprawled, semiconscious, on the footpath. Game over. You lose.

7. Having decided to stick to the liquor, you head back to the bar and conquer another Jägerbomb before going to check out the DJ. The DJ’s booth is sectioned off with velvet rope. You spend a few minutes peering beyond the rope, wondering what it would be like to be on the other side. Then the DJ starts playing a song that you don’t recognise from any Ministry of Sound compilations. That anxious feeling comes over you again. If you want to: leave this club and seek greener pastures, go to part 1; go out for a cigarette, go to part 8.

8. You head out the door you so recently waited in line to enter. You see someone smoking and ask to bum a cigarette … and a light. You have neither, because you only smoke when you’re ‘out’. You scoff at a few sad losers sprawled on the footpath, obviously either unable to handle their liquor or handle themselves in a fight. You are feeling pretty wasted and tired yourself by now. Do you: hop in a cab and call it a night, go to part 9; persist, go to part 10.

9. Conveniently, you see a cab pulling up. As you step to its door, someone else has the same idea. You want this cab, and you go for it. Go to part 3.

10. Persistence is the key to success, you tell yourself. More Jägerbombs sees you thoroughly intoxicated. Go to part 6.