Oz Dating

Charmyne Palavi, who spilled the beans about the NRL's groupie culture, continues to draw media interest. Now it's because she and her young husband are planning to have a baby, with the help of her younger sister as a surrogate.

She seems to have a knack for pressing hot button issues and getting a lot of publicity as a result.  (She's also a cougar, so that helps lift her profile as well!)

There seem to be an awful lot of frustrated single women in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Mosman. There are many more women living there, and if those interviewed in this article are typical of the area they have a pretty low opinion of the local men. So if you are a single bloke in Sydney looking for a date, this area might be a good place to start!

Australian Rules football club St Kilda City had a local brothel called the California Club lined up as a sponsor. But club management has bowed to pressure and the deal is now off.

If the partnership had gone ahead the media would have had a field day. And since the Aussie Rules culture is often shown to be sexist and blokey (though not on the same scale as Rugby League) the decision is totally understandable.

That said, I do suspect that many fans wouldn't have been offended at all by the sponsorship deal. And there would have even been a few very liberal activist types who - believing that sex work is actually empowering to women - might have even seen it as a pro-feminist move!

Aussie swimmer Stephanie Rice is desperate and dateless. It's intriguing - and quite sad - that a young woman so sexy, accomplished and famous can't find a man. But I suspect it's exactly those qualities that have resulted in her lonely situation. Basically, most men would find her quite intimidating. Only a few would be comfortable enough in themselves to even approach her.

This unfortunate syndrome doesn't apply in reverse. For young women, athletic success in a man is an aphrodisiac, not a turn-off. Young, fit and athletic men have countless women trying to bed them and/or wed them. And I don't believe this is a social or cultural thing that can ever be changed. It is primarily a result of human nature.

Australia in the noughties is a very strange place. We are constantly told that sex is good, natural and healthy, yet even mild sexual imagery and references still have the power to cause outrage and condemnation. Advertising is a good example of this. Many of the most complained about ads in Australia this year had a sexual theme.

Interestingly, two of these ads clearly objectified women. One involved pole dancers, another featured topless women. But only complaints about the pole dancing ad were upheld; those about the second were dismissed.

The Advertising Standards Bureau clearly has a very peculiar and inconsistent set of criteria that it uses to pass judgements - not unlike our society in general!

As websites with huge membership bases and massive revenues get even bigger, they often join forces with other big sites. Facebook and Twitter are two examples. You can see them pretty well everywhere now.

One dating site that is following this approach is Match. It's now partnered with eBay Australia, giving it access to 8 million users.  

Another questionnaire has been answered by members of Australian dating site RSVP. This one was sport related, and it revealed that the women preferred men who played Aussie Rules over those in the NRL. This result was hardly surprising consideraing all the recent scandals involving drunk, violent, and sexually abusive rugby players.

There has long been competition and even animosity between the various cities and states of Australia. Melbournians, for instance, think that Sydneysiders are tacky and aggressive. Sydneysiders think of Melbournians as boring snobs! Then of course there's the intense sporting rivalry between Aussie states expressed in State of Origin football and rugby league matches.

Now physical attractiveness may become a criterion for rivalry, since some are claiming that Adelaide has the nation's most beautiful women.

Whenever there is a story about marriage in the media, the news is almost always bad. People are forever marrying less, divorcing more, feeling trapped and frustrated, getting no sex. The list of negatives goes on and on.

But here's a story that bucks that trend: Aussies are getting hitched more frequently again, with marriage rates currently the highest they've been in 20 years.

It's quite amazing how some celebrities keep leveraging their fame for material gain. Take Warwick Capper, for instance. He was a star footballer for the Sydney Swans back in the eighties. His on field career finished in 1991, but he's been popping up in the media occasionally since then, most notoriously for starring in a porn film. Now, the middle aged Queenslander is a highly priced male escort!

The bloke is completely shameless.