Why can’t they flirt?
Anglo’s drunken antics result of their need to get plastered to have a good time.
As the story of the Greek woman in Crete who set alight the drunken British tourist’s testicles hit news websites, people I know started their commentary.
“That’s a bit over the top,” one colleague said. “He was drunk after all.”
Ah yes, because he was drunk, we all have to give him a little bit of leeway in whatever he does, because, well, he was drunk.
Never mind that he was forcefully fondling her and asking her to touch his genitals which he was waving around in full view of everyone in the bar.
The woman has become a hero in Greece it seems and not only, I suspect, because she acted in self defence.
Greeks are disgusted and fed up with the debauched behaviour of Brits in Greece.
As a teacher on the island of Rhodes told me: “They come here and think they can trash the place, behave appallingly and get away with it.”
“Imagine,” his friend, shaking his head in disbelief, said to me in the same conversation. “Being in the company of someone all night and the next day, they have no idea who you are because they were so drunk, they can’t remember.”
A family friend, a man in his fifties who works at one of the hotels in Zakynthos frequented by British tourists understands this experience.
“They come in groups - usually married couples. The husbands get so drunk that they pass out, then the wives start propositioning us. They’re so out of it, they take off their bras and show us their breasts! Don’t these people know how to flirt?”
Don’t these people know how to flirt? That’s a good question and one that I’ve been thinking about since I returned to Melbourne.
Getting plastered in order to have a good time is just as prevalent here as it is in Britain.
There are many examples where Australian men have no capacity to express desire and interest in a woman unless they are literally off their faces and making, at best, clumsy advances which they are often too inebriated to take to their full conclusion, or at worse, acting like aggressive idiots.
A young woman who arrived here from Greece seven months ago as a skilled migrant and with every intention of staying here, phoned me two weeks after I returned, announcing her intention to leave.
She points to her experiences of socializing with her peers as a major contributing factor.
“I find the people here are colourless and restrained in general. I find the men totally straight laced- there’s absolutely no indication that they’re interested in you - then they get drunk and they are completely ridiculous.”
Prior to coming to Australia, she had spent six months in Denmark and had studied in Spain, so it’s not as if she had not lived in other countries and experienced other cultures.
What is it about Anglo-Australian culture that seems to see virtue in repression in daily life with the occasional explosion of drunken fuelled antics?
I suspect that this idiot with burns to his genitals in Crete is thinking that he was ‘just having a bit of fun’.
I suspect a many Australians and Brits will be agreeing with him.
That this was a ‘lark’ that was taken the wrong way. I can see their point of view, having lived in this culture and having witnessed this kind of behaviour.
I remember one night my mother and I were in the car driving to a function in Melbourne when we stopped at a set of traffic lights.
A man crossing the road, with an obvious drunken swagger, looked into the car, faced us and pulled his pants down.
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Comments
Jeana, this is one beautifully written article. Having lived it up in Greece for a few months recently, I did not witness even one display of boorish drunken behaviour by the local Greek males - and that is after many a night at taverns and clubs.
Why would a young Greek guy have a need to get drunk in a land full of Greek Goddesses? Keep in mind that beer and other alcoholic beverages are so freely available and cheap in Greece. Yet one arrives back 'home' to find AFL players making complete buffoons of themselves at Brownlow night - not to mention the numerous incidents of pub brawls, attacks on innocent bystanders etc etc.
Inability to handle alcohol is, in my humble opinion, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon problem most likely caused by the lack of parental leadership. In Greek culture the family generally sticks together when attending weddings, name days, birthdays, Easter etc where the young male can witness adult role-models drinking and behaving responsibly.
The Anglo alternative is the puritannical idiocy that alcohol is taboo until you turn 18 after which one hangs around with their 'mates' every weekend getting legless in order to even look at a female. Where was the parental leadership when he was growing up? I'll tell you where it was; Dad was down the local pub drinking himself blind with Wayne, Shayne and Bruce after knock-off time.
As for the woman in Crete, let's hope her burning of the non-Hellenic testicles has done humanity's gene-pool a favour.
Everything that this states is true. I was recently in Greece and as I was walking back to my hotel room I witnessed two drunken British ladies hanging off each other because they couldn't stand making absolute fools of themselves in-front of a tavern.
The are disgusting, throwing up in the middle of the streets and making fools of themselves. The reason they can't flirt is because they do not have respect for themselves let alone anyone else.
You do not see Greeks doing that in Greece, because it is shamefull.
I am also furious that the British government is trying to mess around with Greece's way of life in by trying to ban 'bar hopping' tours. Greece's economy relies on tourism, so why should they shut down a small section of it because these morons can't control them selves?
Their behaviour might be acceptable in Australia and Britain but not in Greece.
If you want to act like that stay where you are and don't become a problem to Greece.
Greece should not have to put up with drunken Anglo antics.
Jeana, you seem to be drawing a correlation here between drunken stupidity and Australians’ inability to communicate with the opposite sex.I don’t see that the two are related in the slightest. Sure, being drunk helps people to loosen up and enables those who might otherwise be too shy or embarrassed to speak to women, but to suggest that this is the sole motivation for such hard drinking is drawing far too long a bow.Getting blind drunk is not always about propositioning women, sometimes it’s just fun to get very drunk and do stupid things that you would not normally do. And sometimes it’s great not to remember those things in the morning.On the flipside, if this society weren’t so obsessed with physical appearance, perhaps males wouldn’t feel so petrified at the prospect of baring their feelings to females in an unlubricated state.
The reality is, we live in a prudish, conservative society, in which is it not acceptable for a male to display overt emotion or passion unless he has an excuse or a reason to do so. Getting drunk is one such excuse.
And to suggest that Australians engage in alcohol fuelled behavior more readily than Greeks is laughable. Who ever heard of a Greek over-indulging anyway?I wonder if the Greek or British police at the meeting in Zakynthos engaged in any booze-fuelled antics?
And one last thought. In your piece you say:
“Never mind that he was forcefully fondling her and asking her to touch his genitals which he was waving around in full view of everyone in the bar.”
Jeana, were you there? Did you witness this act? If you were, please forgive my next comment, but are you perhaps acting as judge and jury in this instance by assuming that this woman – who has allegedly assaulted a British citizen causing serious bodily harm – is the virtuous heroine that many are making her out to be, and that this tourist is a drunken lout who has acted inappropriately towards her?
You may consider this an exercise in semantics, but it is undoubtedly clumsy writing for someone with your experience.