Everywhere we’ve looked the last few days, people have been frothing at the mouth at the suggestion that player manager Ricky Nixon slept with the 17-year-old girl who published naked photos of St Kilda footballers.

There’s a long history – from Genesis and the Greek myths through opera and film noir – of blaming dangerous women for the downfall of men. This one seems keen on the classic tradition.

She’s certainly a force to be reckoned with.

Humiliating 20-year-old footballers could be chalked up to their youthful stupidity. But in bringing down one of the sharpest and most high-profile men in the game, the girl has got herself a serious scalp.

For a while it seemed she’d gone away. That the court order against her had scared her into quiescence, and the confiscation of her photos had robbed her of ammunition.

Instead she’s found herself a new armoury and launched a counter-attack.

After the initial photo scandal, she had been attacked in the press by St Kilda and by Nixon. He claimed she tried to blackmail the players, painting her as money-hungry rather than wronged.

A few weeks later and he is claiming he became her mentor. Nixon must have thought he had worked his way into her affections. Clearly she doesn’t forgive that easily.

She admits it was a set-up. She videoed Nixon and the contents of his wallet to prove that he’d been in her company, and texted a Herald-Sun reporter when Nixon visited her hotel.

He was filmed leaving at 7am, and the story broke.

And yet, for all the soapie twists, the distasteful part has been the empty moralising by the media and their array of football talking heads. The tone – at once gleeful and sanctimonious – is nauseating.

Derryn Hinch – that model of comportment – launched an excoriating ten-minute attack. “Gone abroad” has become “fled the country” in all the papers. The SMH headline “Police seek Nixon over teen claims” had only one implication, while in fact referring to police potentially prosecuting the girl for illegal surveillance.

“This is a society issue more than anything,” said Sportsline’s Reece Homfray. “I mean [in terms of] what a 47-year-old grown man’s doing in the nature of a relationship with a 17-year-old girl, I mean, what sort of questions does that raise, least of all whether he’s fit to keep managing AFL players.”

The fact remains, though, that even if an affair did happen, Nixon would not have done anything illegal. The age of consent in Victoria is 16, except in duty-of-care relationships.

Yet all the talk has been of revoking his agent’s licence. Since when did disapproval make someone liable for punishment?

You may find the age gap grotesque, and you’d hardly be the only one. But boys think it’s gross to hold hands with girls. Some people get squirmy about men marrying men. Some are disgusted by couples kissing in public. None of them have the right to enforce these mundane sensibilities on anyone else.

Which makes the current reaction offensively puritanical. All the talk of inappropriateness only comes back to opinions about right and wrong, or more accurately, fears of what the public thinks is right or wrong.

When it’s this easy to see where the armchair moralists will sit, no public figure or broadcaster will risk taking the other view.

But if the false puritans out there are so concerned by Nixon’s supposed actions, they should be lobbying to raise the age of consent, not carrying on about what’s already happened.

As for the supposed ‘revelation’ that he might have used cocaine – well, if you can round up every Australian journalist, sportsman, and business leader who has never dabbled in drugs or heavy drinking, I will find you a phone booth you can fit them all in.

Here are some things you could say about Nixon if the story is true. You could say he’s an idiot – he knew first-hand how volatile this girl was, then got involved anyway. Given his public profile, he’s also an idiot if he thought people wouldn’t find out.

You could say his story doesn’t add up. He told Triple M in the same interview that he went to the hotel for half an hour and for two hours. As Spida Everitt charmingly remarked in his Milo style, “If you are leaving someone’s hotel room at 7.15am you’re not making her porridge and ironing her school uniform.”

Then there was a lot of guff about being a good Samaritan and helping a young person in trouble. It’s unclear just how Nixon was furthering this aim by wandering about her room in his underwear, unless he was demonstrating the need for proper diet and exercise.

You could say that Nixon is a sleaze. But if that was enough to get people sacked, you could crowd-surf across Melbourne on the dole queue.

If he did sleep with her, you could say it was ill-advised. Bad for her, bad for his marriage, bad for his career. But nothing more than that. “I am not a crook!” the original Ricky Nixon cried. For Ricky 2.0, it’s actually true.

But you can’t say it was wrong. That sort of definition is entirely subjective. And for all the media and footy types publicly shaking their heads, it’s hard to believe that a whole lot of them wouldn’t have found the same offer just as appealing.

When you’re young, you imagine all adults were old forever. In fact many spend their days pining for the youth they’ve lost. It’s no coincidence the porn industry holds up highly-sexed late-teenage girls as the high point of fantasy.

And it’s no surprise that men with the chance to realise that fantasy might take it. Everyone has their own kinks and weaknesses, things that get them going more than anything else. It only takes the right combination to present itself. When hormones and egos go into overdrive, consequences shrink from view.

Husbands cheat on wives, girlfriends on boyfriends, employees with bosses. Postmen and pool-cleaners didn’t become clichés by mistake. The partner’s sibling is a popular theme. The ex and the best friend is so common we just nod when we hear it.

Oh, that old story.

Because we all do things we shouldn’t. Inappropriate things at inappropriate times. Too young, too old, too drunk, too ugly. Sometimes it’s a brief walk of shame, sometimes it rips up people’s lives. Point is, it happens. Opportunity and desire make a potent combination.

And while a handful of people may be so morally resolute as to resist all temptation, most probably still have a weakness that could bring them down. They’ve just had the good fortune not to have encountered it yet. It’s easy to preach fidelity if no-one else ever wants to sleep with you.

Which doesn’t amount to a defence of Nixon, nor of what he might have done. I’m neither condoning nor condemning it. My opinion is moot. So should yours be.

Let’s cut the sanctimony. There’s a reason why the papers are scrambling for this story, and why Nixon articles are the most read of the past two days. A well-known middle-aged man has inappropriate and drug-fuelled sex with an attractive 17-year-old girl in a city hotel room, goes the story.

People are not clicking through to read that out of a deep, abiding love for the game of football. Nor out of a desire to see appropriate community standards upheld. People are clicking through because it’s titillating, smutty, deliciously wrong, full of detail, and none of their goddamned business.

And for all those who got their minor thrill from reading that story, then left their outraged bluster to cool on some self-righteous comment thread – well, you’re really no better than you claim one Ricky Nixon to be.

There’s no law against being like that. Just don’t get frocked up and preach about it afterwards.