AAH, Christmas: a time to remember the birth of our Lord and extend goodwill to mankind. But also, traditionally, the season at which we Harvest The Slappers and bring them in from the fields – or, indeed, the cosmetics counter at Debenhams – and enjoin them to perform sexual favours for us. Again, traditionally, this will almost certainly involve the ancient and much-loved practice of “roasting”. What is Christmas, after all, without a moist, succulent roast – a fat bird painstakingly prepared for the table, with some savoury stuffing? And bread sauce. A bird almost certainly called Kayleigh or Rioja. And probably self-basting.

I wasn’t invited to the Manchester United players’ Christmas party, or maybe my invite got lost in the post. Apparently the “harvesting” – yes, they really do call it that – took place a week or more before the event itself, when friends of the players wandered around the city’s clothes and cosmetics shops, identifying the juiciest, most oven-ready fowl and warning them that they would soon receive an invitation to join the likes of Rio Ferdinand for an evening of, uh, genteel and Christian celebration. And what girl would rebuff the chance to spend eight hours watching the flower of British (and Portuguese and Brazilian, etc) manhood engage in those other well-established seasonal festivities: projectile vomiting, the ceremonial “twatting of the angry boyfriend”, the choreographed dancefloor scuffle, the braggadocio and the terminal incontinence. And then, as midnight approaches, the romantic retreat to the hired bedrooms (£349.99 each, special offer, breakfast not included) for the rather brief (15 seconds per person, 20 seconds for goalkeepers and central defenders, is the optimum duration) act of consummation.

The girls have claimed to be less than impressed. Incredibly, they claim to be angry. It was awful, they complained, the players treated us “like pieces of meat”. We couldn’t believe it, etc etc. Well, no kidding, love? You mean they didn’t value you as strong, independent women in a very real sense and engage with you on a cerebral level? Good lord, that must have been truly shocking.

Some of the women, shaking their heads sadly, have complained that the Manchester United players seemed to want only one thing from them. One girl said she was grabbed by the arm and led with amorous intent towards the toilets, the lift to the bedrooms presumably taking ages to arrive. And again, they are aghast. Really? I wonder if they have ever witnessed Rio Ferdinand or Wayne Rooney engage with anything on a cerebral level. And I wonder what they expected the evening to be like, as they got themselves tarted up for the night: quiet and elegant dinner at which crucial topics – the Middle East peace process, Doris Lessing’s deserved Nobel prize, Gordon Brown’s calamitous slump in the opinion polls – would be discussed, followed by a convivially riotous game of Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble? And then, as they say, carriages?

What, exactly, did these ladies think they were there for? We ought to remind ourselves that far from viewing the evening’s proceedings with trepidation and feminine reserve, these young women queued around the block to gain admittance to the party. Collared by some meat-headed monosyllabic oaf while they went about their job doling out the Space NK stuff to the public, they cheerfully agreed to attend the party – and must have known what it would entail, what it was for. Why do they think they were thus picked out? If they’d had the remotest shred of dignity, or a brain consisting of something more than compacted lime jelly, they would have insisted that the cretin in front of them, proffering the invitation with a smirk, should be told to get lost, pronto. But they didn’t do that, did they? They said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll be there. I’d like a room with a view of Salford dockside, please.”

Come on, love, spare us the hypocritical bleating, the sudden arrival of amour propre and the sundry allegations occasioned by an apparent reversion to a state of pristine virginity. When Premier League footballers have parties, they are going to want to do three things: drink, fight and screw. And quite probably in that order. Any woman who doesn’t understand that must be an inhabitant of a remote and unfamiliar universe. Rio et al put £4,000 each into a pot to ensure that the party was a resounding success. It sounds to me as if – by their standards – it certainly was. Incidentally, Rio Ferdinand was reported to have been one of the best behaved at the party.

Listen, girl; if you are at a party and Rio Ferdinand is the best-behaved person there, you’re in big trouble.

Yes, of course, the whole business is vile and repulsive on a scale we should, by rights, feel difficult to comprehend. But these days we comprehend it all too well. The obscene extravagance of the party, the gallons of pink champagne flowing down the gullets of pampered and witless imbeciles, the coarseness, the sheer utilitarian intent behind that noble tradition, the harvesting of the slappers. But it would surely not surprise anyone any more. Almost everything our Premier League footballers do is an affront to decency, the result of fairly stupid young people being afforded unlimited incomes and unlimited adulation.

These players think that they can do anything, without censure. By and large they are right. But our sympathies should not be with the equally witless young women who, in effect, colluded in this moronic festival. It should instead be with the state of our national game and with the fans who subsidise such behaviour.