Trump’s locker room fantasy
‘Locker-room talk.” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump used the phrase twice during Sunday’s debate to describe his vulgar 2005 open-microphone comments about women. He used the same phrase in his original halfhearted apology. On Sunday night, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told MSNBC: “Men say stupid things in locker rooms.”
There are only two possibilities here. Either Trump does sexually assault women by grabbing their genitals ( as he bragged 11 years ago to Billy Bush of Access Hollywood), or he doesn’t. Either he’s a sexual predator, or he’s merely a lying creep who wants others to believe he’s a sexual predator. The genius of the phrase “locker- room talk” is that it creates a third, imaginary category: a mythical locker-room Never Never Land where men supposedly have social licence to lie, posture as sexual predators and generally denigrate women as sex objects. Just as one is free to recite one’s actual sins in a confession booth, the conceit here is that one is free to make up fake sins in a locker room.
There may be some locker rooms in the world where this is true. But based on what I have seen and heard during the roughly 1,500 hours I have spent in my gym locker room over the last 20 years, I’d say this is — like most of what Trump said during Sunday’s debate — not true. Never once have I heard anyone around me, whether getting dressed, undressed, showering or shaving, brag about their sexual assaults. In fact, I’m not even sure I have ever heard anyone in my locker room talk about sex — and this includes overheard conversations from collegeage men, middle- agers and seniors — except occasional passing references to the fact they’re not having much of it.
Women who got a chance to hear what my friends and I talk about in the locker room would indeed be shocked at what they hear. But only because it is so fantastically boring.
My locker happens to be located quite close to the locker- room TV, which is usually tuned to either the business network, the movie channel or a sports channel. Most of the conversations in the locker room begin with something that appears on screen. If we’re watching BNN, guys might chatter about the markets. If it’s the movie channel, a debate about which was the best Lethal Weapon movie. If sports ( most commonly), arguments about who should be hitting cleanup for the Jays — or why the hell do they put NASCAR on TV, anyway?
We do talk about women, sometimes. And it can be demeaning — but not in the way you might think. It’s more in the vein of: “Can you play tennis tomorrow?” “Nah, sorry — wife won’t let me. Gotta take the kids to hockey and hit Ikea.” Which is to say: in real-life male locker room talk, women can assume the role of spoiler, enforcing domestic obligations that prevent us from playing sports and grabbing a post-workout beer. And we do sometimes use the “safe space” of an all-male environment to unburden ourselves of prosaic complaints about housework or home finance. If someone were to record such a conversation and make it public, it wouldn’t make us proud. But it’s a rather long way from, “Oh hey, by the way, I like to go around grabbing attractive women by the genitals."
When Trump and his defenders use the term “lockerroom talk,” I suspect they are referring to the kind of lewd talk I heard when I was much, much younger — in high school. As a teen, I heard this not so much in actual locker rooms, but more in the back of buses on field trips. There were a few boys in my class (this is back in the 1980s) who were thought to be sexually experienced. And they would hold us breathless with tales of their supposed exploits — which usually involved them ( much Like Trump) simply going up to anonymous girls and instantly having their way.
There was no way of fact- checking these stories — which always seemed to involve girls in our community who were indescribably attractive, yet completely unknown. And I suspect they were all invented. Thirty years later, I realize that these conversations were adolescent rituals associated with juvenile sexual awakening. All of us were fascinated by sex, yet also afraid of it — and were anxious to hear war stories from peers who presented sexual conquest as both easy and gratifying. Just a few years out of adolescence, we were all little Billy Bushes, lapping it up.
Donald Trump, by contrast, was 59 years old in 2005. My sense from watching him on TV and listening to his misogynistic tone is that he never really graduated from that adolescent sexual phase. He’s still there, on the bus, telling all the beta males about what he did to this or that woman’s crotch. It’s not only vulgar and juvenile, but also quite sad — especially for an old man who should instead be showing people pictures of his children ( or, if he had them, grandchildren).
And if any ordinary senior citizen ever talked to me like that in a locker room, I’d like to think I’d have the social courage to tell them that to their face.
MEN DON’T ACTUALLY BRAG ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT AT THE GYM.