“This was locker room talk,” says Donald Trump about his
vulgar and very dangerous comments whereby he bragged about his willingness to
commit sexual battery. (If you’ve been living under a rock and missed it, just
Google it. I won’t be linking to it).
Men’s locker rooms: I have been in countless of them over
the course of my life, from high school and hockey arenas to military barracks
and high-intensity training centres.
Is Trump correct in placing his recorded mindset and
language in “the locker room”? Well, yes, and no.
Teenagers, with hormones raging, occupy the locker rooms of
high schools. There was, if my fading memory serves me correctly, a lot of talk
about sex and girls. There were always the braggarts who would claim to have
bedded the “hot chicks”. Virtually all of that turned out to be utter BS. It
was high school and claims ran higher than any substantive activity. I can
never remember, at any time, anyone suggesting that the best way to get the
attention of any girl was to force oneself upon them.
Over time, with age, the conversation in most locker rooms
changed. The people were more focused on the task ahead or one just completed.
I spent hours in locker rooms in the company of some of the toughest men on
this planet. Whether we were training to be divers, jumpers, fire-fighters or
just win a soccer game, any talk of sex was fleeting and discussions about
women were pretty minimal. The language would have been considered by many to
have been extremely foul, but it was linguistic embellishment, common in an
all-male environment. In the naval service, (I was in two of them), we were
particularly adept at constructing sentences peppered with expletives which
served only to add colour to the language.
Once in a while a guy would come along who DID start talking
about his sexual exploits. And, on even fewer occasions, someone would go down
a path asserting a psychopathic disdain for women, objectifying them as a group
and suggesting that women “wanted” to be sexually assaulted or abused. It was
never a “discussion”. It was usually an unwelcome monologue foisted on the
group by one loud-mouthed individual seeking to become the centre of attention.
In a locker room or a barracks or a mess-deck, it usually meant, to us, that the
person doing the talking was attempting to cover some inadequacy in his competency
or character. It typically ended when another person told him to shut up, (a
gentrified way of describing it), or his audience simply left the room.
I have witnessed, in a public pool locker room, some guy ask
if we saw “the hot babe in the blue bikini”, only to find himself tapped on the
shoulder and be told by an indignant stranger, “That’s my daughter.” The offender immediately assumed a state of mortified silence.
So, Trump is partially correct. It IS locker room talk. It’s
what HE says in a locker room. It’s what HE says on a bus. He takes over the
conversation and spouts his psychopathic bile.
Where he’s dead wrong is that it isn’t locker room talk
until he starts talking.
(And apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way).
