Healthy Locker Rooms Self-Police To Keep Trump-Like Talk and Rape Culture Out

This isn’t a Donald Trump column, but it is a plea for people to realize sports are and can be better than this.

When tapes were released of presidential candidate Donald Trump and professional Kardashian reporter Billy Bush talking about various topics related to misogyny and sexual assault, Trump’s campaign tried to play off the exchange using the phrase “locker room talk.” The insinuation was that anyone calling out Trump’s antics once again was simply being too politically correct and that all guys talk like this at one point or another.

In various later press interactions, they have also tried to say that Trump didn’t really mean what he said and that he was just joking around — a different message in terms of semantics, but basically the same sort of excuse: This is what guys talk about when all of you ladies aren’t around.

Ick.

Realize what Trump is saying when he calls his nonsense “locker room talk.” More importantly, realize what his surrogates or even you or your friends on social media might be doing when passing that narrative along as a plausible theory.

This is not locker room talk.

That is not to say that talk like this has never happened in locker rooms, ever. Of course, any time we start talking in superlatives and extremes, there are going to be exceptions to prove the rule. If the question is: Have athletes talked like this before? The answer is going to be yes, but to generally refer to such things as locker room talk assumes a generality or a frequency that just isn’t based in reality.

Let’s take a step back to remember what we’re talking about here.

The headline phrase in the released Trump tapes was: “Grab ’em by the p****. You can do anything.” In and around that phrase is a lot of chauvinism, political correctness and vulgarity, and that’s what Trump supporters, surrogates and the campaign itself has focused on defending. If that was all we were talking about here, this column wouldn’t need to be written.

In terms of simple vulgarity…duh, men (and women) talk like that in certain circles all the time. Even the most polite and gentile people have some place or situation where they let their guards down and wouldn’t want a hot mic nearby or transcripts released publicly for their co-workers and peers to see. Even the best of us have moments in our past where we’ve said plenty we regret and wish we’d grown up just a little sooner or hoped that those sorts of verbal diarrhea aren’t all people think of us.

This isn’t just vulgarity, though.

I will repeat for emphasis and clarity: The problem with what Trump said was not just that he was vulgar.

Trump’s exact phrase, “Grab ’em by the p****. You can do anything” along with various other things he said describing unwanted kissing, leering, objectification, male dominance, etc isn’t just vulgar, it is the seeds of something far more heinous.

If this is in any locker rooms, it needs to be stopped and stopped now — just as if it is any boardrooms, work lunchrooms, water cooler circles, bar rooms, rec rooms, etc. Men should not talk like this, and while I would love to type here that we do not generally talk like this, the outpouring of female voices on social media make me think I might be giving my gender a little too much credit.

I can, however, personally say that I’ve never seen or heard anything like this in any locker room including playing multiple sports, coaching multiple sports at the high school and college level and covering every major pro sport and some collegiate sports over the course of my entire adult life.

To their credit: Many athletes and former athletes have come out against Trump’s assertion of locker room talk.

Reading the general ebb and flow on social media and talking to athletes I’ve covered, there’s some nuance here as well. Even people who say “this isn’t locker room talk,” will usually admit that if they think back, they’ve heard something like this before — if not ever quite as egregious. Yet, when it happened, it probably happened way back in junior high or high school and almost always self-corrected thanks to the rest of the people in the locker room.

You know where that doesn’t happen?

Locker rooms that don’t self-correct or self-police and up looking a lot like places like Baylor, Steubenville, Ohio, Florida State and even Penn State where the objectification of women was never obliquely the issue but is a place where football still reigns supreme over protecting victims from sexual assault.

In fact, looking at it this way, it’s clear that the locker room talk nonsense is nothing new.

However, just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not insidious and that it isn’t something that shouldn’t be rooted out like an infected abscess from our culture. Healthy locker rooms – especially those with adults who realize they’re professionals and words have consequences — don’t abide by this sort of thing. From gentle admonition to outright rejection, this isn’t allowed.

Players, coaches, management, ownership and support staff all have a role to play to make sure this kind of talk doesn’t exist because it is not right. For the most part, Donald Trump is wrong, because locker rooms generally take care of this sort of thing all the time. That is doesn’t happen more often and 100 percent of the time is a blight on our culture and we should be working toward that goal, not excusing it as “boys will be boys” banter when grown men are acting like pigs.