Everyone is entitled to my opinion.

The Locker Room

October 10, 2016

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The 2016 second presidential debate took place recently in the quasi-town hall setting. Trump was asked about his “grabbing women by the pussy,” comments, and he replied that it was nothing more than locker room talk.

Every six minutes a woman is raped in America. Usually by a man. Every day, somewhere in America a man is saying to other men something about grabbing a woman’s tits or her cunt.

Every day, a woman is beaten. Usually by a man. Every day, somewhere in America, a boy watches his mother or sister being knocked down, slapped, slugged, cut, shot, run over, set on fire or otherwise harmed.

Every day, a female is forced into sex slavery. Usually by a man. Every day in locker rooms, a boy, unsure of his role as a man, a boy trying to learn how to be a man, hears how some “grown” men degrade, belittle, and abuse women with their locker-room smack. They see how men give high-fives, or compliment each other on their man-talk—the gruff hit-them-over-the-head and drag-them-by-the-hair talk. 

The locker room. The place where boys will be boys, where boys can be excused for their behavior, because among boys in a locker room, they are allowed to be primitive creatures where might is right, where macho talk is a surrogate for being a true, adult, mature male. 

The locker room. Trump’s excuse. The excuse of a man who does not understand that a “real” man does not need to denigrate women in order to make himself feel like his penis is bigger than any other man’s in the room. Because that is the sole purpose of locker room talk. Verbal one-upmanship. Mine is bigger than yours. 

Often, men grow out of this need to rate their manliness, just as they overcome the need to make fart sounds, or burp out loud, or scratch their crotches to get a laugh. 

Few people expect that the leader of the United States of America, the man who would represent this nation, all its laws, its good, its bad and the ridiculous would be a man who still exhibits pre-teen, male jostling behavior. Arrested development, they say. Trump appeals to many with the same affliction. 

I am reminded of something I read recently:

“A man's private boastfulness about the number of his love affairs or his choice of a beauty whom he has seduced is no reproach to him, nor is he scorned for vaunting his love affairs before Thee [God]. Instead, his part in furthering the general corruption meets with the approval of all. Listen to the cheers when, with an inherent looseness of unbridled passion which deserves the doom of eternal silence, he shamelessly noises abroad what ought to have been hidden in shame, what should have burdened his soul with the guilt of ruined chastity and plunged him into the depths of despair. In this and similar ways the modern age is corrupt and corrupting, distributing evil ideas to some, while the filth thereof, spreading to others, goes on increasingly without end.”  Written by Guibert of Nogent, an abbot, in his memoirs nearly 1000 years ago (1064 - c. 1125).  

There is no question that today’s life is difficult for men. The old definitions of manliness are shifting. Perhaps they already disappeared. The male is no longer the sole breadwinner, the ape who goes out into the jungle and brings home the bacon, or lion, or deer while the female stays in the nest raising the young. Today’s male no longer has exclusive monopoly on business, finance, invention, science, art, literature, music, space, the military, sports, etc. Today’s male can no longer keep his mate barefoot and pregnant. So, what is left? What is a man, today, in this world with women seeping into every aspect of male domain—even into the locker room? 

Was it Einstein who said something about technology having exceeded man’s humanity? Well, that is the point, is it not? 

We are at a precipice. Either we evolve to face the future we have constructed for ourselves, or we let our prehistoric emotions and behaviors drive us to extinction. 

REAL males—today’s real men—have evolved. They are capable of seeing everyone’s humanity. Unlike those whose masculinity relies on “locker room talk,” REAL men have courage. It does not take courage to belittle other people. But it does take courage to change the culture of the locker room. REAL men have the personal integrity to call out their peers. The men who do so face ridicule, charges of being wimps or girly girls. These unsung heroes speak out to create a new social environment, to help us all evolve and mature, even though it’s easier to say nothing, to play along, to lay low. These men prepare us for the future by changing today and every day hereafter. 

And today’s women need to have similar courage to stand up against this behavior. We need to show men through our actions, that we will not tolerate immature, hostile, primitive boys in the guise of men. Otherwise, we take a huge evolutionary step backward. 

Any president of this great nation sets the standard, the model for public—and private—behavior. Moral standards are not the same as moral ideas or concepts of right and wrong. Moral standards exist in measurable, observable behaviors, says Karl Marlantes. How we think, what we think, the words we use to convey our thoughts lead directly to our actions, and we behave according to those thoughts. We establish and reconfirm our moral standards through our actions.

As president, Trump’s behavior will tell every single child coming up, that this is the way a man treats people, be them women, or Muslims, or Latinos or blacks, or disabled, or poor, or chubby. Trump as president of the United States of America would tell the world what being his type of “man” is all about. And once he controls the atomic bomb, the oval office, the supreme court, he will show the world how his kind of arrested-development male behaves. 

We need not guess what he will do. We see it every day.