In October, an 11-year-old tape was released of now President-elect Donald Trump bragging that when you’re a star, you don’t need a woman’s permission to kiss and touch them.
“Grab them by the pussy,” he told Billy Bush on a bus as the two got ready for an Access Hollywood shoot. “You can do anything.”
Over the next few days, as woman after woman came forward to accuse Trump of doing exactly what he bragged about on the tape, Trump dismissed the comments as mere “locker room talk.”
Trump, notably, wasn’t even in a locker room when the hot mic caught him, but he’s not one to let a technicality get in the way of an excuse.
Locker rooms have long been treated as fortresses of toxic masculinity and the homophobia and misogyny that accompany it. They’re exclusionary by nature, and men shouldn’t be held accountable for things that go on inside a locker room, the argument goes; it’s a safe space. At 59 and 34 years old, Trump and Bush were merely boys being boys, telling vulgar jokes about women because they’re guys and when guys are alone, they simply can’t help it.
In this case, we weren’t supposed to take him literally or seriously.
In the week or so that Trump’s comments and alleged assaults came to light, athletes and coaches from all over the sporting sphere spoke up quickly to distance themselves from his connotations.
“What is locker room talk to me? It’s not what that guy said,” Lebron James said. “We don’t disrespect women in no shape or fashion in our locker room. That never comes up.”
Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Chris Conley echoed those sentiments.
Just for reference. I work in a locker room (every day)… that is not locker room talk. Just so you know…
— Chris Conley (@_flight17_) October 10, 2016
But as nice as it was to have athletes speaking out against demeaning women, something about the rebuttals rang hollow. Where were the athletes when allegations of sexual violence hit closer to home?
When Kobe Bryant retired in April, James and his NBA peers didn’t reflect on the the terrible legacy left behind by the rape case against him 13 years ago. And there was complete silence from the league this year about the allegations of gang rape against Derrick Rose, even as he missed preseason games with the New York Knicks for a civil trial in which he was found not liable. Knicks President Phil Jackson told reporters that the case wasn’t “keeping [Rose] up at night.”
Neither Bryant or Rose were found guilty in a court of law, a fact often cited by teammates and admirers to justify their lack of outrage. But it also reinforces the “code” that Trump alluded to in his own defense of the tapes; as Rose explained in his deposition, when asked why he and his two friends went over to the alleged victim’s house at 2:00 a.m. to have sex with her, even though they were uninvited and she had never consented to group sex: “We men.”
The NFL’s silence about violence against women is even more explicit. When horrific details about New York Giants kicker Josh Brown’s history of domestic abuse came out this fall, Giants owner John Mara told reporters that Brown had “admitted to [Giants ownership] that he’s abused his wife in the past,” but the Giants took no disciplinary action. (Brown was given a one-game suspension from the NFL in August due to a domestic violence incident, and was only cut from the Giants months later after additional information was released and a public outcry emerged.)
According to Brown’s ex-wife Molly Brown, via a report from King County Detective Robin Ostrum, his abuse was fairly common knowledge in the locker room.
“Several of Josh’s teammates were aware of the abuse in their relationship,” wrote Ostrum, “but it is clear none of them did anything to call it to the attention of the team management or take action to help Molly out.”
When the 1996 sexual assault allegations against Peyton Manning resurfaced after his Super Bowl victory last year, we got a glimpse into how one of the most famous athletes in the world views locker rooms.
In 2001, Manning released a book with his father and ghostwriter John Underwood called Manning: A Father, His Sons, and a Football Legacy, where he described the incident — in which Dr. Jamie Naughright, a female athletic trainer at the University of Tennessee, accused Manning of pulling down his pants and putting his genitals on her face while she examined his foot in the locker room — as “crude, maybe, but harmless.”
He also bemoaned the fact women were even allowed into the locker room in the first place, because, well, “common sense.”
The way it happened, Tennessee had hired a female trainer, and never mind that women in the men’s locker room is one of the most misbegotten concessions to equal rights ever made. When Dad played, there was still at least a tacit acknowledgment that women and men are two different sexes, with all that implies, and a certain amount of decorum had to be maintained. Meaning when it came to training rooms and shower stalls, the opposite sex was not allowed. Common sense tells you why.
Manning’s alma matter was actually in the news quite frequently this year due to a Title IX lawsuit by six women accusing the university of acting “by an official policy of deliberate indifference to known sexual assault.” Five of the six women in the lawsuit alleged they were raped, four by UT athletes. Elsewhere in NCAA athletics, the seemingly endless sexual assault scandal that enveloped Baylor University’s football team commandeered headlines after it was revealed that 17 female students reported sexual or domestic assault charges against 19 football players at the university since 2011 alone.
“Tennessee had hired a female trainer, and never mind that women in the men’s locker room is one of the most misbegotten concessions to equal rights ever made.”
Just this year, the examples go on and on. In March, Yale basketball player Jack Montague was expelled because of an alleged sexual assault, yet his teammates wore t-shirts supporting him. Just last week, players on the University of Minnesota football team announced their intention to boycott their bowl game because 10 of their teammates were suspended over a sexual assault case. (They rescinded their boycott two days later once they learned details from university’s investigation into the incident.) Harvard University’s men’s soccer team had their season cancelled last month due to lewd scouting reports about players for their women’s soccer team, as were the seasons of Columbia’s wrestling team and Princeton men’s swimming and diving team, for similar reasons.
But for every nudge, wink, and nod in the direction of justice and accountability, there were equivalent slides in the opposite direction, like the decision to honor of Joe Paterno at Penn State this fall, months after it was revealed that a child allegedly told Paterno that Jerry Sandusky abused him back in 1976, and yet the coach did nothing about it.
Of course, not all locker rooms are places where violence and sexism fester. But the problem is that far too frequently when an abusive culture does emerge, or when allegations of abuse are lodged against a player or coach in the locker room, a code of silence takes over. The privacy that the space is supposed to provide is used as a weapon.
The idea of a locker room as a sacred bastion of masculinity and exclusivity isn’t just harmful to women; it’s bad for men, too, especially young boys.
The year began with Ooltewah High School in Tennessee cancelling its boys’ basketball season after three players were charged with sodomizing a 15-year-old freshman with a wooden pool cue and rupturing his colon and bladder. Then in February, Pat Smith, a former semi-pro baseball player, spoke with ThinkProgress about the culture of abuse his former coach instilled in an elite youth baseball team in Canada.
And, notably, we went another year without an active player in a major U.S. men’s sports league coming out as gay, and Michael Sam told Dave Zirin that coming out as gay played a “huge part” in NFL teams refusing to sign him.
For decades, locker rooms have served as incubators for patriarchal standards of oppression and privilege. That’s why Trump embraced it as an excuse — because he sees locker rooms as places where powerful men can get away with anything.
And despite the tough talk by so many in the sports world, example after example proves that he is right. Trump’s election is the firmest evidence of this theory yet.
If the culture is going to change, everyone needs to look at around their own locker rooms and address any discrimination and abuse before it metastasizes. And it needs to happen quickly. Because with Trump set to enter the White House, it’s no longer clear where the locker room ends and the rest of the world begins.