OPP: Donald Trump And The Limits of The Locker Room
About a year ago, some friends from work invited me along on a trip to Vegas. I was still pretty new to Los Angeles and didn’t know many people, I’d had a few fun nights out with these guys, and I’d never been to Vegas, so I was pretty excited about the trip. Also, as so many young, single guys do when they go on vacation, I was hoping that Sin City would live up to its name.
The more bro-ish of the two work friends was a local boy, so he brought some high school buddies along. On the way there, as we shot the shit about women, one of those buddies went on at length about how he found the shape of Kate Upton’s midsection troubling, and how he “wouldn’t fuck her on a dare” as if Kate Upton would deign to sleep with him under any circumstances. Also, it quickly became clear that “bitch” would be the preferred demonym for the fairer sex that weekend. I grew more concerned with the vibe with each passing minute.
After we arrived at the faux-Baroque vacuum of taste that is the Venetian, we met up with Nick, another guy from our job, to go on the prowl at one of Vegas’s ludicrously overpriced poolside clubs. I’m not shy or hard on the eyes, but I’ve never had the most aggressive game in the world. Nick was another story altogether.
Every time I started a conversation with a girl, trying to get a comfortable vibe going, Nick would swoop in, spouting a needlessly aggressive stream of penile consciousness to her and her friends, laughing his ass off at every flagrantly disgusting, objectifying word that came out of his mouth. Whenever he’d go far enough to get told off in no uncertain terms — he was getting a bit handsy too — he’d come back to regale us with his uproarious tale of sexual harassment.
When I tried to get him to chill out, he’d laugh it off and say “Yeah. I’m just an asshole” with pride evident in his voice. He was just fine with being the predatory shitball he was. This was fun for him. After all, he was a good-looking dude, and he could get away with it to a certain extent. In spite of everything about him, he kept getting girls on the hook before their disgusted friends dragged them away.
The worst part was that none of my companions really seemed to have a problem with what he was doing. They they took his antics in stride: that was just Nick being Nick, as boys will be boys. No matter how visibly uncomfortable the girls would get, it was just good sport as far as the guys were concerned. By that night, I was so done with these dudes (and cleaned out by overpriced drinks) that I just walked out on the group to wander the Strip, alone with my thoughts.
As it turned out, a man who’s feeling a sense of revulsion with his own sexuality could probably find a better way to work through those emotions than walking the Vegas Strip alone after midnight. With every homeless guy and little old lady who stopped me to tout a strip club, with every outstretched arm offering me a flyer for an implausibly-priced hooker, my despair in my own masculinity deepened further and further. Worse still, I knew that if I was in a different mood, with a higher BAC and deeper pockets, I might have succumbed to what was on offer.
I went to Vegas hoping to get laid, but after a few hours of my long walk, by the time I was accosted by a series of drunk girls offering themselves to me in a wholly non-commercial fashion, I wanted nothing to do with the whole foul enterprise of fucking. Nick’s flagrant disregard for women, and the assent of those who failed to challenge him, ruined my favorite part of being alive for that night at least.
The revulsion I felt that night — with Nick, with our mutual acquaintances, with myself for being a legitimate and actionable target of the sex industry — is exactly what I felt when I heard Donald Trump say the words “Grab ’em by the pussy. They don’t care.” It was a walk right across that line that ruins boys-will-be-boys talk for any halfway decent man.
To be blunt: straight men will always need to talk about pussy. While distasteful, or even seemingly hypocritical in this context, that is a term I use advisedly. It is the most accurate phrase in the English language for the activity in question. Just as all humans need to feel a sense of belonging, dudes have an emotional need to place our raging sexual ids in a social context, to be reminded that our depraved urges are not unique.
This holds true across all cultures and value systems. Right now, somewhere in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas of Pakistan, some guys are making lewd guesses about the shapely contents of someone’s burqa. Somewhere in a field in Lancaster County, there is a group of Amish men jabbering in Pennsylvania German about what they’d do to a comely maiden’s bountiful rack.
But there are universal norms as well, and one of them is that the objective is to assert one’s desirability and sexual ability. You’re supposed to talk about what you’d do if the girl was willing and how effectively you’d do so. No matter how violent the imagery used, for example, “I would destroy that ass,” the woman in question is supposed to want that ass destroyed (the deep compatibility of this sentiment with female sexuality is a subject for another article).
No matter how many romance novels are basically recreational rape literature, no woman’s sexual fantasy begins with “grabbing her by the pussy” or “moving on her like a bitch.” No one hears that wording and reads clitoral stimulation, let alone Rhett Butler taking Scarlett down.
Trump was congratulating himself for luring an unwilling married woman under false pretenses and attacking her, which he followed up with the delusional “they don’t care” as if reality show stardom at age 59 gives him some prima noctae right to attack women’s crotches with his grubby little sausage fingers. He was describing his gleeful violation of a woman’s being and asserting his right to do so.
Maybe, like Nick, some women might’ve let him get away with this when he was younger. After all, he was a 6’2" Aryan playboy with vast sums of money, and the female sexual psyche is an unfathomably dark and twisted place. Maybe as he got older and fatter while his sexual entitlement remained ageless, just like so many dirty old men before him, he just didn’t notice that they stopped saying yes.
Or maybe he never gave half a shit if they said yes. Maybe that money and power always carried an implicit threat to any woman who felt violated and used by that motherless animal. Maybe his words laid bare a fundamentally predatory sexual being who has rampaged unchecked for nearly six decades. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that we even have to ask should preclude us from ever considering a vote for him.
“Grab her by the pussy” is past the limit of locker room talk. When that line is crossed, that is when the other guys in the room get real quiet, too grossed out by the thoughts of what this sexually entitled piece of shit might’ve done to some poor girl when no one was looking. That is when boys being boys have to stop having their fun, bringing the proceedings to a screeching halt with a quiet “dude, not cool.”
What Trump said is not banter, and Billy Bush sure as hell shouldn’t have been giggling — regardless of the context, you don’t let a guy you barely know say anything like that about a coworker. What the Republican nominee for president said is nothing to be laughed off or minimized. Boys will be boys, but that was genuinely vile by the rock-bottom editorial standards of guys talking about pussy.