Setting the record straight about “locker room” talk

There are two things I find sadder than the tapes of Donald Trump that came out last week.

The first are the folks I see defending Trump’s behavior as if it was something okay and normal. Trump surrogates have been minimizing the behavior for days. “Locker talk”, they repeat over and over again, normalizing the words and in doing so attempting to make the lewd, abusive behavior sound normal. “He talks like a guy…this is what guys talk about when you’re not around”, says Scott Baio. “If you’re offended by it, grow up”, he adds. “The fact is that men at times talk like that”, says Rudy Giuliani. “Macho” talk, Pat Robertson calls it.

The second, and saddest, is to hear the women around me — my sister, my daughter, and other women I care for questioning their feelings about what is okay and what is normal… and what the men around them are doing. “Do ALL men behave this way?” “Am I naive to think that not all men are like this?” “Do ALL men talk like this behind our backs?”

As a man, I’m ashamed at what I heard out of the Donald. I’m even more ashamed of the people who, in defense of their candidate, are trying to sweep it under the rug and make it sound normal. This doesn’t just include famous Trump surrogates — honestly (and sadly), it includes friends in my Facebook stream, even family and people I go to church with, and it includes both men and women.

I reject it totally. I don’t talk like this. It has easily, truthfully been 30 years since I’ve heard any man outside of a movie or TV show talk this way. I work on a team of more than a dozen men — with no women to temper the conversation — and in the 10 years I’ve worked with them, never heard a single one utter a word anywhere approaching this kind of lewd, disgusting talk. I would have to go back to my first job in the early 80’s, working with a handful of alcoholic copy machine repair men to remember anyone talking like this, or to high school or middle school days.

Locker room talk? Yes. Locker rooms exist in high schools and middle schools with immature boys, and yeah, you’ll hear some stuff like that in some locker rooms.

Does it stay in the locker rooms? Obviously not, given that at 59 years old our Presidential candidate was saying things like this too. But normal? Acceptable? Okay? Absolutely not.

Grown men, real men, decent men simply don’t engage in that kind of behavior. Those kind of men don’t say things about other women that they wouldn’t say about their wives or their daughters. They don’t cheat on their wives, they don’t chase other men’s wives, and they don’t abuse power to abuse women.

I think I left out one other thing I find sadder that Trump’s comments. It’s that my sons are hearing that the “locker room” talk they might hear at school IS acceptable behavior for adult men, from leaders in the world. They already get way too many messages like this from movies, TV, and music. That’s not what I want for my boys, because it isn’t truth.

That’s behavior for immature boys who don’t know what they’re talking about.

And that’s the point. People like Donald Trump who do that have the character of boys, not men.

“Boys will be boys, but boys will not be President”

- Ronald Reagan