Trump’s “Locker Room Talk” Defense is a Perversion of a Safe Space
If you have not heard yet about Donald Trump’s 2005 hot mic where he describes harassing and forcing himself on women, you must have been camping or have decided to go on an internet fast to cleanse your mind from this brutal election. Or both.
What I want to explore today is not the tape, but Trump’s repeated attempts to minimize the severity of his remarks by dismissing them as “locker room talk.” Essentially, Trump is saying, “this is normal, men should not be criticized for this kind of conversation.” He even went so far as to call criticism of this behavior a “distraction.”
The notion that there is a space, the proverbial “locker room,” where men can objectify and violently demean women with impunity, has two fundamental problems. The first, and I hope this is obvious, is that violence and objectification of women demeans all people, especially the men who participate. As long as there are loopholes in our language to normalize or excuse this behavior, people like Trump will use them to avoid being held accountable for their participation in rape culture.
The second problem is deeper and more insidious. In the last couple of years, Progressive movements on college campuses and across the country have popularized the notion of “safe spaces.” This concept, which has drawn heavy fire from the anti-political-correctness Right, contends that there should be spaces where people are accepted for who and what they are. It arose as a challenge to traditions of exclusion and hierarchy in our society, and seeks to create space where diverse, even radical, self-expression is welcome.
When Trump defends his boasts of sexual predation as “locker room talk,” he claims the right to sanctuary for his aberrant self-expression. He simultaneously confirms the need for safe spaces and highlights the hypocrisy of the Right for deriding them. Howard Kurtz and others at Fox have repeated his euphemism and attempted to downplay the significance of his words, drawing around Trump a veil of legitimacy and normalcy that his behavior simply does not deserve. Meanwhile, the same network has the following delightful commentary on University of Chicago students’ demands for safe spaces on campus:
So we set young people up to fail by establishing norms to make discourse more respectful and accommodating, but we set a 70 year-old Presidential candidate up for success by establishing norms to protect his disrespectful and alienating language? I wonder when the values voters who have received their election coverage from Fox News will tire of the network’s obvious disregard for their intelligence and sense of compassion.
The rest of us lost patience long ago.
