It’s Not Locker Rooms @DonaldTrump

By Melissa Ludtke

Sports columnists used to call me “locker lady.” I was in my twenties. It was the late 1970s, and “locker lady” was code for hard-charging, loud, assertive women’s libbers agitating for access to locker rooms. According to the men, we wanted to be there so we could stare at naked male athletes. Needless, to say, I didn’t share their point of view.

I thought towels might help.

Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn was fond of saying I’d be “invading” his players’ “sexual privacy” if I gained access to locker rooms. I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant. I’m puzzled still. I wasn’t aware that sex happened in locker rooms.

Now Donald Trump is invading our political space with his nonsensical, excuse-laden notion that bragging about sexual assault is usual “locker room banter.” It isn’t. But like sports columnists from my bygone days, Trump uses code; his language stands in for the protected boys-will-be-boys zones he might be recalling from his younger years. Perhaps in military school? There and then, he wants us to believe, men bragged of sexual conquests and were assured no one present would object. There, he remembers it was okay to talk about girls/women as though you owned them. A few decades later, he realized his boyhood fantasy by purchasing beauty pageants and mistakenly thinking he owned the contestants, too.

Now it’s the jocks blowing Trump’s cover. One by one, many athletes are speaking out and laying waste to the specious claim that Trump is just like them. And the players are finding unlikely allies in women sports columnists like Sally Jenkins who know a few things about what goes on inside locker rooms since they’ve been there with the athletes for several decades. One headline on a woman sportswriter’s column in the Washington Post proclaims the new zeitgeist: “No One Talks Like Donald Trump in Locker Rooms.”

Let’s be clear. Locker rooms are not places where women reporters want to go; they are where they need to be to do their jobs. Ask any woman if she’d rather interview players in the locker room or read tweets tagged to her after she’s filed a story on a team or player’s poor performance. I guarantee she’ll choose the locker room. Oh, surely be a player or two will talk crudely and in sexist ways inside of some locker room, but he’s not nearly as likely to find support from teammates as his predecessors did. Let’s remember, too, this same crudeness still happens just about anywhere we go.

It’s the push back to it that has changed.

Now misogyny has migrated online. There, degrading words and the craft of transforming women into sexual objects is well-honed. Braggadocio of the kind that Trump exudes is not the customary bait guys use in their rants targeting women. In those, they charge after women using vile descriptors of their looks or presumptions about their sexual appetites. This is the usual way that they display dislike of a woman’s opinion or object to her presence in a place they feel she doesn’t belong.

Trump’s fingers do his talking on Twitter, so he wasn’t about to out his boys-will-be-boys cyber realm. It’s his protected zone for hurling abuse at just about anyone who doesn’t look like him. To guard this zone, he recycled the tired image of a locker room hoping its lingering stigma would help him out. With a wink, a nod, and a locker room, Trump figured he was covered.

He’s not.

Seems he overlooked a few things about what makes America great — the hard, slogging work that with enough persistence leads to forward progress.

For several decades, women reporters have been going into men’s locker rooms, and despite their discomfort — and occasionally abusive treatment — their presence has had a civilizing effect. Bad behavior by athletes once overlooked or winked at by club and league officials is no longer tolerated. That said, I count myself among those who think far greater vigilance and stronger actions must be taken when it comes to charges of players’ domestic violence and sexual assault.

Social media is doing a better job, too, of pushing back against those still stuck in a 1970s mentality. Minor leaguer Brooks Marlow tweeted recently that “no lady needs to be talking during a game,” a reference to ESPN broadcaster Jessica Mendoza. Soon, an onslaught of negative tweets led to him tweeting an apology. Such turn-around is due in large part to the decades of efforts led by women in sports media who have been joined by some male allies; together they demand respectful treatment of women in the locker rooms and outside of them.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that sports teams and leagues are doing all they can to woo females as fans.

Isn’t that what presidential candidates should be doing, too?

Melissa Ludtke is a veteran, award-winning journalist and the creator and producer of “Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods,” a transmedia storytelling project and curriculum. She is writing a memoir about her legal action during the 1970s. The cartoons used in this story come from her archived papers at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. The photo on the left was taken in the bleachers in Fenway Park during the playoffs in 1976.