What Trump Really Means By "Locker Room Talk"

From Cosmopolitan

It only took two questions during the second presidential debate on Sunday night to get to the issue on everyone’s mind. First, there was a question about how the candidates’ behavior sets an example for American children, and then Anderson Cooper asked Donald Trump about the tape that was released last Friday. On the tape from 2005, you can hear Trump saying that he kisses women without consent, that women "just let you do anything" to them if you’re a star like him, including things like "grab them by the p***y."

"You called what you said locker room banter," Cooper said, in reference to Trump’s previous explanation of the tape. "You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?"

Trump’s response was denial ("I didn’t say that at all"), and then the phrase that he ended up using a total of five times throughout the debate - "This was locker room talk.”

Calling a description of sexual assault "locker room talk" is seemingly Trump’s way of downplaying the gravity of his remarks, brushing it off like it’s no big deal: It was just a joke! I didn’t mean those things literally. It’s just the sort of chummy conversation guys have with other guys, in the cozy confines of male-only spaces. And if you, the audience and Anderson Cooper, take those comments seriously, you’re not only missing the joke, but you’re getting all worked up over nothing. It’s just boys being boys. It’s normal, it’s fine, it doesn’t mean anything. Also, how can we care about this silly thing I said 11 years ago about grabbing women by their vaginas when there is also ISIS? We should really just be focusing on ISIS.

Unsurprisingly, many people didn’t buy Trump’s explanation. Athletes spoke out in defense of locker rooms, saying that Trump’s taped remarks were not things you might hear in a locker room. Jake Tapper said that he’s been in plenty of locker rooms and even belonged to a fraternity, and has “never heard any man, ever, brag about being able to maul women because they get away with it.” This is believable - while I’m sure there are conversations held in locker rooms that are demeaning to women, it seems extreme to assume that men hang out by the showers, talking about the sexual assaults they’ve committed.

But Trump also had his defenders, people who indicated that the things he said are entirely normal, or maybe even tame, compared to what they’ve heard in locker rooms themselves. In an interview after the debate, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said he’s “heard worse than that,” and “men say stupid things in locker rooms.” People also spoke out on Twitter, helping Trump downplay the tape by saying they’ve heard worse as well. To be clear, this means these people are essentially admitting to having heard worse than a physical description of sexual assault.

The way these men explain away these conversations – and the way Trump was able to shrug off a literal description of sexual assault against women – tells you they don’t understand the impact of their words.

“These locker room talks and banter and all these other things, these cultural things are what makes room for harsher things to exist,” Kirstin Naumann, a therapist who specializes in trauma counseling, told Cosmopolitan.com. “If you hear that people are joking about grabbing a woman by the pussy, how do you know that you’re not supposed to just walk up to a woman and actually grab her by the pussy?”

Naumann explained that sexual violence exists on a spectrum, and no act of sexual violence happens in isolation. This means that while catcalling is not the same as sexual assault, both things are part of the continuum of violence against women. Locker room conversations - conversations between men at the expense of women - are too. Any time a man cracks a joke about a woman’s “big phony tits,” or refers to her as an “it” instead of as a person, or talks about grabbing her “by the pussy,” that is rape culture. Any time a man (in this case, Donald Trump) says any of these things and is greeted with laughter and approval from other men (Billy Bush), that is rape culture.

And while clearly these conversations take place between men in spaces other than physical locker rooms (Trump and Bush spoke on a bus, for instance), there’s a reason for this characterization. An element of brotherhood in locker rooms makes them especially dangerous breeding grounds for exactly the type of toxic masculinity you hear in the tape. In her book, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, Jessica Luther writes about the high incidence of sexual assaults that involve multiple athletes from the same team (instead of just one player acting individually), and writes that this is “a particular facet of hyper masculine spaces.” Luther references another book, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, that says sexual assaults involving multiple male perpetrators are more common when there’s a group of people “associated by or as if by ties of brotherhood.”

If you’re wondering why Trump might feel comfortable enough to speak so candidly around a journalist who could easily have turned around and revealed the conversation, listen to the way Bush addresses Trump. Twice in the tape, Bush refers to Trump as “my man.” This isn’t a conversation happening between a reality star and a journalist - this is a conversation happening between two guys, bonded together by the fact that they’re both men. There’s a mutual understanding at play that it’s totally OK to talk about women as objects.

And we have real-world examples of this how connection between locker room talk and criminal action can play out. Earlier this year, there was evidence that suggested that Brock Turner, on the night that he raped a woman outside of a party, might have texted photos of her to his swimming teammates, as if to share what he’d done with his peers. This is where the bond between teammates - or between brothers, or men - goes bad. They internalize the locker room talk, commit an actual crime, and, in order to show off their masculinity, share their awful crimes with their "locker room" friends, who they believe will value what they’ve done. Or as Alison Flierl tweeted in response to Donald Trump’s explanation: “Dismissing Trump’s behavior as locker room talk is why we have young men like Brock Turner.”

Ultimately, locker room talk exists because toxic masculinity exists, and that’s not something we can just get rid of in a week. The first step in eliminating this type of sexism is for men to hold each other accountable in spaces where women aren’t there to do it for them - women shouldn’t have to always be there to do it for them. And as a recent piece in The Nation suggests, we must identify and name the real problems contributing to our society’s rape culture. Here’s one way to do that: Listen to the people who shrug violent masculinity off as locker room talk - they’re trying to tell you something, and that something is that they don’t think women are fully human. If we believe that Trump’s statements really were just locker room talk, and we don’t talk about what that means, we’re letting him get away with a lot more than just talk.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

You Might Also Like

• 18 Spot-On Responses to Donald Trump's "Locker Room Talk" Defense