Trump talk does not reflect most locker rooms
Christopher Jones
Mesa Legend
I have spent nine years of my life in a competitive atmosphere, either as an athlete or a journalist. I’ve participated in nearly every sport in some form or fashion. In doing so, I’ve gotten the pleasure to be around many talented men and women. You learn a lot being there in a room with so much diversity. Being around this exposes you to many different conversations. Some of which I’ve even have taken offense to. But when Donald Trump defended his comments about how women let him do whatever he wants to them just because he’s famous as “locker room talk,” I could not relate.
Donald Trump is using it all as a diversion from himself. He is using clichés to mask his obvious lack of leadership. His words do not represent what goes on at all in the many locker rooms or the words that come out of the many athletes that there are. By using the term “locker room talk,” Trump put himself in a group of athletes where that type of language he uses in the video is acceptable. Attaching himself to the common cliché that, when guys are in a shower or in a group together it is a constant alpha-male contest.
Solely male hormonal based communication, and therefore expected that vulgar language is going to be used. He is saying that this is how rich and powerful men commonly think about women when they are alone in their natural state and free of the mask painted with the rules given by society. Trump says that, as long as men only talk but not act on this sexual aggressiveness, then it is harmless. Just an embarrassing moment being caught talking without the mask.
Just another example of Trump’s celebrated virtue of saying what others are fearful of saying. The characterizing of this commonplace is especially creepy because it would suggest that sexual obsession is the immutable trait of successful maleness. Every athlete is a weird closet freak, or even in Trump’s case, a serial groper, but that is not true. In fact, it is demeaning to not just the women that he talks about but especially to every athlete.
If Trump would listen to what really goes on inside of locker rooms instead of describing them as something that it just isn’t with disrespectful clichés, he would discover that there is order in a locker room where players don’t get to just say whatever just like in most settings. As NBA superstar LeBron James speaks on what he encountered in the NBA throughout his career in a press conference after practice.“What is locker room talk to me?
It’s not what that guy said. We don’t disrespect women in no shape or fashion in the locker room. That never comes up. Obviously I’ve got a mother-in-law, a wife, a mom and a daughter — and those conversations just don’t go on in a locker room. What goes on in a locker room is sporting events that went on the night before, about family, about strategies that we may have that night — about a highlight that may have happened.
You know if there was a home run in the bottom of the ninth or if there was an alley-oop dunk from a player the night before. That’s what happens in our locker room. But what that guy was saying, that’s not, I don’t know what that is. That’s trash talk.” Donald Trump’s comments should offend everyone. You should never see a true leader disrespect others to earn respect.
A leader doesn’t put down the same people he asks to let him lead. Meaning that at the very least Donald Trump has some growing to do as a leader. Guys who banter like Donald Trump most likely haven’t stepped foot inside of a locker room since high school. What we saw in the video is a man who does not aspire to be a leader, but a bandwagon rider and a wannabe.
