[LINK] "John Weir on the Controlling Effect of Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’"
Towleroad shares author John Weir's take on the idea of "locker room talk", examining it from a needed queer perspective. This kind of language is meant to exclude more people than you might think. An extract:
So you have a lot of white guys sitting around on a tour bus talking, reminiscing about their past sexual aggressions, planning their upcoming sexual aggression; and then they get off the bus and there is footage of that aggression.
It was not as violent as gang rape, but it stuck to standard scenarios of how gang rape is represented in innumerable movies and novels and TV shows produced and written and directed by men; and it was sexual harassment.
Watching it - only once - I thought about how, since I hit puberty (I’m 57 years old), I’ve repeatedly been in social situations - not locker rooms! *living* rooms - where one man, or a group of men, whom I have just met, whom I am “getting to know,” has/have said stuff about women not so different from what Trump said to Bush.
It is, indeed, inevitable, that conversation: I walk into a room of men I don’t know, and sooner or later, one of them turns to me and makes a sexual comment about a woman or all women. Not like, “She’s hot!” But more like Trump saying, “I moved on her like a bitch.”
I’m a gay guy, and I’m talking here - I assume! - about straight men. Straight guys are constantly policing each other’s heterosexuality, even still, and they want to know, as quickly as possible, whether or not the new guy is a fag.
So you have a lot of white guys sitting around on a tour bus talking, reminiscing about their past sexual aggressions, planning their upcoming sexual aggression; and then they get off the bus and there is footage of that aggression.
It was not as violent as gang rape, but it stuck to standard scenarios of how gang rape is represented in innumerable movies and novels and TV shows produced and written and directed by men; and it was sexual harassment.
Watching it - only once - I thought about how, since I hit puberty (I’m 57 years old), I’ve repeatedly been in social situations - not locker rooms! *living* rooms - where one man, or a group of men, whom I have just met, whom I am “getting to know,” has/have said stuff about women not so different from what Trump said to Bush.
It is, indeed, inevitable, that conversation: I walk into a room of men I don’t know, and sooner or later, one of them turns to me and makes a sexual comment about a woman or all women. Not like, “She’s hot!” But more like Trump saying, “I moved on her like a bitch.”
I’m a gay guy, and I’m talking here - I assume! - about straight men. Straight guys are constantly policing each other’s heterosexuality, even still, and they want to know, as quickly as possible, whether or not the new guy is a fag.