Stay out of the locker room then
Boys’ Club gets boy in trouble yet again. Boys just wonder how come all the rules got changed alla sudden and nobody ever told them.
Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, a Republican, said on Tuesday he plans to step down from his position after lewd and racist text messages between him and his former chief of staff were leaked to the media.
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Opposition to his leadership snowballed after texts were leaked to the media in which Casada and his now-former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, traded lewd remarks. Sent in the summer of 2016, the messages show Casada egging on the aide as he bragged about a sexual encounter in a restaurant bathroom, as one example.
The leaks also included a text message in which Cothren disparaged African Americans calling black people “idiots.” Only one of those went to Casada, and it is not clear if he responded.
Casada first questioned the authenticity of the texts, then wrote them off in an interview as “locker room talk.” Finally, Casada conceded that the texts were real and apologized.
What is this idea that “locker room talk” is some kind of escape clause? That of course is what Trump said, dismissively, about his “you can grab them by the pussy” brag – the one that cost Billy Bush his job and the respect of his daughter. So what is this idea? Who decided that when men talk contemptuous sexist shit about women in a locker room it doesn’t count? Why the fuck wouldn’t it count? Of course it counts! Locker rooms and other all-guy let your hair down places are where boys and men learn to talk contemptuous sexist shit about women. It’s where they learn they’re expected to talk contemptuous sexist shit about women, and that they’ll be mocked and bullied and ostracized if they don’t.
The fact that the contemptuous sexist shit about women is “locker room talk” doesn’t make it one tiny bit less contemptuous and sexist and guaranteed to train men to look down on women. Not.one.tiny.bit.
Yeah, it seems like guys are trying to say it only matters if you say it to women. Nope.
There’s a football commercial (“equal game” campaign) which kinda goes like “why do we love football … ’cause on the pitch, we’re all equal” and I keep thinking “what about the locker room, though”
Having spent decades visiting a locker room I can see that “ sons often become their fathers “ is a major component to misogyny and racism in locker room talk. But the other is peer pressure. The merits of just a few boys being secular helps dramatically lower sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism.
I think part of the “locker room talk” gambit is the notion of most bigots, that almost everyone in the dominant group secretly agrees with them but is afraid to say so because political correctness liberal thought police blah blah blah.
And so the subtext is “yeah, sure, I said that, but that was supposed to be just between us men. I didn’t know that some snitch was gonna squeal about it.” The message to women is “this is how we ALL talk about you when you’re not around. Those guys who claim otherwise are just posing/white knighting/trying to get laid.”
Ugh. God, yes. And the message to men is “Talk like us or you’re a pussy.” Peer pressure, as Kevin says.
Kevin @ 3 – did you actually mean “secular”? It doesn’t seem to fit there. I suspect a word-substitution brain-fart.
I took Kevin’s comment to mean that the worst of the misogyny was coming from those who had a religious upbringing.
But there’s nothing in the post to suggest that. I’m just curious as to whether I missed something or it was a word-mashup.
Like, the opposite of peer-pressure isn’t secularism. Has to be a mashup.
I don’t think that ‘secular’ was meant as an opposite to peer-pressure, more to misogyny, so maybe ‘progressive’ would be a better fit. Peer-pressure created by a few progressive boys could make all the difference.