Blessed are the Geeks: October 2016

Friday, October 14, 2016

Locker Room Talk = Plantation Talk

Admittedly, I'm not much of an athlete so I can't claim to have spent that much time in locker rooms, but I've spent enough time in locker rooms to have an idea of what goes on in there. Even more so, I'm an admitted degenerate so I have some concept on how men talk with one another when we think no women are present, and -- even more so -- I am something of an authority on how we think we are completely alone. I can honestly say I have never heard anybody talk about grabbing a woman by her pussy, nor have I ever even considered the possibility of such a thing taking place. Even when I'm alone, most of my fantasies involve women grabbing me.

To be clear: the problem isn't the use of the word pussy. I think it's safe to say most men use the word pussy. We use it frequently and reverently. That isn't an excuse or defense, we use it even knowing it's awful and that if any woman her us say it, she'd be less inclined to let us see hers. The problem is with what Donald Trump said he wanted to do to with it. He wanted to grab it, which is offense to morals as well as science. You can grab a cock, but you can't grab a vagina.

But anyway: Locker room talk, which before the past couple weeks was something about which most men took some measure of shame, has now, somehow, become a defense for saying something awful, even when the person caught speaking was nowhere near a locker room. Locker room talk, in reality, isn't really as exciting as Trump and his cronies seem to think it is. It has actually been my experience that most locker room talk is highly unsexual and boring. After all, very few people want to brag about their sexual prowess after just showering with a bunch of other dudes.

So let's call Donald Trump's comments on that video what they actually are: Plantation talk. Comments like his aren't so much the kinds of brags you'd hear in a locker room, but so much matter of fact talk by rich, entitled white men who see women and minorities as their inferiors.

Would anybody be shocked to see an early kinetoscope of a slave owner saying something like, "Sometimes you have to grab a negress by the pussy"? Well yes, but only because the kinetoscope was invented in 1897, but you get my point.

Trump's comments -- or at least his defense of those comments as something all men say -- remind me of an anecdote about Richard Nixon. After the first day of filming his now notorious interviews with David Frost, his advisors suggested he attempt to lighten up on set and try to appear a little more fraternal with his interview and his crew. So he showed up on set and asked, "So, David, did you engaged in any fornicating over the weekend?"

Even Richard Nixon would have been shocked by Trumps comments, and it's hard to argue Nixon isn't the lowest form of comparison any person could make to a GOP candidate for president.