Real Men Don’t Commit Sexual Assault, Let Alone Brag About It
In case you missed it, Donald Trump was recently caught admitting to being a sexual predator. I won’t repeat his comments because they’re disgusting, degrading, and have already reached memetic proportions. While I was surprised by the sheer vulgarity of what he said, I can’t say I found the admission especially surprising. The guy who owned the Miss Teen USA Pageant, a creep with an unsettling fondness for girls young enough to be his granddaughter? I would have pegged him as a deviant before learning he would apparently walk into pageant dressing rooms to catch the contestants in a state of undress. I don’t even have to bring up his sexualized comments about his daughter or telling children he’d be dating them in ten years. Oops, I just did. Oh well, those things were on the record before he admitted to sexually assaulting women because he could.
The recording of his appalling comments almost immediately became a catalyst that inspired several women to come forward about being sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. Not surprisingly, Trump supporters swiftly responded with the typical refrains leveled at sexual assault victims who didn’t immediately press charges against their attacker. As an established pathological liar, Trump aggressively denied any and all of the accusations because there’s no way he did those things he has admitted to doing. “Locker room talk,” as he put it.
Truth be told—a rarity in politics, I know—Trump’s comment defending bragging about sexual assault as simply being locker room talk isn’t entirely wrong. I’ve been in locker rooms for over twenty years, and I do remember some locker room conversations steering in that unfortunate direction.
When I was about thirteen years old, I was once dealing with a bunch of hormonal virgins who thought that to go to Hooters was the coolest thing ever. Kids who thought to be anything outside of some construction of “normal” made you gay. Little juvenile so-and-sos. Perhaps that’s the locker room Trump was discussing. But I somehow still doubt he has been in a locker room in his entire life. Miss Teen USA dressing rooms? Sure. Locker rooms with adult men? No.
For the most part, adult locker room conversation is pretty mundane. Mostly, we talk about the sport we play, how the pros are doing, that sort of thing. One group I’m in likes discussing absurd conspiracy theories, but they mostly talk about pop culture and hockey. I’m not going to lie, we do occasionally say some crude things about women. I was going to downplay this aspect of locker room conversation. But the morning before I submitted this article for editing, I found myself in a locker room, discussing things like hook-up etiquette and the aesthetic appeal of yoga pants.
If you still suspect that I’m understating it a bit, you’re not wrong. It certainly wasn’t a line of conversation you’d bring up in front of your grandmother, and I say this as someone whose grandmother recently described my bandana as “sexy.” (She’s 91, has an uncanny resemblance to the Queen, and has campaigned for women’s rights for most of her adult life: she can say whatever she damned well pleases). Locker rooms are certainly not PG but locker room talk rarely gets to the point of full-blown, shameful vulgarity, and we devoted as much time to the upcoming episode of The Walking Dead as we did to “that chick from last week.”
Most importantly, if you were in an adult locker room and started bragging about sexually assaulting women… I actually don’t know what would happen, because that is NOT locker room talk. Seriously, this is just another ridiculous excuse from Trump. Sure, in an adult locker room you’ll hear cluster f-bombs (guilty), insults (guilty), tough guy posturing (very guilty), references to breasts (also guilty), and even some indefensible socio-political points based on some nonsense someone heard on talk radio (not guilty—on the talk radio part at least). But bragging about sexual assault? No. That would be new, and maybe even received with physical violence. You wouldn’t get invited back to “Gord’s” pickup group, that’s for sure.
Twistedly enough, Trump’s not lying as much as usual. He’s just tacitly admitting that if he’d ever been in a locker room, it was when he was about thirteen, and he’s never mentally developed beyond that mindset. His grotesque comments were as close to honest as he gets, and naturally, he attempted to disavow them after they were made public. The Donald is nothing if not consistent in his derangement.
At this point, it’s difficult to be surprised by anything that Donald Trump does. He is a man-child in every sense of the word. He feels entitled to anything he wants, and he will do anything he can within his considerable power to get it. He has made his living ripping people off and suing anyone who dares challenge him on it. Mentally, he is a spoiled thirteen-year-old boy with an obscene amount of wealth and power, and there is a slight chance that he might become a thirteen-year-old boy with access to a nuclear arsenal. He thinks he’s entitled to rule a massive and powerful country, if not the world. How can we be surprised that he thinks he’s allowed to violate any woman unfortunate enough to get within arm’s reach?
In case you haven’t noticed, I have specifically avoided calling Donald Trump a man. That’s because he’s not a man, certainly not in any sense of the word that I’d care to use. Sure, he’s an adult male, and technically meets the dictionary definition of the term, but beneath that surgically installed comb-over and behind that sneering orange mug is the mind of a very sick boy. Granted, that boy is incredibly smart, knows how to exploit the vilest fringes of the human psyche, and knows how to get what he wants when he wants it, but he is not a man. Men don’t commit sexual assault. Men don’t brag about sexual assault. Men can be crude, ignorant, petty, angry, and a whole lot of other negative things, but in the end, no real man would ever behave like Donald Trump, let alone be proud of it. He is an embodiment of a toxic masculinity that almost makes me embarrassed to possess a Y chromosome. If Donald Trump is a representative of manhood, I volunteer for castration sans anesthesia.
Thankfully, Donald Trump is not a man: he’s a boy. Here’s hoping that the next person in the White House is a woman.