locker room talk
Last week, our very own Bachelor (on ABC!) got caught in a sticky situation.
Matt James was innocently playing pandemic golf with his buddies when his caddy/friend/random non-famous average named Jerry (?) tried to distract him from his “putt” or whatever by poking fun at one of the contestants currently on the season, villain Victoria Larson.
“Now how was Victoria’s body? ‘Cause when I look at her, it doesn’t look very nice...and you’ve been making out with this woman…”
In the video, the other guys laugh while Matt takes a step back, pauses, and asks someone to “pull the pin” (golf stuff I guess). Exactly the response you’d hope for.
Larson, though an absolutely deranged bully, is by no means ugly. She is, however, the Bachelor franchise’s attempt at body diversity, meaning she weighs more than 115 pounds. She might not look as much like a supermodel as the ACTUAL RUNWAY MODEL on the season does, but she’s conventionally attractive by the standards of most people. Sure, she’s annoying, and sure, her bras are ill-fitting and constantly visible under her cocktail dresses, and sure, I’m enraged to be in a position to defend her, but Larson has unequivocally become victim to the brand of body shaming cutely labeled as “locker room talk.”
“Locker room talk” was the phrase used by the Trump campaign before the 2016 election in response to the Access Hollywood tape that caught the former president boasting about forcibly groping women to Billy Bush while he laughed along. Locker rooms are, if you don’t know, entirely cis-male spaces that women cannot enter because they don’t play sports. Therefore, they are home to what I imagine are very harmless, fun, and funny conversations about objectifying and assaulting women.
Larson publicly brushed the body-shaming off as no big deal while Matt made an apology statement, alleging that he took Jerry (??) aside off-camera to chastise him. To this, I say an emphatic “thanks.” More than falling victim to his friend’s faux-pas, James has proved himself to be complicit in his friend’s at-best hurried evaluation of Victoria’s value as a woman. When it mattered, James stayed silent while his friends laughed at something Victoria can’t necessarily change (not like her bras, which she CAN change and which I will CONTINUE to make fun of). As ABC’s bachelor of choice, James does, perhaps unwittingly, represent the best of the best, and is being held up as the standard for American men to meet. If the country’s most eligible bachelor can’t be trusted to stand up to his friends for women when it counts, the question becomes: who can?
When I was in Edinburgh, I had the good fortune (if you consider “good fortune” to be the opportunity to cry silent, angry tears in a room full of Scottish strangers) to see Locker Room Talk at the Traverse Theatre. The production was more curated than it was written by Glaswegian theatre-maker Gary McNair: the text was taken from interviews he’d done with men (scary) of all ages (uh oh), professions (oh no), and socioeconomic backgrounds (horrifying) about how they talk about women amongst themselves. The results are your basic nightmare: jokes about how certain women are only fuckable with paper bags over their heads, in-depth conversations about the size of women’s breasts and “arses,” a rating system that is numbered based on whether they would fuck someone that’s coded so that it can be discussed in front of the women it references, how women are responsible for being assaulted by rich men because they exhibited their sexuality in the first place, how sexism no longer exists because sometimes men cook too, how talking about women is good for male bonding and banter in the gym or workplace, and being responsible about the audience of their “guy talk” so that no one else hears about it, with a little transphobia thrown in for good measure. If that list felt too long, know that I removed four more horrifying examples to keep it brief.
The stage was laid bare except for four women with earpieces in. Gary McNair recorded his conversations with the men he interviewed, and the performers listened to them while speaking their exact words. They impersonated the men with their physicality and the low-pitch of their voices, but their bodies were unmistakably female-identifying, and the audience witnessed the words of these men literally enter the women onstage through their ears. The performers embodied the inception of internalized misogyny, where sexist attitudes are enacted by women themselves. In their repetition of the crude, crass words directed towards bodies like their own, the violence inherent to locker room talk became apparent.
The point of the play comes at the end, in Track 16, ‘Outro,’ also named “Nothing Degrading.” Sandwiched between two testimonials pondering whether there is a negative effect to the persistent verbal degradation of women between men is the speech of a man who murdered his partner, choked her for catching her cheating on him, before attesting that women are only good for one thing and that’s cooking. The final speech of the show is by a doctor, who gripes that he feels like a walking irony for not wanting his future daughter to be spoken crudely of while hoping to continue participating in his own “guy chat.” The point is that there is a thin line between verbal objectification and violence, that just because the consequences of participating in these conversations won’t likely fall upon those contributing does not mean that they don’t exist.
It is easy to connect the dots between the objectification of women and the sexual and physical violence that 1 in 4 women experience. Persistently insisting upon seeing women as their body parts reduces their value to just that: parts that exist for someone else’s pleasure. This outlook perpetuates the perceived ownership of women’s bodies by the men who evaluate them.
Locker Room Talk had post-show talkbacks after each performance in which audience members were invited to participate in a conversation about the content of the play. Now, two egregious comments stood out to me, one by the giggly guy sitting directly behind me who found the text of the piece to be positively hilarious, one by a meek theatre nerd several rows away. I’ll deal with Sir Laughsalot first.
The first section of the talkback was reserved for women’s reactions. This section ended with a poignant comment made by an elderly woman who started crying because she couldn’t believe women still have to worry about being verbally dismembered (butt, boobs, face, etc.) behind their backs by men whom they know and/or trust. On this note, the moderator opened the floor to reactions from everyone. The hand of the guy behind me shot up in a way that I hadn’t seen since I took college classes with straight, white men with little to offer beyond a vested belief in their own expertise.
He opened with, “I thought some of that was funny.” This was an understatement because he thought all of it was funny.
He continued on. “If this is really a bad thing, then what am I supposed to say when I’m with my friends and we walk by a hot girl?”
Other audience members, primarily women, tried to respond. They suggested he say something quietly, or use respectful language, or refrain from making sexual remarks. He remained unconvinced by these potential solutions to his conundrum. Now, I am not a particularly patient person, and though I can be reserved in situations like this, I physically could not contain my rage, so yes, I did fully yell out that he maybe didn’t have to say anything. One woman shouted, “exactly” from the front row. He disagreed, but the room moved on.
Slightly more upsetting to me was the theatre dork a few rows away, who did not like to speak about women in the way depicted in the show, but who was not comfortable stopping his own friends from doing it. How do I know he was a theatre dork? He was wearing glasses and was seeing a show at Scotland’s preeminent new writing theatre. Here is where I feel compelled to directly address both him, Matt James, and fuck it, Billy Bush, why not?
People remain unaware that their behavior is inappropriate when no one steps in to correct them. People learn how to talk about others from other people. Words matter, they teach us how to think. When your friends use their words to dismember women until they are nothing but walking tits, they teach each other that women are not whole in the same way that they are. Maybe you’re not so impressionable, but many are. Some kid shot up a school citing an “incel rebellion” in order to punish women for not being interested in him because he felt entitled to them after being taught that he was through exactly this kind of language. Get over yourself and your stupid fear of being disliked or called a pussy. There are worse things people can say to or about you. Ask a woman.
In Locker Room Talk, one man swears that no guy is innocent of participating in this kind of chat. He says, “Look. All men are like that. No? Ok, 99% are like that. Ok 95% Uh alright. 89% and that’s it. That’s my lowest number.” I don’t know that he’s wrong, because the doors to conversations like this are closed to women. What I do know is that there hasn’t yet been a tape leaked where a famous guy does stand up against locker room talk, so until that day arrives, I’ll have to believe what I hear.