An Observation

[Content Note: Rape culture; description of sexual assault.]

I have had it up to here with this "locker room talk" horseshit in defense of Donald Trump and his boastful admission that he sexually assaults women.

Here's the thing: Locker rooms are themselves the site of many sexual assaults against boys and men (and sometimes girls and women, too), which we frequently conceal and normalize behind the euphemism "hazing." This pretense that locker rooms are safe spaces for men to just banter about sexual aggression with no real consequence is deeply troubling.

This is from a piece I wrote ten years ago: "Badjocks.com reports that the most commonly reported hazing incident among male high school students is sodomy, with penises, fingers, or other objects; usually it's the teammates, but sometimes it's the coaches."

The most commonly reported hazing is sexual assault.

So this "locker room" excuse is masking some extremely ugly stuff, on top of everything else that's wrong with it.