A locker room is a place where conversation is held between teammates about what’s going on in their lives.
I am someone who has been part of a locker room for a good part of my life, and I have never once experienced this “locker room talk” that Donald Trump refers to.
“Most people think that kind of talk comes from somebody who is just boastful and totally thinks they are better than everyone else. I see it the other way, people who talk that way are really insecure,” said Debby Day, assistant athletic director and women’s softball head coach.
Day has seen what it is like to both play for a men’s and women’s softball team.
Day heard a few things thrown her way after playing softball with men for 20 years.
She said she always brushed off any kind of sexist comments.
I personally hear these comments being thrown around to shake a player up, but nothing to the extent of what Trump said.
“To me it’s the same as a fishing story…what fisherman doesn’t go out and catche a 3-inch fish and say it was a 13 pound [fish],” Day said.
Trump’s comments are being used to his advantage. Conservative news outlets are making everyone think he is better than what he really is since he can get away with this kind of behavior. Kind of like a child on the playground talking about how they got a new phone, they feel they need to share with everyone because it makes them better than the rest.
The Amherst men’s soccer team was one team that spoke out about this “locker room talk” and they couldn’t have approached it any better.
“We do not know what locker room Donald Trump uses. It clearly doesn’t represent the one we use every day,” said David Lander, a senior on the soccer team at Amherst.
I can closely relate to this because I am a part of the soccer team here at California Lutheran University and I have never experienced talk like this in our locker room. Here in college is also not the only locker room I have been in.
I have had the opportunity to be on many different teams and many different locker rooms as a result, and not one time has anyone talked about sexually assaulting women. I’m sure there are better things to talk about.
The idea that Trump thinks it is OK to talk about women like this is disgusting. And to make matters worse, he is a candidate for the President of the United States. This will forever be a skidmark in the history of American politics.
It makes me upset that a man like this is getting support and people are justifying his actions. I am not writing this article to choose political sides, but had Clinton said anything about men that promoted sexual assault, the Republican party and those who try to justify Trump would be slamming Clinton every day, all day until election day.
I am not the only one who is offended by his use of “locker room talk” as an excuse.
CNN posted a story that contained many tweets from professional athletes showing their discomfort in his use of these words as justifying the video of him promoting sexual assault.
Dahntay Jones, an NBA veteran, tweeted out, “Claiming Trump’s comments are ‘locker room banter’ is to suggest they are somehow acceptable. They aren’t.”
Men who are at the highest level of their profession see this as unacceptable and that’s because it is the truth.
His justification of this talk is unbelievable.
If Trump wants to use an excuse for his next mess up, I hope he stays away from attributing it to the locker room, because that’s just simply not what it is.
Gabriel Naudin
Staff Writer