Do you remember in a presidential debate, then-candidate Trump defended some pretty gross comments he’d made about women as “locker room talk.” The use of this cavalier phrase in turn meant to convey an atmosphere of loose, unserious, immature banter —caused Americans to review their own experience with locker rooms. Quite a few men said they’d never heard locker room talk of the sort Trump utters on the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, which makes sense because even the most self-aggrandizing creep is likely to stop short of the phrase “grab ’em by the p*#$.”
Girls locker room: "damn i forgot my sports bra"
Boys locker room: pic.twitter.com/QBMjqfpkwz
— Niche Gamer (@nichegamer) May 11, 2019
This impression has lately resurfaced within a spate of memes purporting to compare the anarchy of boys’ locker rooms with the civility of girls locker rooms.
Originating in Russian social media, they evoke male nostalgia for the warlike changing periods before and after gym class, when minimal supervision, homosocial friction, excess energy, and pubescent anxiety created a singular dude-extravaganza.
Between the sweat and the shit-talking, the towel-snapping and the toilets, you’re lucky to escape alive.
As primal as the energy in the boys’ locker room was, it didn’t necessarily result in violence. It could just as easily spur the creation of weird communal games, rituals and stuff that genuinely bordered on performance art. The fact that everyone was exposed and vulnerable together.
Young men performed the hell out of whatever masculinity they felt most comfortable in, and the outcome was often a scene that would have made no sense in any other context. Not that it ever did in this case, either.
