Their bodies exist for us to look at and do sex to

Alexandra Petri has good sarcasm on Trump’s manual dexterity and the claim that it’s “just” locker room bantz.

Ah, yes, just locker room banter. As far as I can tell, the conversations in men’s locker rooms all must go something like this.

First man: Phew! Thank goodness. It was exhausting to have to walk through the world talking to all those women as though they were just people, like us. Clearly, they are not. They are women. Their bodies exist for us to look at and do sex to.

Second Man: I do sex constantly! I obtained a great deal of sex today from the many walking sex dispensers that are to be found drifting through the world! I must obtain as much as possible from the best-looking dispensers so that I can win respect from fellow men like you!

One pictures Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd in the flowery shirts.

It must be nice to have a magical room where you can go, drop your pants and pretend for a few glorious hours that women are not people.

A repellent, but remarkably unexamined, idea that we carry around in society with us is the notion that somehow this is okay. That this is just boys being boys.  where they can stop the exhausting charade of acting as though women contain the same internal worlds that they do themselves.

This is what it gets back to: the idea that men are people, and women are just women.

 

It’s the idea behind the “man cave,” a phrase that makes me want to scream every time I hear it. Men need to Get Away to nurture their rich inner lives, and women are fine just staying in the public part of the house, because they have no rich inner lives to nurture.

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