Save Locker Room Talk For The Bedroom - Or Nowhere At All

My small Manhattan apartment, the tiny jewel box I call home and home office, has six Hobbit sized rooms. There's the requisite kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. Plus a living room, a minute second bedroom for my visiting prodigal son and (blessedly) a dining room where I sit to work.

Like you, I cook in the kitchen, entertain in the living room, sleep in the bedroom and perform necessary functions in the bathroom. I don't take a shower in the kitchen, nap in the bathroom or make a salad in the bedroom. I love each room, and respect that they each have a different function. The dog's a different story - she thinks every room is her room and she can do anything she wants in any of them. But then again she's an animal.

Which brings us to the question of one room in particular and what happens there. I mean the locker room and the talk in it. And here's what I've never understood: why is saying something in one room okay but saying the same thing in another room not okay? If you made a racist slur, but did it in the kitchen that's fine ("it's just kitchen talk!") but do it in the living and you're in trouble. If they're the same words, said by the same person in the same tone, isn't it equally bad no matter where it's said? Why does the location of where it's said give it permission to be said at all?

Logically it just doesn't hold up. And this isn't about censorship - it's about protection and power. Take the "locker room talk" excuse (because that's what it is) and swap in any other topic instead of comments about women and you'll immediately see that this is just a lot of sweaty baloney, trying to justify saying anything you want without censure or consequence.

"I'm sorry I said that Picasso sucks. It was just museum talk."

That's right! You leave that nasty talk in the museum where it belongs!

Of course the locker room was never really a room anyway, but a metaphor for the type of talk that happens anywhere in historically restricted all male environments where it was safe to say what you really think. Somehow that spilled over into a lot of rooms. Rooms of all types. And not even rooms.

It can happen on a bus while you're "bonding", at the bar over drinks or at the desk next to yours. It happens between men, accompanied by laughter, usually evaluative about women's body parts and sexual boasting. Sam Polk wrote, eloquently, about how "bro talk" contributed to his disgust with, and departure from, Wall Street.

It happened to me on a business trip to Asia when my male colleagues were making jokes about the size of the waitresses' breasts. My expressed embarrassment labeled me a stuck up prude. And yes, I left the company. And no, there was no one to complain to.

And then we have the newsroom. Oh look! Another room! Does it have a locker too?

Well maybe not, but if that newsroom was Fox News, then some pretty steamy talk was happening.

Sexual harassment law went into effect in 1964, during the age of Mad Men and short skirts on stewardesses. 50 years is both way too long and hardly a blink in the changing of attitudes and behaviors. But our tolerance of it is rapidly diminishing. It isn't just about a few grown up boys behaving badly, but about corporate cultures like those at Uber and Fox that will come under increasingly strong scrutiny and customer backlash. And it's about time. And that Jeannie is not going back in the bottle.

For my part, I'm banning the term "locker room" talk from my vocabulary and you should too. Call it what it is - harassment, degradation, belittlement.

We'll need to call it something. How about O'Reilly talk? That seems right. Because whoever said "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me" clearly didn't work at Fox news.

Bye bye Bill. Guess words matter after all.