I know what locker-room talk sounds like.
I’ve worked in construction. I’ve spent years in male-dominated environments, around men of different ages, backgrounds, temperaments and appetites. I’ve heard conversations that would make polite company choke.
I’ve probably contributed to a few of them.
Some of it is funny. Some of it is exaggerated. Some of it is fantasy dressed up as testimony. Men boast, lie, compare, confess and perform for one another.
Often, the story tells you more about the man speaking than it does about anybody he claims to have slept with.
I am not shocked by the word “pussy.”
I am not shocked by men describing what they would like to do with a woman. I’m not going to clutch my pearls because adults occasionally speak about other adults in crude, sexual language.
That really would be dishonest.
But “locker-room talk” became something else in 2016.
It became a defence.And when Donald Trump said it, I laughed.
I genuinely did.
“It was locker-room talk.”
Not because the recording was harmless, but because the defence was so utterly shameless—and so unmistakably him.
I had heard the phrase long before Donald Trump arrived anywhere near the White House. We all knew what it meant: men talking filth when they thought women couldn’t hear them. Boasting, exaggerating, performing and occasionally inventing entire sexual histories for whoever happened to be standing nearby.
But Trump said it as though he had discovered a constitutional exemption.
Just call it locker-room talk and apparently nothing inside the conversation needs to be examined too closely.
He reached for the oldest available phrase, threw it over the recording like a dirty towel and expected the entire thing to disappear underneath it.
Utterly shameless. Unmistakably Trump.
The tape
The recording itself was made in 2005.
Trump was travelling on an Access Hollywood bus with presenter Billy Bush when the microphones captured him talking about women. The recording became public in October 2016, weeks before the American presidential election.
Trump described pursuing a married woman. He then talked about automatically kissing women he found attractive:
“I don’t even wait.”
He followed it with the claim that when you are a star, women let you do anything.
Then came the phrase everybody remembers:
“Grab ’em by the pussy.”
When Trump was questioned about the recording during the second presidential debate, he repeatedly dismissed it as “locker-room talk.” He said he was not proud of it and apologised—but the phrase had already done its work.
The locker room had been offered as an imaginary jurisdiction where ordinary standards did not apply.
Except I did understand.
That was precisely the problem.
The emphasis was always supposed to land on the final word.
Only words. Nothing happened. Nobody was touched. Nobody needed to take it seriously.
Fine.
But what was he talking about?
That is the distinction the defence tried to avoid. The problem wasn’t merely that Trump used filthy language. The problem was the belief contained inside it: that fame created its own permission.
Satirical composite
Filth is not entitlement
The problem wasn’t the filthy language.
It was the belief that fame counted as permission.There is a difference between saying what you would love to do with somebody and boasting about what your position allows you to do to somebody.
That difference is not prudishness.
It is consent.
A man can describe a woman in the filthiest language imaginable and still understand that she remains a person with her own desires, boundaries and decisions.
Equally, a man can use perfectly respectable language while believing that his money, status or power entitles him to access.
Trump’s defence asked us to concentrate on the setting and ignore the substance. We were supposed to picture towels, changing benches and men talking nonsense after a game.
The phrase made the conversation sound adolescent, private and essentially harmless.
Boys being boys.
But Trump wasn’t a boy.
He was a wealthy, famous man describing what he believed wealthy, famous men could get away with.
What men say when women leave
Private conversations matter—not because every crude joke reveals a hidden criminal, but because people disclose themselves differently when they think the audience is safe.
The performance changes.
A man may say things around other men that he would never say in front of a woman. Sometimes that is because the words are embarrassing. Sometimes they are simply filthy. Sometimes he is trying to impress the room.
And sometimes he is testing what the room will tolerate.
Billy Bush laughed and encouraged Trump during the exchange. He later apologised and rejected the idea that the conversation represented ordinary locker-room banter.
Numerous professional athletes made the same distinction after Trump used the phrase as his defence.
They knew locker rooms.
They also knew that invoking one did not make every statement inside it acceptable.
The women disappear
There is another problem with the expression “locker-room talk.”
It removes the women.
They become bodies passing through a male conversation: breasts, legs, arses, pussies. A catalogue of parts to inspect, compare, rank and claim.
All that remains is what the man wants and what he believes he can have.
Sexual objectification is not always complicated.
Sometimes it looks exactly like this: repetition until individuality disappears.
That doesn’t mean attraction itself is immoral. We notice bodies. We desire strangers. We fantasise. We reduce people to an arse, a chest, a face or a pair of legs for a moment because human desire is not written by a safeguarding committee.
But civilisation begins where appetite meets another person.
The useful distinction
Perhaps we have become too bad at making distinctions.
One side pretends that any crude sexual language is evidence of danger. The other pretends that anything said between men is meaningless banter.
Neither is true.
I don’t need every man to speak about sex as though he is addressing a human-resources seminar. I don’t want adult conversation cleaned until there is no lust, vulgarity, risk or humour left in it.
But I also refuse the idea that “locker-room talk” automatically absolves the speaker.
Sometimes it is just talk.
Sometimes it reveals the speaker’s idea of himself.
Sometimes it reveals what he thinks other people are for.
And sometimes it reveals what he believes he is allowed to do when nobody in the room is prepared to stop him.
The problem wasn’t that Donald Trump spoke like a dirty man.
The problem was that he spoke like a powerful man who believed power came with access.