Eileen Myles on Trump: 'Locker Room Banter' Is Another Name for Patriarchy

Eileen Myles weighs in on the 2016 campaign: "No surprise, she had the most interesting take we’ve heard since this fiasco exploded," writes Frank Horton for Literary Hub, who asked the writer to discuss the Republican nominee. Here's an excerpt from the transcript of Myles's conversation with Christopher Lydon (you can also listen to the whole thing at Soundcloud, below):

Eileen Myles: The thing I wish Hillary–and this is sort of my job as a poet, to try and unpack language–but the thing I wish she did in the debate when he [Anderson Cooper] repeated twice that, “that’s just locker room banter.” I want to talk about what locker room banter is because as far as I’m concerned, that’s just another name for patriarchy.

The way I understand locker room banter is that it is a kind of reinstatement of the values that made private clubs, golf clubs, drinking clubs and bars all over America. That just ended in the 60s and 70s when there were so many private clubs for men where they did business, where they probably brought sex workers, where they made plans, all sorts of things where they inherently reestablish men’s power and exclude women. It kind of creates language and propaganda for sexual abuse and assault and all sorts of things that are negative toward women. Locker room banter to me just is another way of saying there are private men’s clubs from which we rule the world, and our language is sacred.

He was trying to have it both ways. It’s just locker room banter, and it’s just words. But, as we know, so are legal contracts, so are all kinds of verbal abuse. I think basically he’s just saying that men have a right to have a place where they rule the world and abuse women verbally and then set out and hit “refresh” from that experience of being in that sauna of hierarchical, sexual potency to go and act on it. He was just brushing off the absolute omnipotence of the male gender.

https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/eileen-myles-on-locker-room-talk