Maybe Men and Women Shouldn't See This Much of Each Other
Young men and women now get full, free access to the worst of the opposite gender's locker room talk. This is bad.
When I was first getting interested in boys and dating, I had absolutely no clue what boys said about girls.
Okay, I had some ideas. I heard through the grapevine that they thought certain girls were hot. They had some kind of NFL draft of the hottest girls in our high school and I discovered that was why they kept calling this cute sophomore “Reggie Bush.” I’m sure they said other things—far worse things—to which I was never privy. And honestly? If I had heard every weird, perverted or downright offensive thing that teenage boys said about girls, I think it would have fucked me up, and done major damage to my views of men as I got older. But luckily, I heard very little of it.
Similarly, I think it’s probably good that the boys didn’t hear what girls said about them. When my friend’s boyfriend broke up with her, I cheered her up by drawing a comic of him getting mounted by a buffalo (to think of all the money I could have made if I agreed to commission such images.) Most of the time, when we talked about boys, we were just bullshitting and being edgy to amuse each other—a phenomenon I refer to as “highfivesexuality,” or a proto stage of sexual development that should end by adulthood.
I also think it’s good that boys never saw or heard any of this.
Unfortunately, today, if you are on social media, you will be served a constant stream of the absolute worst of the other gender’s “locker room talk.” The stuff that young people are able to see just by logging into TikTok or Twitter for two minutes is worse than everything I ever heard boys say in four years of high school, even through gossip. And we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t think that experiencing the opposite sex this way—through their most inflammatory members saying or doing the most inflammatory things—is doing real damage to today’s young people and how they view the opposite sex, fueling myths and stereotypes that aren’t remotely true.
