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12 thoughts on “On banter, bonding and Donald Trump”

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C R E AT E A F R E E W E B S I T E O R B LO G AT WO R D P R E S S . C O M .

On banter, bonding and Donald Trump
O CTO B E R 9 , 2 0 1 6 ~ D E B U K

In my last post I argued that gossip–personal, judgmental talk about absent

others–is not the peculiarly female vice our culture would have us believe.

Both sexes gossip. But one common form of male gossip, namely sexualised

talk about women, is made to look like something different, and more benign,

by giving it another name: ‘banter’.

A week after I published that post, along came That Video of Donald Trump

doing the very thing I was talking about–and trying to excuse it, predictably,

by calling it ‘locker room banter’.

There are many things I don’t want to say on this subject, because they’ve

already been said, sometimes very eloquently, in countless tweets and blog

posts and columns. I don’t need to repeat that Trump is a misogynist (which

we already knew before we heard the tape). I don’t need to upbraid the news

media for their mealy-mouthed language (the Washington Post described the
recording as containing ‘an extremely lewd conversation’, while the Guardian
has referred to it as a ‘sex-boast tape’–as if the issue were the unseemliness of

bragging or the vulgarity of using words like ‘tits’). But what I do have

something to say about is banter itself: what it does and why it matters.

A lot of the commentary I’ve read about the tape does not, to my mind, get to

the heart of what’s going on in it. So, that’s where I want to begin. Here’s a

(quick and very basic) transcription of the start of the recorded conversation:

Trump, the Hollywood Access host Billy Bush and a third, unidentified man
are talking on a bus which is taking them to the set of a soap opera where

Trump is making a guest appearance.

In this sequence Trump is not boasting about having sex: he’s telling a

personal anecdote about an occasion when he didn’t manage to have sex (‘I

failed I’ll admit it’). He then returns to what seems to be the original topic, how

to assess the woman’s physical attractiveness. The first speaker’s turn

suggests that this has diminished over time (‘she used to be great’), but

whereas he thinks ‘she’s still very beautiful’, Trump’s reference to her ‘big

phony tits’ implies that he no longer finds her as desirable.

What’s going on here is gossip. Like the young men’s gossip I discussed in my

earlier post, this is judgmental talk about an absent other which serves to

reinforce group norms (in this case, for male heterosexual behaviour and for

female attractiveness). It’s also male bonding talk: by sharing intimate

information about himself–and especially by admitting to a failed attempt at

seduction–Trump positions the other men as trusted confidants.

It’s not clear whether the discussion of the woman’s appearance has reached

its natural end, but at this point, as the bus nears its destination, Billy Bush

intervenes to point out the soap actress Trump is scheduled to meet, and she

becomes the next topic.

Trump’s contribution to this extract looks more like the ‘sex boast’ of the news

headlines. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that this too is an enactment of

male bonding. Trump, the alpha male of the group, takes centre stage, but the

other men support him throughout with affiliative responses–saying ‘woah’

and ‘yes’, echoing his sentiments (‘Trump: you can do anything’/ ‘Bush:

whatever you want’), and above all, greeting his most overtly offensive

remarks with laughter. They laugh when he says he doesn’t wait for

permission to kiss a woman; they laugh again when he mentions ‘grab[bing]

[women] by the pussy’. (You can listen for yourself, but my assessment of this

laughter is that it’s appreciative rather than embarrassed, awkward or forced.)

The transgressiveness of sexual banter–its tendency to report markedly

offensive acts or desires in deliberately offensive (or in the media’s terms,

‘lewd’) language, is not just accidental, a case of men allowing the mask to slip

when they think they’re alone. It’s deliberate, and it’s part of the bonding

process. Like the sharing of secrets, the sharing of transgressive desires, acts

and words is a token of intimacy and trust. It says, ‘I am showing that I trust

you by saying things, and using words, that I wouldn’t want the whole world

to hear’. It’s also an invitation to the hearer to reciprocate by offering some

kind of affiliative response, whether a token of approval like appreciative

laughter, or a matching transgressive comment. (‘I trust you, now show that

you trust me’.)

When a private transgressive conversation becomes public, and the speaker

who said something misogynist (or racist or homophobic) is publicly named

and shamed, he often protests, as Trump did, that it was ‘just banter’, that he is

not ‘really’ a bigot, and that his comments have been ‘taken out of context’.

And the rest of us marvel at the barefaced cheek of these claims. How, we

wonder, can this person disavow his obvious prejudice by insisting that what

he said wasn’t, ‘in context’, what he meant?

What I’ve just said about the role of transgressive speech in male bonding

suggests an answer (though as I’ll explain in a minute, that’s not the same as

an excuse). Public exposure does literally take this kind of conversation out of

its original context (the metaphorical ‘locker room’, a private, all-male space).

And when the talk is removed from that context, critics will focus on its

referential content rather than its interpersonal function. They won’t

appreciate (or care) that what’s primarily motivating the boasting, the

misogyny, the offensive language and the laughter isn’t so much the speakers’

hatred of women as their investment in their fraternal relationship with each

other. They’re like fishermen telling tall tales about their catches, or old

soldiers exaggerating their exploits on the battlefield: their goal is to impress

their male peers, and the women they insult are just a means to that end.

As I said before, though, that’s not meant to be an excuse: I’m not suggesting

that banter isn’t ‘really’ sexist or damaging to women. On the contrary, I’m

trying to suggest that it’s more damaging than most critical discussions
acknowledge. Banter is not just what commentators on the Trump tape have

mostly treated it as–a window into the mind of an individual sexist or

misogynist. It’s a ritualised social practice which contributes to the

maintenance of structural sexual inequality. This effect does not depend on

what the individuals involved ‘really think’ about women. (I have examples of

both sexist and homophobic banter where I’m certain that what some

speakers say is not what they really think, because they’re gay and everyone

involved knows that.) It’s more a case of ‘all that’s needed for evil to flourish is

for good men to go along with it for the lolz’.

You might think that in Trump’s case a lot of men have chosen to do the

decent thing. Since the tape became public, male politicians have been lining

up to condemn it. A formula quickly emerged: after Jeb Bush tweeted that, as

a grandfather to girls, he could not condone such degrading talk about

women, there followed a steady stream of similar comments from other men

proclaiming their respect for their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers.

But to me this rings hollow. Some of it is obvious political score-settling, and

far too much of it is tainted by what some theorists call ‘benevolent sexism’

(no, Paul Ryan, women should not be ‘revered’, they should be respected as

equal and autonomous human beings; and no, they aren’t just deserving of

respect because they’re ‘your’ women). But in addition, I’d bet good money that

all the men uttering these pious sentiments have at some point participated

in similar conversations themselves. When Trump protested that Bill Clinton

had said worse things to him on the golf course, I found that entirely plausible

(though also irrelevant: Trump can’t seem to grasp that Bill’s behaviour

reflects on Bill rather than Hillary). Whatever their actual attitudes to women,

as members of the US political elite these men have had to be assiduous in

forging fraternal bonds with other powerful men. And wherever there are

fraternal bonds there will also be banter.

Feminists generally refer to the social system in which men dominate

women as ‘patriarchy’, the rule of the fathers, but some theorists have

suggested that in its modern (post-feudal) forms it might more aptly be called

‘fratriarchy’, the rule of the brothers, or in Carole Pateman’s term, ‘fraternal

patriarchy’. Banter is fraternal patriarchy’s verbal glue. It strengthens the

bonds of solidarity among male peers by excluding, Othering and

dehumanising women; and in doing those things it also facilitates sexual

violence.

Male peer networks based on fraternal solidarity are a common and effective

mechanism for informally excluding women, or consigning them to second-

class ‘interloper’ status, in professions and institutions which no longer bar

them formally. Whether it’s city bankers socialising with clients in strip clubs,

or construction workers adorning the site office with pictures of topless

models, men use expressions of heterosexual masculinity–verbal as well as

non-verbal, the two generally go together–to claim common ground with one

another, while differentiating themselves from women. Sometimes they

engage in sexual talk to embarrass and humiliate women who are present;

sometimes they spread damaging rumours behind women’s backs. These

tactics prevent women from participating on equal terms.

I said earlier that when Trump and his companions on the bus talked about

women, the women were not the real point: they were like the fish in a fishing

story or the faceless enemy in a war story. But that wasn’t meant to be a

consoling thought (‘don’t worry, women, it’s nothing personal, they’re just

bonding with each other by talking trash about you’). When you talk about

people it should be personal–it should involve the recognition of the other as
a human being with human feelings like your own. Heterosexual banter is

one of the practices that teach men to withhold that recognition from women,

treating them as objects rather than persons.

When you objectify and dehumanise a class of people, it becomes easier to

mistreat them without guilt. And when you are part of a tight-knit peer group,

it becomes more difficult to resist the collective will. According to the

anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, rape culture arises where both these

conditions are fulfilled–where men have strong fraternal loyalties to each

other, and at the same time dehumanise women. In her classic study of

fraternity gang-rape, Sanday argues that what motivates fraternity brothers

or college athletes to commit rape in groups is the desire of the men involved

both to prove their manhood and to feel close to one another. These are

typically men whose conception of masculinity will not permit them to

express their feelings for other men in any way that might raise the spectre of

homosexuality, which they equate with effeminacy and unmanliness. Instead

they bond through violence against someone who represents the despised

feminine Other.

Heterosexual banter is a regular feature of life in many fraternities, and

Sanday identifies it (along with homophobia, heavy use of pornography and

alcohol) as a factor producing ‘rape-prone’ campus cultures. One man who

was interviewed for her study recalled the way it worked in his fraternity,

and how it made him feel:

Of course there’s a difference between ‘acting out on a verbal level’ and

committing gang rape. It’s not inevitable that one will lead to the other. But

Sanday suggests that one can help to make the other more acceptable, or less

unthinkable. What the man quoted above says about the social and

psychological rewards of fraternal bonding also helps to explain why men

may be prevailed on to join in with a group assault, even if they wouldn’t have

initiated it alone; and why they don’t intervene to stop it.

Whenever I talk or write about male sexual banter, I always hear from some

men who tell me they’re deeply uncomfortable with it. I believe them. But my

response is, ‘it’s not me you need to tell’. They risk nothing by expressing their

discomfort to me. What would be risky, and potentially costly, would be for

them to put their principles above their fraternal loyalties, stop engaging in

banter and challenge their peers to do the same.

Similarly, it’s pretty easy–assuming your politics lean left of fascism–to

criticise the behaviour of Donald Trump. But as necessary as that may be in

current circumstances, on its own it is not sufficient. We need to

acknowledge that the kind of banter Trump has been condemned for is more

than just an individual vice: it is a social practice supporting a form of

fraternity that stands in the way of women’s liberty and equality.

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