“You Go First “

“I keep coming back to the fact that it takes two to make a locker room.” https://t.co/YoAZ7cW4Yg

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) April 6, 2021

There’s a reason you don’t, and it’s the reason why you are in the locker room. You don’t have to be in the locker room. The only time I spent there was because I had to: P. E in junior high and high school. Otherwise I was never in a locker room. If you spend more time than that in one, it’s because you want to be there. If you speak up as this tweet advises, you’ll soon wish you didn’t have to be there.

It’s like any other job: you adapt to the work, the people who work there, or you leave. Leave aside direct insult disallowed by law. A hostile work environment is not the subject here. But I worked for three different lawyers who were hard men to work for. One I would actually call a bully. I couldn’t change those men. I had to change, or leave. I left. It was not redemptive or instructive or beneficial; it just was. Most importantly, it was not my job to change those men. It was not my opportunity to improve the world by even that much.

My father spent time in locker rooms at country clubs. He did it because he wanted to play golf. I spent some time with him there, snippets of time, because I never played golf; not really. It was a locker room, and he didn’t try to change it. If he had, he’d have soon been unwelcome there, and he wanted to be there, if just to change his street shoes for golf shoes, and to find a party for a game. It wasn’t his burden to change what he couldn’t change. He just didn’t join in. He taught me better than that.

Improving the world is seldom in your remit. Voltaire was right: we must tend our own garden. But people like to imagine themselves so important and upright they must tell other people how to be the same way, how to behave. Acting the right way themselves is actually less important than telling other people how to act: to act for them, to be directed by them.

Obviously I don’t have much use for them.