Nope. And it happened in 1997. This is only Lebron James’ 3rd year as a pro. He got drafted directly from high school.
Am I the only one who saw the chest-hair pulling as even less “manly”? Like waxing all of one’s body hair?
(Not that there’s anything wrong with THAT!)
Of course I know it Dex. Which personal insults would those be? I wasn’t aware that I had made any.
Like, say…playing football? 
Well I certainly apologize to Mr James for falsley asserting that he choked his coach. However, if he in fact made homophobic comments about the possibility of being ravaged by a homosexual teammate in the locker room he’s still a giant douchebag.
I don’t imagine it’s any sort of threat of rape or anything. It can be uncomfortable to be the object of sexual gratification without your consent. And so while locker rooms are naked and somewhat intimate and personal, because they’re segregated by sex, people feel secure in not being looked at as a sex object, generally. Of course having someone gay in there changes that.
If that’s not a factor, why are locker rooms segregated at all?
Oh balls. I think James is pretty fugly but at any given basketball game there are probably a dozen or two people who find him sexually attractive without his consent (whatever that means; how exactly does one ever consent to being found sexually attractive by someone else?). I’m reasonably confident he’s not up nights worrying about it. And his fear at the idea that one of his teammates might find him attractive is ludicrous and insulting. It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in a locker room sport but when I was, I spent my time in the locker room getting ready to play or winding down from them and spent very little time pondering the sexual attractiveness of my teammates. It’s insulting, not to mention supremely arrogant, for James to think that he’s so hawt that a gay teammate is going to find him attractive. And even assuming that this hypothetical gay teammate does find James attractive, logically wouldn’t James want to know who has teh gay so that he can go dress in another part of the locker room away from lustful eyes?
I’m not saying it’s a big deal, but it’s not a totally off the wall idea. Why, honestly, do you think that they have sex-segregated lockers?
Modesty?
If we’re working on the assumption that some men may feel uncomfortable around gays because they might inadvertently be object of sexual gratification without their consent, then what’s the difference to them between being ogled by a gay man and being ogled by an unattractive woman? (“unattractive” being relative to the guy in question, of course)
“Okay, that hot girl in row six can eyeball me all night, she’s damn fine. But everyone else better not be undressing me with their eyes, I mean it!”
never mind- wrong forum
I think this might be that to which Dex was referring. :dubious:
Funny, I had the same thought. I had vivid images of Nads … :eek:
I think that the history of segregating by sex well pre-dates the advent of locker rooms. It’s a self-sustaining cultural artifact.
To some degree, I would imagine people would feel differently about someone they’d be attracted to vs repulsed by. People’s reactions are shaped by the attractiveness of the other person to an extreme extent. A cute person smiles on you on the bus, and you think “aw, they’re nice”, and yet an ugly person with the same intention smiles at you, and you think “what the hell are they looking at?”. But other men cross a barrier that unattractive women don’t, to most men. But it’s a matter of degree - a moderately ugly girl your age might be less oogy than a 60 year old woman, who in turn might be less so than a man where you can’t even relate to their feelings of sexual attraction.
In the locker room example, it’s far more likely that women will be the recipients of unwanted attention by men than the reverse, though.
But nudity to some degree brings vulnerability for most people, and so they’d they’re more exposed in such situations and would be particularly aware of how other people view them.
To give an analogy of sorts - if someone bumped into you, brushed up against your shoulder or something, while you were walking on a busy street, no big deal, right? But what if you were to find out that this person has a weird fetish about just touching strangers at all, and you knew they were getting sexual gratification from the contact? Suddenly you feel weird about it, whereas it was insignificant before. Yet it’s the same action.
The difference being that someone brushing up against you is an affirmative act and should you find out about the fetish you would know that you’ve been actively used for sexual purposes against your will. There is an enormous difference between being actively touched against your will and being in a locker room with someone who might or might not find you attractive should s/he see you naked.
I found it offensive. I’m a hetero and I found it made us heteros look stupid. I’m glad Snickers pulled it.
Found it. It’s not as blatant as I remembered it being (James’ quote, I mean), but it still has major homophobic-paranoia overtones:
To be fair, he could just be saying that teammates shouldn’t keep secrets from each other, in general. OK–considering the rampant homophobia in the world (NBA superstars) Mr. James lives in, if that’s all he was saying, that’s not too bad.
Philadelphia 76ers forward Shavlik Randolph was more direct:
While Randolph may–if you give him the benefit of the doubt–be only vaguely uncomfortable by a concept he doesn’t feel he understands fully, rather than being a full-blown bigot, his teammate Steven Hunter felt no need to mince words (bolding mine):
Mr. Hunter went on to note that an openly gay teammate would have to make a special effort to be “like a man” and “like a good person”:
The Orlando Magic seem to be more open-minded:
How many NBA arenas have locker rooms separated by gender in the first place? They can fit all the women on each team into the same locker room and nobody would even notice they were there.
To give a little context, Shavlik Randolph was raised in a very conservative Christian family, and was known in college for being kind of sheltered, so it is likely that he doesn’t know a whole lot obout homosexuality. That’s really a pretty tolerant statement coming from someone with his background, IMO.