if you say so.
really? we as individuals can just walk into any locker room we feel like because Enginerd says so?
I see. So a player who doesn’t wish to get naked in front of someone who finds his gender sexually attractive is now a homophobe. Nice. Does that mean men who don’t want women in their locker room are misogynists? Or are you going to fall back on your argument that gay men are trained from birth not to look at other men in locker rooms so it doesn’t apply to them?
They’ve been in locker rooms with gay men for as long as they’ve been in locker rooms. If you never had a problem sharing a locker room with them before you knew they were gay, but now you do, then yes, of course it’s homophobic.
That’s not a logical statement. If someone isn’t gay then they aren’t attracted to the same sex. It’s a false premise comparable to a woman pretending to be a man. If she’s discovered and the men feel uncomfortable does that make them misogynists?
Again, you seem to equate modesty with rejection.
I admit I’m a bit surprised that men who can run full force into a 6’5", 300 pound behemoth of a man and who sacrifice their body every single day to play a game would be scared and modest in a work space shower. Who knew locker rooms were so fragile.
“I’ll play with a concussion, broken wrist and torn ligaments but I’ll be damned if I’ll have a gay guy look at my weener!”
You can throw in words like “suddenly” to make it seem like there is a conspiracy but it isn’t. If you read the entire thread you would see that was his scouting report long before the story broke. It is far from sudden. His speed is more of a question than his size. He is plenty big enough to be a linebacker. For his sake I hope he surprises people at the combine on the 40.
His speed is a question if he plays OLB. His size is a question if he plays DE. He’s a tweener, and at this point in his career, mostly just a situational pass rusher. Certainly worth a mid round draft pick, but by no means a sure thing.
I can vouch for this. I’ve been doing theatre (mostly nonprofessional, but actors and friends who’ve gone on to professional gigs confirm that it’s like this there, as well) for 20 years, and partial or complete nudity by both sexes backstage is definitely a thing that happens. Somehow I’ve managed to not ogle, because though I’m straight, I’m not, you know, a complete choad. Magiver, maybe you wouldn’t be able to avoid looking, but let’s not generalize that lack of control to all heterosexual men, let alone to all men. I’m not there to see boobs; if that’s my goal, I have a wife and and an excellent broadband connection. I’m there to do a job, and sometimes getting undressed is a necessary condition of that job, and I’m not unprofessional enough to let the the latter interfere with the former.
Are you under the impression that locker rooms in professional sports are currently restricted to men?
To be fair, the shower areas are restricted. Reporters aren’t given free access to the entire team area. Of course, that means male reporters aren’t allowed in the showers, either, so it’s not a gender thing but a privacy thing.
It’s a distraction from the main issue anyway. As repeatedly stated, it wasn’t an issue at Mizzou. Nor was it an issue for any of the closeted pros suspected by their teammates as being homosexual. Nor for any closeted pros who totally hid their sexuality from their teammates.
And there’s some poor assumptions going on here. We make arbitrary divisions all the time. This one is gender based - not sexual orientation based. Showers are divided by gender, not by sexual orientation. That’s been and remains consistent. And worse, this appears to be a sexist argument as well. I doubt we’d get this kind of reaction to open lesbians on professional women’s teams showering together. We’d probably get some sniggers and some off-color jokes, instead.
It’s not a distraction from the main issue; it is the main issue. It’s the closest thing to a pure expression of the homophobia that’s driving this “controversy,” to the extent anything is. Whether Michael Sam’s presence is ten units of disruption to an arbitrary NFL team’s locker room or whether it’s a thousand units of disruption, what’s going on here is that culturally we’ve always treated gay guys like they’re freaks, and some people would prefer not to start treating them like ordinary human beings.
I mostly agree, but I still see a distinction.
The guys who will be on the practice field day in and day out - the players and the coaches - don’t appear to actually care that much. And that’s the issue I consider most important. Can he play? Sure. Can he play at an NFL level? We’ll probably find out. Should anything else matter? No, but it does for whatever asinine reason.
This is exactly like gays in the military. There were all the same “concerns” expressed about unit cohesion, facilities, gay panic, and the like. A couple years on, and it’s not an issue. It’s such a dead issue that nobody even brings it up anymore.
Since open homophobia is not tolerated, there’s no choice but to attack the man on the grounds of “distraction” than directly on his sexuality.
Maybe it seems more important because you think it won’t, but if you knew for certain that it would cause a disruption in the locker room, would you accept that Sam should be discriminated against? Obviously not, right? Jackie Robinson was a distraction, but he deserved to be out there, “practical” considerations be damned. So does Sam, assuming he can hack it. Magiver and that anonymous veteran scout are either on board or they aren’t.
The fact that Sam isn’t a surefire star gives Magiver’s anonymous buddies all the cover they need, though. They can claim it’s purely about talent - that Robinson deserved to be out there because he was a net positive for the team, but Sam’s expected-to-be-marginal talent isn’t worth the distraction.
It’s not about prejudice, you see - it’s just about what’s best for the team. :rolleyes:
Exactly. Which is why I think the argument that it won’t even be that much of a distraction is a double-edged sword. It’s not “the players won’t be worried about showering with the guy,” it’s “fuck 'em if they are.”
But there is a bit of truth to it, which muddies the waters. It is perfectly possible for a GM to not draft Sam early, or even in the middle rounds, based solely on his projected play in the NFL. It’s not necessarily about “cover” or “prejudice”, it’s could simply be a football decision. I know that makes it much harder to take sides on this issue, but I think it’s also more realistic.
If, however, he goes completely undrafted, I would be right there with you blaming it on bigotry and prejudice rather than a decision on football talent. Although he is at this time a one-dimensional, tweener player, he’s also SEC Co-defensive player of the year and quite good as a pass rusher, which means if the decision was purely on talent/projection, there would be no way he wouldn’t be drafted if he weren’t gay. ETA: (wow, that’s a lot of negatives in one sentence. Ugh)
That’s a harder question to answer, actually.
I actually do believe locker room distractions (vs a media distraction) may be a bad thing if it goes too far. If it’s bad enough your team cannot function at all, that’s obviously not an acceptable result.
Jackie Robinson was a bit of a distraction, but that team still performed on the field, so it wouldn’t cross my threshold of unacceptability. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, though. He was on the team because society itself (with some exceptions) was ready for a black baseball player. Twenty years earlier? Probably wouldn’t have happened.
Likewise gays in the military. We weren’t quite ready 20 years ago for openly gay service members, and it might not have worked. Now, we’re ready.
And likewise gays in professional sports. We weren’t quite ready 20 years ago for openly gay athletes. Now, it’s one of the few holdouts. We’re past ready for it.
It’s a moot point, anyway, since he’s not going to be much of a locker room distraction. No more than Tim Tebow or Michael Vick, anyway.
It will be as much of a distraction as a team lets it be. When Tim Tebow joined the Jets as the backup they let him have press conference. When he joined the Pats they didn’t do anything special for him. Surprisingly Donte Stallworth laid it out best in a series of tweets.
No doubt there will be some teammates who won’t be able to see him as an individual. Either they’ll be peer-pressured into shutting up or they’ll be gone as quickly as the Dodgers traded Dixie Walker - which admittedly took a year.
It only seems like society was ready for those things now that we’re looking back at them. Some of Robinson’s own teammates didn’t want to play with him, but Dodgers management forced the issue. If you remember a few years ago, both the rank and file and the Commandant of the Marine Corps were opposed to integrating gays into their units (citing familiar reasons - “unit cohesion” and “distractions”), but it was done over their objections. In hindsight it looks like they both society and MLB/the military were ready for those changes, but neither one was a painless process.
We’re never ready until management forces us to be. I hope Sam goes to an organization that will do that.