Locker Room Talk, Hockey, and the Moment I Realized I Had Blind Spots

by Jim Herbert

There’s been a lot of conversation about locker room talk lately. Much of it has stemmed from the controversy surrounding the U.S. Olympic hockey teams: the men celebrating their gold medal with a high-profile locker-room visit by the Director of the FBI and congratulatory call from the President, while the women’s team, also gold medalists, received very different visibility and tone.

During the president’s locker room call to the men’s team, he joked, “I suppose I’ll have to invite the women too or I’ll get impeached.” For the record, both teams were invited to the White House. The women declined. Most of the men attended.

This piece isn’t about summarizing the situation with the men’s and women’s Olympic hockey teams this year or debating what proper locker room protocol should be. This piece is about something far more personal. It’s about the moment when I realized how easy it is to participate in casual misogyny in a fashion similar to locker room talk, even when you believe with every fiber of your being that you deeply respect and honor women.

Interestingly, my story also involves hockey.

Many of you know I’m a native Detroiter and a loyal fan of my hometown teams. My intensity has ebbed and flowed over the years, but there was a stretch of about fifteen or twenty years when I was utterly obsessed with the Detroit Red Wings.

I played hockey myself through the first half of high school. I was a decent player who started as a defenseman, but eventually wound up skating at center and left wing because I was fast. It’s interesting to me how my hockey positions as a young teenager mirror my general ideology as an adult—a little center and a little left.

Sometime around age of sixteen, the intensity of the sport, and the locker-room environment, became a little too much for me, so I decided to step away from hockey before my junior year of high school. There’s a deeper story there about fear and teenage male culture, but I’ll stay with the thread of locker-room talk for now.

When I was growing up, the Red Wings were terrible. My dad used to take me to games at the old Olympia Stadium where we’d routinely get crushed by teams like the New York Islanders and Montreal Canadiens. Then in 1983, just as I was stepping away from my own hockey career, everything began to change when the Red Wings drafted Steve Yzerman. Over time, the Wings became perennial contenders, eventually setting an NHL record with twenty-six consecutive playoff appearances.

I watched nearly every playoff game during that era. In the early years of my relationship with my wife Christiana, we even drove to Detroit regularly to attend games. In 2009 we traveled together to Detroit for Games 1 and 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals, which was a rematch between the defending-champion Red Wings and their archrival Pittsburgh Penguins. Detroit won both of those first two games 3–1, putting them in great position to repeat as Cup champions. Unfortunately, they lost four of the next five games and Pittsburgh went on to win the series.

I can’t remember the whole story at this point, but somewhere in the aftermath of their game two defeat, Penguins captain Sidney Crosby voiced complaints about the officiating. Detroit fans responded exactly as rival fans do: with ridicule. Memes circulated showing Crosby’s head on the body of a crocodile crying big crocodile tears. Another meme I remember showed Crosby in a baby bonnet weeping. And then there was the one that showed a hockey skate modified with a high heel attached to the blade, captioned “Sidney Crosby’s skates.”

I thought it was funny, so I reposted the high-heeled skate meme on my Facebook.

At the time, Christiana and I had newer, overlapping, but very different friend circles. Many of my friends were men in their forties; most of hers were women in their twenties. That was simply the reality of our age difference and life stages. One of her friends, who was someone I barely knew, commented on my post and called it out as offensive and misogynistic.

I was perplexed. After I thought about it a little bit longer, I became defensive. After my defensiveness expanded to a size that was ready to burst inside me, eventually I got angry about the whole thing. How dare she come on to my Facebook page and accuse me of things without even knowing who I am? I’m in touch with my inner feminine! I love and respect women!

I remember going to Christiana and saying, “Can you believe what your friend wrote on my post?”

Christiana looked at me calmly and said, “Well… it is kind of offensive, Jim.”

I can only imagine that my first reaction to Christiana doubling down on her friend’s comment wasn’t especially open-minded, but as we talked about it further, something shifted. I began to see more clearly what I hadn’t seen on the surface: that this particular brand of humor depended on equating femininity with weakness. The joke only worked if being like a woman was inherently less than being a man.

That realization unsettled me, because I had spent my entire life under the impression that I genuinely loved and respected women in an appropriate way. My father, who was one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever known, modeled reverence, courtesy, and kindness toward women in a way that still inspires me. People who knew my dad still tell me how deeply they admired his decency.

And yet, I had grown up inside a larger societal culture where certain language and jokes were simply ambient:

• “Don’t cry like a little girl.”

• “Be a man.”

• “Don’t be a sissy.”

Sometimes the word sissy was replaced by another word ending in s-s-y which is even harsher and more offensive. In the circles I grew up in, no one around me considered this hatred of women. It just seemed… normal. Until suddenly it wasn’t normal for me anymore.

That Facebook exchange was the moment I understood that joking about gender, even casually, participates in the same hierarchy that makes other forms of marginalization possible. It is a brand of humor that relies on women being “less than” which actually is no more appropriate than the use of black face in the movie “Holiday Inn” or the plethora of jokes that start with the line, “A Rabbi, a Priest and an Imam walk into a bar…”

And in that moment, I saw that I had participated in extending that pejorative behavior into my own world, intentionally or not. What changed in that moment wasn’t my core decency. I believe I have always been a fundamentally respectful person. What changed in that moment was my awareness, and with awareness, my behavior going forward.

Thanks to my wife and many other awakenings since, I’ve learned that intention and impact are not the same thing. You can mean no harm and still reinforce harm. You can love women and still echo misogyny. You can be a good man and still have blind spots. This is the liminal space where personal growth and change can take its roots and spread outward.

Which brings me back to hockey, locker rooms, and leadership.

When people in power joke about equality, even lightly, even as part of a celebration, it sends a signal. The value systems of those people in power may already be obvious, but the real collateral damage is that it delivers a message to others about what is safe to minimize in public space.

“Of course I have to invite the women too.”

On the surface, it’s a throwaway line. To the man who delivered the line, it may seem like humor, banter, and nothing to take seriously, but humor reveals hierarchy. It always has. This particular joke lands only if the women’s team is implicitly secondary, which is the product of a system that has allowed women’s hockey, and so many other things, to be held back in that secondary space.

This is precisely how casual misogyny usually operates: not through overt hostility, but through tone, framing, and assumed centrality. The men come first, and oh, by the way… why not the women also.

The unbelievable irony, of course, is that the women’s hockey team has been the dominant program globally for decades. Their excellence doesn’t require validation from any office or a legitimate invitation. Which is perhaps why they so politely declined the invitation in a way that modeled a class that their male counterparts, and many other men, could learn something from.

One of the core missions of Men Living is helping men notice the invisible waters we swim in and the norms we inherit without choosing. Our goal isn’t to shame you out of the beliefs you have inherited. Our goal is to raise awareness, because awareness creates choice, and choice creates potential change in the culture of misogyny.

I’m grateful for the moment years ago when someone, a young woman I barely knew, interrupted my certainty and showed me something I couldn’t yet see in my own blind spot. It made me uncomfortable in the moment, and also made me a better man.

To me, that’s the quiet invitation for all of us, wrapped up inside this current hockey moment. This is not the time for outrage, defensiveness, or political sorting. This is a time to ask a simple question: What does our locker room talk, and our everyday language assume, and what does it teach the men who are listening?

If leaders learn to model equality not only in policy, not only in tone and not only in invitations, but also in language, then cultural change can begin to take root. The locker room, like culture itself, is always listening.