More and more women have been making inroads into traditionally male-dominated occupations, and one of these is sports reporting in all its forms--writing, broadcasting, interviewing. The response shows many that professional sports players and coaches have a good deal to learn about equality, but at the same time the intrusion of women into the locker room raises a number of questions about proper conduct on both sides. The experiences of a number of the women in this profession will illustrate the matter.
Mariah Burton Nelson works in this arena, and she has found that women sports writers and sportscasters are often made the brunt of sexual jokes in the locker room and are treated as less welcome than male reporters. She asks why this is so and offers one opinion when she writes that the locker room culture is a hotbed of latent homosexuality, something that can never be acknowledged openly and that therefore breeds a macho reaction as a form of armor (Nelson 192). Nelson sees the female reporter as a woman with power, and this in particular goads these insecure males to new heights of absurd behavior as a way of proving their manhood to one another at the expense of the woman.
Nelson states that she made her first trip into a men's locker room in 1992 after a football game between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Seattle Seahawks. Nelson was confronted with men who tentatively stated that they were not sure whether women should be in the locker room or not. Some felt that their wives would not approve, and some were supportive. Nelson's experience was not as tortuous or insulting as that of Lisa Olson, a writer for the Boston Herald. On September 17, 1990, several New England patriots football players allegedly exposed themselves to her in their locker room, causing her to avert her eyes and stare at the carpet:
"Several of them approached me, positioned themselves inches away from my face and dared me to touch...