They Should Make It Open and Shut Case

Victor Kiam is not exactly Omar Khayyam. Omar was an eloquent Persian poet who wrote “The Rubaiyat” in quatrains, occupying the minds of 12th-Century women with thoughts of adventure and romance. Victor is a vulgar New England businessman whose principal interest in 20th-Century women, until recently, was whether or not they shave.

Methinks Victor belongs to another age, to a time when women were forbidden to function as physicians or politicians or pirates or poets, a time when a free-thinking woman might be fastened to a chair and dipped into a nearby river should she even be caught reading, much less writing, anything so bold as the poems of Khayyam.

By now, liberal and conservative Americans of both genders have become familiarized with--and possibly fed up with--the story of a woman from Boston, employed by a daily publication there, who was confronted antagonistically by an unspecified number of football-playing ruffians inside a room that they consider a sanctum but others consider a workplace.

The case of Lisa Olson vs. the New England Patriots deserves our attention because of its particularly brutal nature, which, to my mind at least, bordered on criminal sexual assault; and because of its accompanying relevance to women in all lines of work who either have encountered some form of specific harassment or fear it from the gerontocracy that still controls such a high percentage of American labor.

Olson was doing a job. She was present in a setting to which others of her occupation had access. There was no question of her legal right to be there. The only issue was the behavior of adult men, behavior that, under any other professional circumstances, would never be tolerated.

The question of whether a woman belongs inside a man’s dressing room is an altogether different one, one that hinges on personal definitions of moral or ethical obligation. The question of whether any outsider, male or female, belongs inside a team’s locker room is a better one. As it happens, I believe locker rooms ought to be locked. We may do business in there, but we have no business being in there.

Let’s examine this thing from a couple of angles.

First, Lisa Olson. I know nothing about her, nothing about any activity on her part that could be even remotely construed as a contributing factor to what occurred inside the Patriots’ locker room. From afar, I can do little but consider her an innocent victim cruelly treated, then ade to endure assassination attempts on her character.

Victor Kiam, the razor-maker who owns the team, has cut a tragicomic figure from the outset, at first being patriotic to the cause of his Patriots, then later going public with his gushing mea culpa to Lisa Olson and to women in general, with visions of warehouses full of unsold Lady Remingtons no doubt dancing in his head.

There must be two Victors, a good one and an evil one. Kiamese twins.

He was frighteningly funny on at least two counts. One was the full-page ad in which Kiam denied calling Olson a “b---h,” which, for those who hadn’t followed the story from the beginning, must have had some of them calling Pat Sajak to buy a vowel.

Then there was Mr. Kiam’s assurance that of the 21,000 workers he employed at the old electric-shaver mill, we should be aware that “2,000 of them are ladies.” Should any of these lady Remingtons be in charge of removing unsightly stubble, they should consider starting with the boss.

The guy is such a b-----d.

Still, more than one modern woman of my acquaintance has mentioned her utter opposition to women, however qualified, being permitted inside men’s dressing rooms. They said they would never want women having such routine access to their husbands and boyfriends.

I asked them if female surgeons should only be permitted to operate on female patients. I asked if men should be forbidden by law to be gynecologists or obstetricians. I asked if female sculptors should avoid male models. They said these were good questions.

The catch, they contended, was permission. The undressed men inside these locker rooms were not getting to vote. They were being ordered to comply, told that they must grant entry to these very private premises to anybody with proper credentials. This has annoyed, to varying degrees, athletic figures such as Dale Murphy, Dave Butz, Jack Morris, Kirk Gibson, Bo Schembechler plus many others who have strenuously objected to a woman’s presence. I’ve heard things said to human beings that shouldn’t be said to a dog.

My first reaction, as a somewhat radical feminist and dues-paying member of the Assn. of Women in Sports Media (AWSM), is to side with my sisters. The women with whom I work are there for business, not pleasure--at least so far as I can tell, not being clairvoyant.

Yet, you can’t blame some people for thinking what they are thinking. One night in the Lakers’ locker room, a woman wearing a press credential began asking Byron Scott crazy questions such as “How’d you like going to UCLA?” (he attended Arizona State) and “How many points did you score tonight?” Turned out she mooched the badge off a photographer.

Girls will be girls, same as the reverse. When a former Washington sportswriter wrote her first novel, it was fraught with graphic descriptions of what her protagonist, a Washington sportswriter, saw inside the locker room. The character even has relations with one of the athletes.

To me, this was mere fiction, but to some it would send subliminal messages.

Were locker rooms sealed off to the press, certain individuals might never be heard from again. That would be too bad. But this should be their choice, not ours.

Frankly, I wish these teams would kick everyone the hell out of there, and I mean men and women alike, and I mean in every sport, and I mean right now. Until that day, I expect both the men and women to behave like professionals, and I expect the New England Patriots not to behave like animals.