I’ve spent the last 48 hours in a white-hot rage about an Olympic hockey game I didn’t watch. Or rather, I’m feeling rage about the game’s after-party, part of which I did watch, on repeat: a drunken hoard of entitled men, spilling beer with an entitled FBI director, and talking by phone with the nation’s entitled president, who can’t help but make a jab at women in a call meant to celebrate the men’s victory.
But it’s the players’ laughter at the expense of women’s hockey that bothers me most, their seeming willingness to respond with glee at the president’s derisive comment without considering how that laughter might land. Two days later, there are no apologies forthcoming from those men. Instead, there’s been a public relations clean-up that rings quite hollow, including the excuse that this was just “locker room talk,” and that “boys will be boys.” On Tuesday, there was also a trip to the White House to hang with the President.
White. Hot. Rage. Because “boys being boys” has always worked as an excuse. Because “boys being boys” always comes at some cost to girls and women. Because “boys being boys” is what got us here: to the Epstein files; and to government leaders credibly excused of rape and predation without facing accountability; and to entitled young men, touted as heroes while equally talented (and heroic) women not only toil in obscurity, but receive derision by dent of being female.
Women in Sports? It’s Laughable
Even though I first competed as an athlete almost a decade after Title IX passed, codifying women’s equity in sports, I know that derision well, and on Sunday, felt the men’s laughter viscerally. It pinged a nerve first exposed when our middle school principal insisted that the seventh grade girls’ volleyball team attend boys’ football games without requiring boys to watch our matches.
That nerve was rubbed raw by playing basketball games to empty high school gymnasiums that would fill up in the last minutes of girls’ games, since the boys played after us. And by college athletic trainers who always attended to male athletes before turning to the women, as men’s injuries were deemed more important (and male basketball players, most important of all).
I’m sure—positive—every female athlete has stories to tell. I’m sure—positive—that their nerves were similarly activated by the men hockey players laughing. As if it’s hilarious that that women as athletes should ever be considered equal to men. It doesn’t matter if women work just as hard, if not harder, than their male peers to achieve athletic success. Or that women dedicate hours and hours to be the best in their sport: in this case, Olympic gold medalists three times over (plus five silver meals, and one bronze). They’re not men, and to think that their achievement is laudable: well, that’s downright laughable.
A similar derisive laughter is surely familiar to women everywhere, who have had to accept bad, sexist gibes made at their expense. In boardrooms, classrooms, lunchrooms, we’re told that the crude remarks made by our male peers are just a joke, and that if we just smiled more we’d be more successful palatable. That justification—the president’s dig at women was just a joke—is one more way that the hockey men will not be held accountable for their misogyny.
Since he began campaigning for election this time around, President Trump’s platform has centered on the idea that he alone can “protect women’s sports.” He signed an executive order in February 2025 to give “women and girls equal opportunity in sports.” In this as in just about everything else, President Trump is an opportunist, eager for another wedge to divide people and give himself power. The “protect women’s sports” cant is just that: empty rhetoric, meant to discriminate against transgender athletes, who at this point in America are a miniscule fraction of women (only 10 of 500,000 NCAA athletes were transgender in 2024). That number seems even less consequential when compared to the sexual assault victims mentioned in the Epstein files Trump refuses to release.
Truly protecting women might start there, by treating the Epstein files with the transparency they deserve.
Where Boys Being Boys Gets Us
It might seem unfair to mention those files when commentating on the US men’s hockey team. But isn’t a “boys will be boys” ideology what gave us Epstein and his accomplices in the first place? Powerful and wealthy men were just doing what guys do, the apologia goes, and it’s not worth the effort to prosecute every co-conspirator, at least not in the US. Boys will be boys, doing boy things.
Besides, their victims were just girls, so many of them expendable because the girls were also poor, or from complicated family systems. Their lives lacked so much worth that people in the United States would rather trust the testimony found in emails of a dead man, than the 100s of living victims, willing to testify about their experience. But even better, the U.S. Justice Department doesn’t believe it’s worth hearing any testimony at all.
There is one co-conspirator who has been punished: Ghislaine Maxwell. She absolutely deserves to be in prison, and in a less cushy one at that, but it’s telling that the only person indicted in our country for the supporting the heinous deeds of powerful men is a woman.
(How we talk about the victims, and the hockey players, is also an interesting tell. The victims, most who were children when assaulted, are often called “underage women,” rather than girls. The men’s hockey team, mostly in their mid- to late 20s, are called boys, thereby denying culpability in their own bad behavior. They were just being boys, after all.)
As I’ve monitored social media the last two days, I’ve witnessed a similar white-hot rage in many other women who are just plain tired of hearing that their lives don’t matter quite as much as men’s lives do. That women need to stop being so sensitive, and show some respect for America. But it seems like respect requires that people take responsibility for their actions, and also treat others as if they are fully human. And right now, that doesn’t seem to be happening: Not with the men’s hockey team. Not with our judicial system. And certainly not with Donald Trump, who rode the excuse of boys being boys and their locker room talk all the way to his two-term presidency.
An addendum: Since writing this post, the rapper Flavor Flav, a huge supporter of women’s sports, has invited the women’s hockey team to Las Vegas for a celebration, on him. A number of corporate sponsors have joined the party, providing free airfare, stays in luxury hotel suites, new luggage and clothes, spa treatments, and more. Reading the plans for the party made me cry, because women–and in this case, women athletes–really do deserve to be celebrated. I’m glad some others agree.
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