What I Learned In The Locker Room Summary

In “What I Learned in the Locker Room” by Steve Almond, he highlights what men have to strive for to enter “the world of men.”Almond’s article is a description of his first experience of meeting a transgender woman while as a summer intern with the sports department of a newspaper and the strains a male has to face to be considered a man. Almond through his summer experience and with his own insecurities of manhood is able to illustrate to the reader what it really means to “be a man.” He uses sports as the “most direct and secure passage into the world of men,” but underplays the implications of having to prove masculinity enter “the world of men.” Almond first introduces the importance of proving masculinity by emphasizing the importance of securing the sports internship, stating how belonging to the sports fandom had “protected him from being labeled a weakling and a coward.” Sports were Almond’s passage to hiding his insecurities and a way to prove others although he

As he vividly describes Shelly’s appearance and way of both the reader and Almond come to the realization that she at one point had a sex-change. This realization then turns into an engulfed moment of silence between the two. Later on, we learn that Shelly for many years worked as a sports reporter and even was close friends with the editor, but the moment Shelly became who she really was it was if she had committed a cardinal sin. Almond uses his experience with Shelly to exemplify how one act can discredit you forever in “the world of man.” Shelly becomes in a sense “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” She was literally”, she literally tucked away in solidarity for who she hads become. She wasis treated like less than human for straying away from masculinity, which is Almond’s biggest fear and only further proves how dangerous masculinemen culture has