This brief polemical essay is a single-author libertarian commentary. Rothbard uses a contemporary sports controversy—the access of female reporters to male football locker rooms—to attack what he sees as the left’s expansion of politics into private life. The essay’s thesis is that “the personal is political” is not liberatory but totalitarian, because it authorizes ideological supervision over ordinary conduct, speech, privacy, and association.
The only way to combat this nefarious slogan is root-and-branch, total resistance, war to the knife.
Rothbard’s central conceptual move is an inversion of the slogan he opposes. Libertarianism, for him, does not politicize personal life; it demystifies politics itself, reducing “the State” and “sovereignty” to individual actors using coercive privilege. The political is not sacred or collective but personal misconduct protected by institutional power.
For the essence of the libertarian creed is the reverse slogan: “No, dammit, the political is the personal.”
The essay then narrows from theory to sports, where Rothbard thinks politicization is especially intrusive. Sports fandom is valuable precisely because it allows irrational loyalties, playful antagonisms, and non-theoretical attachments. Against this, he casts left-wing moral policing as puritanical and punitive, citing controversies involving Al Campaneris and Jimmy the Greek as examples of careers ruined for ideologically forbidden speech.
Of all areas of life, sports should be the arena least touched by politics.
The main case is the “Locker Room Controversy” involving the New England Patriots and Cincinnati Bengals coach Sam Wyche. Rothbard frames the dispute not as equal professional access but as a collision between press entitlement, feminist politics, and players’ privacy. His rhetoric is deliberately caustic: claims such as “mind rape” are treated as inventions of victimological politics, while the media’s demand for immediate locker-room access is portrayed as a desire to catch players exposed, unprepared, and vulnerable.
The Hate Thought squad has run rampant in sports for years.
The constitutional dimension enters through Judge Constance Baker Motley’s ruling on equal access for female reporters. Rothbard presents this as judicial activism and as an effective back-door version of the Equal Rights Amendment. His point is less a technical constitutional argument than a libertarian complaint about the conversion of professional convenience into rights-language.
The egregious federal Judge Constance Baker Motley had decreed that women have a constitutional right to enter male locker rooms!
Yet Rothbard also distinguishes state constitutional law from private institutional rules. He acknowledges that barring all reporters might be constitutional, but says NFL rules—shaped by press and feminist pressure—compel immediate access. This allows him to move from courts to private governance, arguing that cultural politics can regulate behavior even without direct state command.
Well, it’s true that the action would probably be constitutional, but it would violate NFL rules, which compel football teams to admit the press to locker rooms immediately after the game.
The closing satire turns Wyche’s compromise—admitting reporters while keeping players clothed—into evidence that the controversy is not merely about news gathering. Rothbard’s final irony is that “equal access” is asymmetrical: male access to female locker rooms is treated as unthinkable, while female access to male nudity is sanctified as constitutional progress.
Besides, all reporters, male and female, have the God-given, constitutional right to see football players naked: male players, that is.
The essay’s relevance lies in its compression of Rothbard’s broader libertarian method into a cultural skirmish: expose collectivist abstractions, translate them into concrete coercions, and defend private life against politicized moral supervision. Its style is sarcastic, combative, and deliberately provocative; its argument depends less on legal doctrine than on the claim that privacy, property rules, and voluntary association should not be overridden by ideological claims of professional or constitutional entitlement.
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