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The RoboProfessor Fighting Sexism In Iowa Football

Sexism is bad. RoboProfessors are good. Who will win the battle for the soul of Iowa football?
Photo via Kembrew McLeod/RoboProfessor

Since 1979, the visiting locker rooms at the University of Iowa's Kinnick Stadium have been painted pink. In Hayden Fry: A High Porch Picnic, the former Iowa football coach, who chose the color scheme, explains why: "Pink is often found in girls' bedrooms, and because of that, some consider it a sissy color." You can sense ghostwriter George Wine softening whatever Fry said on the subject with that "some consider" bit.

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Fry covered the walls in a sickly shade of rose to wordlessly taunt opponents. The hue is a way of calling the other team a bunch of homos without doing so explicitly. Everyone understands this, from the folks who think it's funny, to those who argue it's juvenile at best and downright sexist and homophobic at worst. Curiously, this understanding hasn't inspired any of the supposedly enlightened adults in charge at Iowa to bring an end to the tired gag.

Kembrew McLeod, a communications professor at Iowa, is trying to affect change through public jackassery. On Friday evening, he plans to unleash an army of robots—or, like, a smallish group of people dressed up in silly costumes—on FryFest, an annual hot-dogs-and-beer-type celebration of Iowa's most successful ball coach. McLeod's protesters will hold signs with doofy slogans like "Binary code yes! Gender binaries no!" and "Delete the pink locker rooms!" They'll presumably piss off some Hawkeye partisans.

This isn't the point of McLeod's display—he told me he wants to "start an honest conversation about the pink locker rooms"—but his buffoonery has attracted some ire from people who think him an idiot. McLeod forwarded me an impressively to-the-point email that reads: "You must have a very, very large vagina for such a big piece of sand to get lodged in it over pink lockers [sic] rooms at your school."

He also sent me a longer one that's essentially a single, protracted NEEEEERRRRD! An excerpt: "Honestly, you need to grow up. There is a reason why you don't have a wife, and you should change your life. You are really an outcast."

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The Million Robot March, as McLeod self-deprecatingly calls it, isn't his first stunt. You might remember a robot asking Bill Clinton to apologize to Sister Souljah in 2008, or (again) a robot calling Michele Bachmann a "robophobe" in protest of her views on gay marriage. McLeod is that guy. He believes in his methods, "I think pranks are a great way of reaching wide audiences, and forcing people to tackle difficult issues they would otherwise want to ignore." He also claims his spectacles draw media attention, which is a stone cold fact.

McLeod doesn't think he's going to fix the pink locker room issue simply by being goofy. He's written some well-reasoned op-eds on the subject in the Des Moines Registerand Iowa City Press Citizen. He knows clownishness alone isn't going to get the job done, but by meeting the absurdity of pink locker rooms with the absurdity of his Robo-professor persona, he hopes to bring attention to the issue and demonstrate that the running joke is as doltish and ignorant now as it was in 1979.

Perhaps he has accomplished that much. In response to McLeod's agitation, Iowa president Sally Mason said in a press conference this past Tuesday that pink wouldn't be her "first choice" for a locker room color, but it's too minor a problem with too expensive a solution for her to deal with at this time. Maybe pranks can't change the world, but they can at least force a university president to admit that one of her school's long-running traditions is pretty stupid.

"I just assumed that if you add robots to the equation, then you get people's attention and force the university president to publicly respond," says McLeod. Damn it if the guy in the metallic skiing vest isn't correct.

Colin McGowan is a writer living in Chicago. His work has appeared at Sports on Earth, Deadspin, and Salon. He tweets on Twitter.