By Mike Wise
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; E01

After the blow-up doll controversy in the Chicago White Sox' clubhouse last week, a number of women's groups and social engineers predictably weighed in on the issue. In defense, it doesn't take just an activist to summon emotion when an unidentified player props up two nude, inflatable dolls in an American workplace -- dolls with bats strategically positioned around them and one holding a sign that read: "You've Got to Push," a juvenile reference to the White Sox hitting slump.

Anyone with a wife, daughter or sister, or, heaven forbid, a relative who has been sexually abused, has a right to feel offended.

But it's the backlash over the backlash -- men outraged by the outrage -- that should make our gender quiver.

After Newsday's Barbara Barker took aim at baseball and the White Sox in a column, Jack from Chicago responded via e-mail: "Get back in that kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, like you should be."

After printing this tamer response, I have to ask: As a species, are we subhuman?

Because that is the defense of purported real men everywhere, that: a) we're male, therefore we are cretins; and b) they're male baseball players , tobacco-dippin' Neanderthals. What did you expect, decency? Respect in the clubhouse, a workplace subject to the same laws of discrimination and sexual harassment as IBM or Chipotle? Hah.

And it's not just louts on the Internet or on Miserable Suburban Guy radio taking up arms over this cause; it's naturally producing testosterone people everywhere -- friends and colleagues in my own business, who have decided to make White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillén's warped clubhouse their own Skull and Bones, a don't-ask-don't-tell fraternity where misogynists will be misogynists.

"Everybody, please, just shut up," wrote a flummoxed Bruce Jenkins of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Of course it's stupid and ugly and not funny. It's the clubhouse, where players can do anything they please."

Said Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey, who hinted the dolls need names last week at the end of his column: "The baseball clubhouse is the last place where boys can be boys or idiots can be idiots, as if a distinction can be made."

Look, an illusion exists that locker rooms are private in professional sports. They are not. For long periods of time, often three hours or more, baseball clubhouses are places of business -- open to any credentialed member of the media. Women. Men. Straight. Gay. Black. White. Hispanic. Asian. Everyone.

And yet the suspension of basic civility often ends the moment a player or reporter passes through the door. Locker-room culture is a vacuum, where amnesia sets in quick.

This week in particular makes Bud Selig come across as a huge hypocrite. That's right, Major League Baseball, the people who gave you pink bats in support of breast cancer awareness on Mother's Day, were also the people whose commissioner called propping up a bat in a doll's rear end "a team issue."

Neither the White Sox nor baseball offered an apology, making team owner Jerry Reinsdorf and general manager Ken Williams as gutless as Selig. Before saying he was a tad miffed, Williams joked, "I will assure Major League Baseball that the doll was not violated in any way, shape or form."

Cute, Kenny. It's no wonder Guillén, the White Sox' boorish, crass manager, who has turned his broken English into a Vaudeville act while being portrayed by the game's gatekeepers as a man's man, is allowed to stay employed.

When retired NBA star Tim Hardaway said he hates gays more than a year ago, after former NBA player John Amaechi came out in his autobiography, David Stern made him go away, saying emphatically that Hardaway's homophobia does not represent the commissioner's inclusive league. When Guillén used a gay slur to call out Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Marriotti in 2006, Selig ordered him to "sensitivity training."

This is how much Guillén got out of his course:

"I'm not going to say I'm sorry," Guillén said of the inflatable dolls. "I don't know what to say. I can't come up with the words, because as soon as I say that, that means I'm guilty of something. I'm not. I'm not guilty. . . . We just had a plastic thing sitting on a table and, wow, we're bad people."

Poor Ozzie, he doesn't even know he's a caricature.

People really believe this is merely about a couple of sex toys and a gag gone bad, that it has nothing to do with the males-gone-wild sporting culture we live in.

In HBO's disturbing documentary, "The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo," a few rebels actually rationalize their behavior by telling of a mystical belief based in folklore: that raping a woman gives the perpetrator magical powers.

It's hard to go that far given the circumstances in the White Sox clubhouse, where there are no doubt some intelligent, free-thinking souls who probably felt bullied by the display but felt pressured not to say anything.

But to completely disregard the connection -- to not understand the implicit truths and alarming statistics about athletes and sexual assault in this country -- is just flat-out negligent.

Here's the really troubling issue: that some major league baseball players believe the image of a violated woman, in doll form, might be enough to empower men to break free from their anemic hitting slump, that their power and average will return if they just push through.

When, really, they could have just gotten enemas.