Chances are, if you’ve seen me in the last, oh, four or five months, I haven’t been wearing pants. I have officially embraced the no-pants revolution and am rocking leggings just about erry day of the week.
Unfortunately, my new way of life is being attacked on all sides. First, there was the blog post heard ’round the world—you know the one I’m talking about, in which the writer vowed to abandon all stretchy fabric to avoid inspiring lustful gazes.
(Is it just me, or does that justification fall dangerously close to the she-deserved-it argument that says a woman’s outfit triggered her rape?)
Now, lawmakers in Montana want to ban yoga pants in public—at least flesh-covered ones (which, insanely, would make that transcendent video of Sergei Polunin dancing to Hozier illegal). I hesitate to call upon the Right’s go-to argument of the slippery slope, but HB 365 would pave the way to legislating my sartorial choices and comfort, regardless of the color of my leggings. After all, Republican David Moore added that yoga pants “should be illegal in public anyway.”
Perhaps women should go back to wearing floor-length skirts at all time—heck, they should just stay in the kitchen, where they definitely won’t risk giving any men-folk impure thoughts. Maybe that’ll be the next bill.
In the meantime, though, I’ll continue wearing leggings because I damn well want to.
I’ll wear leggings because they allow me to chase after my daughter and because they don’t have belt buckles that dig into her back when she sits on my lap.
I’ll wear leggings because they’re comfortable and they feel good. Even if pants and skirts aren’t exactly corsets/Spanx/Chinese foot binding, they’re not always the most comfortable thing to slip on, and I reserve the right to pass on them.
I’ll wear leggings because I want to show my daughter that women should wear whatever the eff we want. We are responsible for ourselves; we are not responsible for others’ feelings and thoughts. We do not have to restrict what we wear to moderate what someone else might think.
I’ll wear leggings because sometimes it’s all I can do to brush my teeth and hair, and getting dressed in an actual outfit is just too much.
I’ll wear leggings because politicians and prudes don’t want me to.
Join me—or not—but let’s all call out ridiculous attempts to legislate women’s bodies and what we decide to put on them.
PS – I loved “How Accepting Leggings as Pants Made Me a Better Feminist.” (To wit: “My leggings epiphany has shown me that I need to tell my Creepy Subconscious Slut-Shaming Cave Dweller to shut up. Judging a person based on what they wear is weird and wrong. And in the case of women, it furthers sexual objectification and the idea that appearance is a woman’s most important characteristic.”) Yes, yes, yes!