One of Those Things
It once occurred, though we need not be
so specific as to intrinsically and specifically keelhaul somoene for a gaffe so long ago, that a conservative arguing in defense of what seemed a throwback racist tantrum from many hardline conservatives and alleged libertarians as Barack Obama ascended to the White House managed to make exactly the wrong point; more specifically, he used a political cartoon as an example to the exact opposite of what the panel actually meant. These years later, it doesn't seem so extraordinary, as the lack of pathos now seems not only obvious but common. Perhaps it seems a lot more complicated arguing back and forth about the artistic merit of
Piss Christ, but it's one thing to disagree with the photographer's general view of life; trying to say the artist's intention must necessarily be what the disdainful critic made the criticism a caricature. Fast-forward all these years and the solution seems to be to make the behavior so common that it's not so much a caricature as a mere description of a seemingly everyday rhetorical device. It might seem a lot more complicated when arguing about a crucifix in a jar of urine, but in truth it's not. One need not argue what is wrong with the cartoonist's perspective if one simply replaces it with their own, such as it was on the occasion I am recalling. One hundred eighty degrees off. Diametrically opposed. And, really, I would have thought it obvious.
We should not be surprised that I digress from the outset; nor should we expect I find the digression completely irreleant.
My own mistake on the present occasion, which in turn recalls that once upon a time, was to read something in the context by which it was presented to me; despite my general suspicion of certain rhetorical scraps offered in lieu of something more properly rhetorical, I read the article the first time as if the tatters of implication were in some way reasonably accurate.
As a result, I was a bit disoriented and disbelieving, resolving two points:
• The construction of the article, with a man saying feminist things as a counterpoint to a prudish female, seemed nearly significant; taking the article in the context it was offered, though, I could not figure out what that significance actually was.
• I do not recognize the society Kelsey Hughes describes.
Indeed, the whole thing seemed so amiss I started looking around to figure out if she was some manner of conservative propagandist.
Somewhere along the line, after a couple of attempts to describe my disbelief and confusion, the significance finally struck: Hughes is setting up Joe Antoshak to make the point.
Yoga pants have apparently
"caused a real problem" because of
"what they've led to" for having
"snowballed into a newer trend", which in turn is
"wearing leggings as pants"? No, really: What society is she describing?
I've been hearing arguments about women wearing tight pants for decades. I mean, elastene been around since the 1950s, and when I was in junior high school many girls wore spandex tights.
The article itself is written in 2013; my daughter was born in 2002, and from the outset, she and her female age-peer extended relatives have been wearing leggings as pants pretty much from the outset; indeed, the idea that
"wearing leggings as pants" is somehow
new is not so much suspect as laughable.
The leggings-as-undergarment assertion is itself hilarious:
Leggings, however, are not pants.
They are designed as an undergarment — solely for additional warmth, maybe to show peeking out under the skirt for some added flair. This yoga pants sibling is more similar to stockings than sweatpants. Wearing leggings as pants in public is essentially like wearing tights as pants, except leggings show bare skin from the calf down. So really, they're worse. And nobody wants to see what color underwear you're wearing through your pants.
(Boldface accent added↱)
No, really, at this point ... well, yeah, trying to take those paragraphs seriously was more than a little difficult.
Aside from the exceptionally narrow definition of leggings―we might thus similarly suggest that pencil skirts are bad for showing leg from the knee down, and someone might ask about an ankle-length jersey pencil, and then I'd end up muttering something about not being able to wear those without gaffing, and, frankly, I have yet to meet the skirt worth the effort―the bit about bare skin from the calf down is astoundingly prudish if we take it in any literalistic context; as mockery, the vice really is in the prim confidence.
But I'm also a bit puzzled at the bit about underwear.
"Nobody wants to see what color underwear you're wearing through your pants"? Really?
I mean, there are plenty of issues about how we perceive and prioritize the existences of other people, but the panty check is almost automatic among men of my cohort. I mean, it wasn't
just the boys at my school; two school districts and then a Jesuit school, and the question of dots or hearts or flowers or teddy bears with balloons or stripes or whatever was
never an outlier. It would not have occurred to me to wonder, among the wanker's voyeur porn, just how unusual the panty checkers are.
These weren't Satanists or atheists or bra-burning feminists. They were tame Lutheran mothers dressing their girls in white trousers that showed us what underwear our female classmates were wearing. And in all the years I've heard parents and daughters fight about how the young one isn't going out dressed like that―and this includes the literary and comedic propositions, as well, and also the downright horrifying vignettes about parents or
other adults in the community deciding to inspect a girl's underwear to determine if it is sexually appropriate―I have
never encountered the one when the parent wants to know what she's wearing under those otherwise modest white trousers because.
And before leggings became a market force such as we know them today, I remeber iterations of stirrup and stretch pants, and, yeah, the whole time there were plenty of light-colored fabrics through which we could (
ahem!) count the dots.
That is to say, we need not offer any specific moral defense of the behavior in order to observe that
"nobody wants to see what color underwear you're wearing through your pants" seems at least a little presumptuous. Among many of my generation, it was actually a significant part of boyhood.
But if we read Hughes as teeing up for Antoshak, the twisted history and absurd prudery make a bit more sense. And Antoshak delivers:
The United States in particular loves to protest newfangled clothing styles. Consider the flappers of the 1920s. Though scandalous in their time, when compared to the typical garb of today, their style would look closer to that of convent members than sexual revolutionists.
It's a safe bet American society will grow used to the idea of yoga pants. In 50 years, there's a good chance they'll even seem tame. Nonetheless, this controversy has presently brought out the worst in a few of its antagonists.
Some complain that the pants are being worn by women not only for comfort, but to cheaply catch the eye of the modest, vulnerable men they encounter. But since dressing to attract the opposite sex is not against any law, given certain body parts are covered, it might be time to put those patriarchal views to rest.
He even goes on to essentially gloss his way through body shaming, making the obvious point that nobody is forcing anyone else to look, and the sympathetic can, if they choose, try to read a nod and wink into this:
The only time "nobody" wants to know about her underwear in any consistent fashion is among those who go out of their way to criticize women they consider too large, because Spandex, according to the vernacular, is a privilege and not a right.
More likely, he's just glossing through because body shame and fashion are a minefield, and such gaffes have a way of blowing up in really nasty ways. That is, if one can reduce the risk of wrecking the point, it would seem wise to do so; to the other, Antoshak is also pushing a very important point:
But really, considering the national debt clock is set to hit $20 trillion in the not-so-distant future, yoga pants may be among the least of our problems.
In a time where Dennis Rodman is the United States' best chance at avoiding a North Korean nuclear attack, reassessment of priorities seems to be in order.
In the end, why is the question important? Marching in the rain in white pants could be
entirely distracting to middle school boys, yet we managed to get through the parades well enough. And in those circumstances, the fact that we could see wasn't really problematic; the real question is just how big a deal we should make of it, or, more specifically within that range,
why.
____________________
Notes:
Hughes, Kelsey and Joe Antoshak. "FACEOFF: The Yoga Pants-Leggings Debate". The Diamondback. 27 March 2013. DiamondbackOnline.com. 5 January 2016. http://bit.ly/1mxJDL3
