Dear Reader, I’m sure you’ve encountered at some point one or both of the following:
*Someone wearing a pair of tights and a longish shirt apparently thinking that said tights suffice as lower body covering.
*Someone remarking, commenting, tweeting that “tights aren’t pants!” (I think I’ve sent such a tweet myself in the past.)
I had occasion to mull this extremely first-world conflict last week, and as it’s been on my mind since then, I decided to take to the blog.
I follow a few nice ladies on Twitter who live in Australia, and often I see them all talking about something that is an apparent mystery to me, but which was obviously a recent topic in Australian media. Last week, I noticed that, all on the same evening, several of them twittered things like, “I will wear what I fucking please! #tightsaspants” I take it, though I do not know for sure, that some Australian lady-commentator made derogatory comments about people who wear tights as pants, prompting some general outrage and frustration.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a proud fat lady, and as such I feel a fair amount of feminist outrage at the way fat women’s bodies are policed and, to a lesser degree, the way our fashion choices are circumscribed, either literally because of a lack of shopping options or metaphorically because of the general shaming and nagging society inflicts when fat women don’t dress according to the mystical “what fat people are supposed to wear” rules (“slimming cuts” – whatever the fuck that means, a lot of black, no loud or clashing patterns, etc.). I’m not much of a clothes horse – it just doesn’t interest me, and I doubt it much would even if I were thin and rich and had all the clothing options in the world – but many fat activists use fashion – or, “fatshion” – as a tool of not only self-expression but of resistance: resistance to a dominant cultural narrative that demands of fat people, and fat women especially, that they not take up too much space, literally, and figuratively by standing out, by refusing to be cowed by consensus opinion that our bodies are not “right,” not attractive, grotesque, offensive, and shameful. (Marianne Kirby has an excellent recent blog post on this subject on her website, www.therotund.com, that started me thinking about this.) This, I think, is part of a larger patriarchal culture that tries to demand acquiescence by women to the idea that they are primarily valuable only as sexual objects for men, and as such must remain constantly available and constantly “attractive” as the dominant culture conceives of the term. By not being “attractive” in this way, fat women advertantly or inadvertantly defy this patriarchal command – as do women who are queer – and so we are punished for it by harassment, shaming, policing, and stigma. (Straight women who meet the standard of what is “attractive” and yet who are loud, uppity, and reject the notion that their value is situated in their sexual availability are also punished, if sometimes in different ways.)
The point is that it is a form of radical resistance to a hostile, oppressive culture when women, fat or not, do not do as they are told and do not follow the script of what is “acceptable”.
When resistance is couched in fashion, there is normally a predictable backlash: the offending women are shamed in one or both of two ways. They are either slut shamed or body shamed. In the case of the former, they are told that the way they dress makes them look whorish, and if they are assaulted, they were asking for it (this victim blaming is part of a rape culture that terrorizes women and demeans men, but let’s leave that for another day). The latter preys on the anxieties inculcated by a predatory capitalism and the patriarchy about the “necessity” of being always attractive, and manifests, usually, as an attack on the woman’s body shape and weight: “You’re too fat to wear ______.” Consider the narrative around skinny jeans, for instance, and then check out this post from Natalie Perkins over at www.definatalie.com for an excellent example of resistance – shaming – and, happily, another round of resistance.
So in summation, those Australian feminists were wrankled because in general, attempts to control things like women choosing to wear tights as pants are actually merely attempts to control women, through slut shaming and body shaming; to corral them back into the role of sexual object, available to men for consumption because they are behaving as the patriarchy desires, working to appear as the patriarchy desires, and also because they are literally available – willing participants in the system of sexual objectification. And fuck a bunch of that, obviously.
And yet.
I cannot shake the fact that I think wearing tights as pants is tacky. Not because it makes women look slutty, because 1) it doesn’t, necessarily, and 2) I have no problem with women looking slutty if they want to as a means of expressing their own healthy sexuality. Also, since there’s noting wrong with being a (responsible) slut if one desires, there should also be nothing wrong with being slutty. Not because some women might not “have the body for it”: I, for one, am fat as hell, and NO ONE has the right to come at me like that’s a problem, because it’s not, no matter what I do or do not have on my fat body. Just … hmm. I just don’t like it. I feel about it the way I feel about young men who wear their pants belted below their ass, so that their underwear-clad ass is exposed, purposefully, for all the world to see. I want to go up to those young men and ask them, snarkily, “Do you not understand what pants are for? Or do you just not understand how to get them to work?” I want to go up to young women wearing nothing but tights and a shirt and say the same thing. This drive is basic, comes from deep down, and is in spite of everything I know about the policing of women as discussed above.
But then I feel guilty about this – after all, what right do I have to join in the shaming chorus? None, of course, even if my motivations aren’t as evil as others’.
So I guess what I’m left with is this: I support the right of every women everywhere, regardless of body shape or size, age, or anything else, to wear tights as pants. But I don’t endorse the practice, ’cause I hate it.
Thus ends another round of “Is Sabrina a bad feminist?”
I feel like these are two different discussions that have become conflated due to a misunderstanding of context. Logically so, because these are two discussions that often become conflated, that is, fashion and body type.
Of course, many instances of fashion discussion in our culture do surround body type. Women’s magazines, talk shows, make-over shows, etc. are constantly talking about ways that fashion can hide or highlight various bodily features that may be deemed positive or negative by culture. Play up those big boobs, play down those big hips, etc.
On the other hand, there is also a much more body-neutral and entirely arbitrary fashion discussion which is simply: What’s in? Clothing fashion, just like home decor, or even culinary taste, is an aspect of our culture that is a completely arbitrary aesthetic that simply changes over time. We all have our opinions on what “looks good,” on what is fashionable or not fashionable. We can look at a picture of a woman in the 80’s who would be deemed to have a so-called “perfect” body type by the majority of Americans and STILL say that her outfit is silly because we don’t deem it fashionable anymore.
I think that, depending on context, the tights as pants argument could fall into that category.
Now, if the context of a “tights as pants are bad” comment is something to the effect of: “Check out that lady… she’s way too fat to wear tights as pants,” then, yes, the lady has every right to come back and say that she can dress her own body in a way she deems fit, and if anyone finds her garb inappropriate for her size, then they can go suck eggs.
On the other hand, if the context is, “Wearing tights as pants looks so silly, nobody in their right mind should wear it!” and the commenter would have made this comment equally to the world’s most popular supermodel as to the world’s most ordinary plump girl, then we have an issue of fashion commentary rather than body commentary. It’s an opinion about what’s fashionable, rather than what is appropriate for a particular body type.
Besides that, we also have cultural notions regarding what types of clothing are appropriate for public wear, and these notions generally tend to change much more slowly than the simple tides of “what’s in, what’s out?” Would some clothes we find perfectly acceptable for casual (or even some professional) wear today be considered inappropriately revealing in a Renaissance court? Of course! But would some clothes we find perfectly acceptable today be considered inappropriately revealing in the same context (i.e. work, club, party, restaurant, etc.) back in the 80’s? Standards of what constitutes “half naked” probably haven’t changed much since then.
We all have cultural notions about what’s okay to wear in public and what’s okay to wear in private, and furthermore what’s okay in front of family and what’s okay in front of lovers, etc. These are arbitrary cultural conceptions, of course, but these conceptions exist. It may be okay to hang out at home with your family or friends in pajamas, but if you show up to work wearing them, it would be considered unprofessional. I might hang out at home in a sports bra, pj shorts and with rollers in my hair, and probably a lover or friend or my mom wouldn’t object to hanging out with me in similar circumstances, but stepping outside like that? I open myself up to ridicule by my fellow man. Think about the famous Seinfeld episode where the woman walks down the street wearing a bra under her open blazer.
The “bra” is considered by our culture to be a garment that’s supposed to be hidden. Think about this… I could walk down the street on a hot summer day wearing shorts and a bikini top without causing a stir (maybe a few cat calls from skeezy guys). Why couldn’t I walk down the same street on the same day with the same outfit, but substituting a perfectly opaque bra for the bikini top? Because we have a culture conception saying that a bikini top in public is okay, but a bra in public is not.
I think it’s the same thing for tights. In our culture, tights are meant to be worn under a dress or a skirt. Even if a shirt is as long as a dress or skirt, something in our cultural rubric tells us that it’s wrong to wear tights instead of pants because it’s too revealing. It’s the same as the bra vs. the bikini top. The shirt that’s as long as a dress vs. an actual dress… why are tights considered inappropriate under one but not the other? One fits our cultural rubric of public v. private, one does not.
First: “Go suck eggs.” Lulz.
Second: It occurs to me that I think I have some engrained modesty that is also part of my objection to tights as pants. When you mentioned wearing a bikini top in public as acceptable, I felt myself recoil a bit – I always feel bikinis are much too revealing, again, regardless of the wearer’s body shape. I actually sort of feel the same way about men walking around shirtless: unless it’s at the actual pool or beach, it makes me feel squicky. I really like to think that this is not an example of sexual prudery — Sarah, at least, knows that I’m certainly not hung up about sex, and I’m happy to be open about it in general. I just have a negative gut reaction to seeing strangers naked casually: outside of swimming and/or sexy settings (and frankly, I don’t mind guys swimming in t-shirts at all, and sort of prefer one-pieces for ladies), I just tend to think that men and women should leave a little something to the imagination, including their upper thighs, not quite concealed by not-quite opaque tights. Usually this attitude IS born of sexual prudery, so I’m not sure where my objections come from, but there they are. A little modesty is good for the soul.
I personally think that it is supremely sexist for our laws to allow men to walk around shirtless, but not women. I’m not saying I want to walk around shirtless by any means, but if women should have to cover their nipples and the immediate area in public or risk arrest, men should too.
I like two piece swim suits, myself, because I find one piece suits uncomfortable. Most one piece suits have a tendency to pull somewhere, be it at the crotch or the shoulders. That, and having to take the whole suit down upon visiting the lady’s room. Luckily, the modern innovation of the tank-ini gives women the option of modesty in a two piece.
A few of the states and assorted cities have legalized going topless for both sexes. There have been a few cases where courts have ruled on equal protection for nipples under the law; the results have gone both ways. Interestingly, men could not go shirtless in most places until the 30s. Personally, I believe everyone should be allowed to be topless in public. Well except for Dick Cheney.