In Which I Am Torn About #TightsAsPants

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?”

Pants. Grr.

Today I would like to rant about pants.

To begin: I am fat. Not plump, not curvy, straight up fucking fat. And this is perfectly fine. I have tried to be not fat in the past, but the only way to achieve that was starving myself, which sucks, and doesn’t work in the long term, anyway. In fact, FYI, everybody, diets don’t work. That link leads to one particular study that proves it, as though everyone in the universe’s experience didn’t already, but there have been numerous studies to that effect. The fact that you still see millions of people and products claiming that diets work is because 1) the foundation of capitalism is lying for money, and 2) people are taught to be so ashamed and frightened of being fat that they lose the power of reason when the subject of fat and dieting comes up.

Look, this is a big topic, one I’m not the first to remark upon – there’s the entire fatosphere out there, after all – and I’m sure I’ll bring it up here again. The point for the purposes of my pants rant is: I am fat. I am fine with this. Pointing out that I am fat is like pointing out that I am tall or that my hair is long or that I am, in the words of a dermatologist I saw last year, “unusually mole-less”: it’s just another descriptor, and no matter how badly other people in the world would like to attach a value judgment to that descriptor, they don’t get to, because my body is my property, and my value judgments are my own and not subject to the bullshit spewed out into the world by dudebro trolls on comment boards or companies selling diets that don’t work.

However, there are downsides to being fat, and one of those is one that all marginalized people have in common: the world is not made for us. In this case, specifically, pants are not made for us.

Oh, sure you can buy plus-size pants, and I do, specifically jeans. But look, for one, they are expensive: you cannot get a good pair of fat jeans for less than $40. For two, they are seldom sold in “long” sizes, which I need: I’m looking at you, L.L. Bean and Lands’ End. For three, they are comprised of this very stretchy denim, such that after one day of wearing, the shape of the pants is nothing like what it was when you first put them on. This leads me to a secondary rant: WHY ARE WOMEN’S JEANS, OF ALL SIZES, MADE OF HALF SPANDEX? I do not want leggings, I want jeans. Blue jean denim cowboy motherfucking jeans. NO STRETCHINESS AT ALL. Stretchiness does not help the pants to “fit my curves”: I barely have curves. I am a big fat tube. Also, it fucks hardcore with the sizing – the jeans have completely different measurements at the end of the day than they did at the beginning because of all the stretching out with wear. WHY CAN’T I JUST GET STRAIGHT UP DENIM JEANS?

Yes, you should have read that as though it contained a lot of yelling.

Let me get to the actual incident that drove me to this ranty blog. I ordered three pairs of jeans online: one from Old Navy, one from Levi’s, and one from Lane Bryant. All were at least $40, plus shipping. All had size charts, purporting to offer measurements for each size. I took my measurements and ordered appropriately. One pair was a size 26, two were size 24s. I don’t care about the number of the size, or vanity sizing – manufacturers can call the pants Size Dainty if that’s what it takes to make some people feel better about themselves. But I expect that if you provide a measurement guide, and I take my measurements accurately, your pants should fit.

Well. The Levi’s were a billion times too big in all ways. I clearly needed a size 22, if not a 20. The Old Navy pair was a nightmare in general: the rise was enormous, as though they expected me to be carrying a low-slung fanny pack in my underwear. The waist was too large, and the material was questionable. The Lane Bryant’s seemed to fit well enough, although the waist came up OVER MY NAVEL. The waistband of these pants was designed for Urkel.

I ended up keeping the Lane Bryant pair, basically because they fit (or so it seemed) least worst, and I was in desperate need of jeans, having been reduced to only two pairs after the crotch tore out of a third old pair. Old Navy provides free return shipping on plus-size items – this seems nice until you realize that they do this only because they discontinued plus-size items in their stores, so, natch, you can’t just be fat and go to an Old Navy and try the damn pants on and save yourself the hassle. I presume they didn’t want to taint their brand by having their stores full of fatties – fuck you, Old Navy. Levi’s I had to pay to ship back. (And, of course, I had to pay to have all of these things shipped to me, except for one pair I found a “free shipping” coupon for, so in total it cost $18 to try on three pairs of pants and decide to buy one. This is not something thin people ever have to do.)

As to the pair I kept: I knew the waist was ridiculously, unsexily high, but whatever – I don’t tuck things in, generally, and I need pants. The legs I liked: they were straight leg, as opposed to bootcut or flares, but not skinny jeans, which I’ve found to constrain the calf unpleasantly. I took the tags off, washed them to get rid of that plastic shipping smell, and put them on.

By the end of the day they were much to big. Like, falling down (off my diaphragm, ahem). BECAUSE OF THE DAMN STRETCHINESS. So now, to wear these pants I will have to belt them around my goddamn chest, try to shrink them in the wash, or maybe bribe Sarah into taking them in, if that is even possible.

This single pair of poorly fitting pants cost me almost $60, including the price of the jeans I kept, shipping and return shipping for all three pairs, and that was minus the shipping coupon and another, second coupon I found online. Without coupons I would have been close to spending $80 on one pair of very poorly fitting jeans.

Look, what bothers me is this: I am a human being, with (a little bit of) money to spend. I don’t deserve to spend twice what thin people spend, and at three times the inconvenience, on pants. And I realize that shopping can be tough for everyone, even thin people – clothing in a reasonable price range is rarely cut to fit people who are very tall or very short or very curvy or what have you. But we fats have far fewer options, and it’s just unreasonable that I can’t pay money for clothing I like that fits reasonably well. I thought that was the whole goddamn point of the American economy. And it further bothers me that I’m pretty sure it’s not that the reason I have so few options isn’t a dearth of demand – there are lots of fat folk out there. I’m pretty sure brands don’t make plus sizes because they, like Old Navy, don’t want to “taint their brand” by having it be worn by and seen on fat women. Old Navy pushes us into the ghetto of online shopping to make sure we’re never seen in their stores; other companies just push us out entirely, so that we’ll never be seen in their clothing, period. As an illustration: American Apparel sells plus-size menswear but not plus-size womenswear. Because there’s nothing, according to a particular prevalent bias and stigma, as unhip and unsexy as a fat woman.

That’s bullshit.

I have heard of a number of fats who have just given up on jeans altogether: they wear skirts, and tights when it’s cold. I wish I was femme enough for that, but it’s just not really my style. I suppose I could learn to sew (though see my “Mary Fucking Poppins” post for some thoughts on that), but I’m not sure that even if I could learn to sew, I could manage to make jeans. I’m also considering trying men’s pants, though given the different shapes of men’s and women’s bodies generally, I’m not sure how that will go. Maybe I just will have to learn to de-femme skirts, somehow.

The point is … well, actually, after 1500 words, the point is fuck this shit. Good day to you.