Okay so this is an awesome article that I completely resonate with: http://feminspire.com/how-accepting-leggings-as-pants-made-me-a-better-feminist/
I found this article a couple of months ago and completely felt like it "got me". For years from early high school through my sophomore year of college, I judged anywhere who had the audacity to wear leggings as pants. I thought they were downright trashy. The completely exposed everything on a woman's lower half. I assumed that any woman who wore leggings was an attention seeking slut. My friends and I used to snicker behind people's back as they walked down the hallway. However, if someone was wearing the most outrageous oversized sweater or brightly striped pants, I was all for their freedom to wear whatever they wanted. I would staunchly defend them against people looking to tease them. I had an incredibly shallow understanding of feminism. I thought that feminism meant dressing modestly or in the most desexualized manner possible. If you dressed in provocative clothing, it meant that you craved the attention of men and thus were clearly not for the cause. It did not hit me that women might just want to dress in tight or promiscuous clothing for themselves.
I am glad that I have outgrown that phase of my life. Feminism has become for me about women have the right to choose what they do. They should have the right to choose if they want to be the CEO of a company or raise children. They should have the right to choose what they do with their bodies. And women should most certainly have the right to choose if they want to wear leggings or not. And if they do choose to wearing leggings, it shouldn't mean that they are trying to attract men or that they are slutty. So now, I am pro-legging choice!
This is perfect! At the high school I went to, girls had the same problem that you had, except it was with yoga pants. You see, we had a dress code where you could only wear maroon, navy, white, and grey polos, sweaters, or hoodies (no jackets). For pants, you could only wear khaki pants, navy pants, or black pants. Basically no jeans. A bunch of us girls fought for comfort by wearing black yoga pants. A ton of girls got very stingy about it, saying that yoga pants were how girls got attention by wearing tighter fitting clothes with such a strict dress code enforced! I, however, just wanted to be comfortable. It became that girl-on-girl hate that Mean Girls is all about. Feminism is all about letting women have the choice to dress in whatever clothing they want to wear! Sure, you may have your own personal feeling towards leggings as pants, there is nothing wrong with that. It is when you try to force your fashion critique upon someone else that you lose that sense of feminism. I am happy you are now pro-legging choice :D
ReplyDeleteAs a women who works and attend school I notice that a lot of the female population at SLU wear leggings or yoga pants and for me I always think about how cold it is and how can they stand it. I wear leggings myself on occasion but never in a professional setting. I like to wear them in a comfortable environment and really enjoy them for that female time of the month, it keeps things close, providing support. Hope that's not too personal. Only negative thing about them I can think of is that it may allow a person to not think about the amount of weight they are gaining because its easy to go from a large to an extra large without thinking about the pounds one has put on in that time span which could lead to health issues. Where if one goes from a size 10 to 14 in a two month time span I think the awareness is more noticeable and action is sooner to be taken then later. Yet I'm not saying that pants should be an indicators for gauging ones size.
ReplyDeleteIt always strikes me that there is a fine line between promoting women's ability to choose how they want to look, and critically analyzing why certain appearances are preferences over others. A good example of this is breast implants. One could argue that feminism should promote women's ability to alter their bodies however they want, but at the same time, they must realize that the purpose of breast implants in almost all cases is to appeal to the hyper-sexualized view of women in contemporary culture. With the leggings debate, there are many more reasons, such as comfort, why a woman would want to wear them that are not solely to appease men, but it is important to always make sure that the reasons behind seemingly harmless actions are not in fact perpetuating patriarchy.
ReplyDeleteI think that this idea raises an interesting point on how a women presents herself and how that relates to feminism. For example, this opens up the floor for questions like "Can you be a feminist if you wear revealing clothes for the purpose of attracting sexual attention?" What about make-up? Where do we draw the lines for things like this? I ask you because it is still something that I struggle with as a feminist.
Deletecoming from me, a person who wears leggings and yoga pants on the regular, i would never wear them in a formal situation unless it was leggings with a nice sweater that was longer than a normal shirt. I think that these types of pants are completely appropriate for causal situations and relaxing but as for your professional life, I think the look is to casual which makes it inappropriate
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