Over the past 20-odd years, women’s lives have improved in countless ways. We’ve elected more female politicians and world leaders than ever before. We’ve seen our wages rise steadily. And by God, we got yoga pants.
I sometimes wonder why we don’t throw yoga pants parades every day, to celebrate the miraculous stretchy garment that freed women once and for all from the constant struggle of having to choose between comfort (aka thoroughly unpresentable sweatpants) and style. If your ancestors who squeezed into corsets could see you now!
But no, it turns out it took someone threatening women’s right to wear yoga pants for the spandex throngs to come out in full force, prompting the world’s very first recorded yoga pants parade this weekend in Rhode Island.
This all started last week, when a man wrote in to the state’s Barrington Times to complain about women wearing yoga pants. “[T]here is something bizarre and disturbing about the appearance they make in public,” Alan Sorrentino wrote, especially for those “coping poorly with their weight or advancing age.” As a cultural observer, Sorrentino is late to the party, calling the “recent development” of yoga pants outside yoga studios “[t]he absolute worst thing to ever happen in women fashion” [sic]. Uh, Alan, this isn’t exactly a recent development—“athleisure” has been around for several years, and in case you haven’t heard, yoga pants and adult coloring books are pretty much propping up the American economy at this point. Sorrentino claims to have seen these infernal things worn at “weddings, funerals, shopping, and even for the workplace,” a statement whose accuracy I question just because there is little chance this rule-crazy, pants-banning man has ever attended an invitation-only social function.
Sorrentino did not state whether he had any objection to bloomers, the 19th-century trousers women wore in order to participate in the then-nascent bicycling craze. But I wouldn’t put it past him. Because Sorrentino’s issue was purely visual: Yoga pants do not look good on women over 20 years old, and Sorrentino believes he should not have to look at anything that doesn’t please his discerning senses. Seems to me that it would be equally logical to ask Sorrentino to look away, start wearing a paper bag on his head, or otherwise avert his eyes, but in his letter he suggests that women “grow up and stop wearing them in public.”
The letter was received poorly among the yoga pants–loving population of Barrington, the most ambitious of whom decided to organize a demonstration of yoga pants wearing right past Sorrentino’s house, to speak out against “[m]isogyny and the history of men policing women’s bodies.” Yes, yoga pants are awesome, but this is also about more than yoga pants. (In response, Sorrentino apparently hung a banner that read “free speech” outside.) Around 400 people participated in Sunday’s protest, many of them wearing leggings, thus bringing together the technically separate categories of yoga pants wearers and leggings wearers under the inclusive banner of comfy-pants solidarity.
I feel a little bad for Sorrentino, who admitted in his letter that he “struggle[s] with my own physicality as I age.” If only there was a garment out there that made him feel both fashionable and endlessly comfortable that he wouldn’t feel weird about wearing. Maybe that was part of the real problem here—the choice to wear yoga pants is one of the few freedoms women have that men don’t. And thankfully, it’s a freedom that can be exercised whether you’re breaking a sweat or engaging in a peaceful protest past some hater’s house.
