The Skin-Tight Leggings Debate Continues

Maryann White has been having a moment of notoriety. For having had the raw temerity to question whether women should wear skin-tight leggings to church, she has been attacked and assaulted by the feminist furies.

You know which furies I am talking about. The ones who rant and rave to no special purpose. The ones who are so right that they need not offer any cogent arguments. The ones who blame it all on men and assume that women can do anything they please and that no one is allowed to react. And the ones who pretend like Monica Hesse of the Washington Post to be offering rational thought and whose column contains none whatever.

At a time when feminists tell us that they want to be treated with respect, the notion that they might be treated with more respect if they wear less revealing clothes seems not to have crossed their mini-minds. Even when they cap off their mini-minds with pussy hats. At a time when women want to be respected for their minds, a distinguished columnist does not even pretend to have one.

You see, the problem is men. It is nothing but men. Since Hesse does not feel compelled to stare at lady’s rear ends she assumes that men do not either. Either she is not very bright, as we suspect, or she missed the biology class where they explained the differences between male and female biology.

The feministically correct attitude is clear: outrage, anger, yelling and screaming, emotional incontinence… anything but rational thought. Because women have a right to wear whatever they want and no one is allowed to react.

Incidentally, among those who are not allowed to react is Maryann White. Because White understood, as Hesse did not, that when large numbers of women strut their stuff in revealing garb, it reflects on all women. And makes it appear that all women are more available than they really are. But, then again, who am I to judge.

That is, it reflects on all women when female thought leaders offer full throated praise for those women whose leggings were painted on and full throated condemnation for any woman who would dare call them out on it.

Here is what Hesse considers to be consequential thought:

Within hours of the [Maryann White] letter spreading, the earth was already scorched. Demonstrations had already been organized where participants were invited to come in leggings. People were already infuriated by the implication that women were temptresses and men were helpless walking hormones. The public was already having the correct emotional response.

“My column would be four words,” I joked with a colleague. “Yep, she’s the worst.”

Women who walk around half naked are surely trying to tempt someone. Perhaps they are so insecure that they fear not been noticed. Naturally, Hesse saves her contempt for men, those “helpless walking hormones,” without noticing that instinct is what it is and that she knows nothing about it. And without seeing that those “helpless” men might also take certain liberties with women who dress like skanks. Didn’t the #MeToo movement suggest that these men are not quite as helpless as feminists would like them to be?

Next, Hesse pretends that she wants to address the core of the White argument. Thus, she wants to show off her capacious intellect:

Characters like Maryann White come along, and they’re so easy to hate. Swimming through the news cycle today is exhausting when done carefully — and the Maryann Whites of the world are convenient life buoys. She doesn’t require thoughtfulness; she requires only rage. Uncomplicated rage can feel like such a respite, a comfortable thing to cling to. But I don’t know if doing so solves any problems.

It doesn’t address the core of her argument: that her sons will respect women only if they realize they are “someone’s wives and daughters.” The implication is that women aren’t independent humans, but rather appendages of their male relatives.

Hesse would do better not to pretend to think. When a man sees a woman as someone’s wife or daughter he is not thinking that she is an appendage. Who ever thought up that idiot notion? It says that she belongs to a family unit, that she is a social being who is connected to other social beings.

White notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is, in the old days, when women were considered to be someone’s wives or daughters or even mothers, they were considered to be protected by stronger male beings. A woman protected is a woman less vulnerable.

If five decades of feminism has seen a ramp up of sexual abuse the reason is that women are now considered to be independent, that is, alone and isolated and vulnerable and weak. How did the great feminist minds miss the obvious point?

Naturally, Hesse does not understand anything about men. She does not understand that the male mind is hard wired to notice females who display their naked derrieres. She thinks it’s possible not to notice because she does not take much notice. But she is showing that she does not understand anything about men or about the biology of sexual difference.

It’s possible to notice someone’s “naked rear ends” — as White described women in leggings — and not have that turn into a creepy leer. It’s possible to do the very hard work of questioning your own behavior instead of taking the easy way out and asking other people to change their clothes.

So, Hesse closes her mindless rant—which she insists is not a mindless rant—by blaming Mrs. White for the “bad patterns” that are entrenched in her. What bad patterns would those be: encouraging women to respect themselves, encouraging women not to give it away for free, caring about women’s reputations:

Here’s what I wondered, scrolling through the profiles. Is there a conversation we could be having that would not just mock Maryann White, but would make others who think like her really consider what it meant to ask women not to wear leggings?

Is there a conversation that would explain that the anger is not really about your letter, Mrs. White. It’s not about leggings. This anger is about bad patterns that are so entrenched that you, a woman yourself, are trying to address them in the only broken, feeble way you can imagine — by asking younger women to stop having visible butts.

So, according to Hesse, Mrs. White is “broken” and “feeble.” She addressed the issue in a broken and feeble way. For my part I find that Mrs. White, who is not a professional columnist, showed more intelligence than the Washington Post gender columnist. Broken and feeble describes the Hess column perfectly.