Women wearing appropriate clothes to gym not asking for men’s opinions

Prior to last Saturday, I was the blissful sort of person who could say “who is that, again?” when I heard the name Shane Gillis.

Now, I know him as the comedian who said “women just dress like whores now” at the gym during his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live — a show that fired him in 2019, by the way, for being racist and homophobic on a podcast yet continues to invite him back as a host for some reason.

Gillis also likened women’s short shorts (the kind one might wear to lift weights, say) to neon fishing lures.

“And don’t look. You’re not allowed to look. For real, don’t look, because they are filming,” he said.

…lol?

The backlash was swift. People wondered how this joke could be green-lit in our current climate, with the Cornell 7 — the group accused of a 2024 gang rape at a frat house at the American university — making headlines.

But policing women’s bodies — and what we put on them or don’t — helps build the very culture in which women are objectified and harmed. And jokes like this one are not divorced from that culture. They uphold it.

Some men tell us we “dress like whores” when they can see too much of our bodies at the gym, wearing shorts and sports bras and other entirely appropriate-for-the-activity attire.

Other men, such as Daily Mail columnist Simon Mills, admonish us for “repelling men” with our barrel jeans and other silhouettes we might experiment with when we’re liberated from the tyranny of “flattering” and start dressing for personal expression.

These kinds of men assume we only dress for them and never for us. That their gaze is the only gaze, centred and fixed, like crosshairs.

Of course, there are other kinds of men. The kind of men who belong to disgusting group chats, the kind of men who treat us like objects, the kind of men who believe our bodies are theirs for the taking — they don’t care much about what we’re wearing. Ask any woman who has ever been harassed on the street while wearing a full-length parka or sexually assaulted while wearing sweatpants.

Other people care a lot, though. When the worst things happen to us, we get asked about what we were wearing at the time. A prom dress. A school uniform. Scrubs. Pyjamas.

Girls are taught to hide their bodies. The yoga pants and spaghetti-top tank tops are called “inappropriate” in school dress codes, but deep down, we know they are saying our bodies are inappropriate. Our bodies are too “distracting” to the boys and men who call our bright-coloured shorts lures.

I am going to be very generous and suspect that Gillis’s punchline was supposed to be about him being a creep in the background of people’s TikToks. But the “whore” setup frames being a creep as something that cannot be helped. The women dressed like whores at the gym are asking for it!

What do we say men who wear shorts to the gym are dressed like? Oh, that’s right. They just get to be men wearing shorts.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com