By David Futrelle
A quarter of a century ago, in his seminal The Myth of Male Power, Men’s Rights Activist Warren Farrell warned hapless, horny males of the danger of “miniskirt power” — that is, the hypnotizing power of shapely female asses, which devious women can apparently use to have their (financial) way with men who ostensibly have more power than them. Damn those conniving harpies and their short, short skirts!
Today, men — well, horny straight men anyway — face what some consider a far more insidious enemy: Yoga pants, the allegedly comfortable lower-half coverups popular with the devious, man-exploiting harpies of the current age.
Well, the brave souls of the Men Going Their Own Way movement are having none of it. Here is the MGTOW case against yoga pants, based on my perusal of several dozen recent postings on the subject in the MGTOW subreddit.
Make sure not to laugh at any of these, as the threat of yoga pants is very, very serious and not just some ridiculous crap these guys have come up with to make themselves feel like they’re being oppressed by women who won’t date them they REFUSE to date.
Yoga pants are so tight it’s like these sluts are walking around naked and basically it’s sexual harassment because biology makes men perpetually horny.
“Wearing yoga pants to work is sexual harassment,” Baldrbaldr complains.
And the bullshit about “men just needing to control themselves?” Well, it’s bullshit. Men can’t but become seriously distracted when half-naked women prance around them. It’s the way we’re made. It’s biology. So fuck off, you bare assed bitches. We’re working.
“Females are an expensive, unknown distraction,” adds fcb98292, sounding a little bit like Jordan Peterson. “I require segregated offices.”
Actually they make women look better than they look naked, which is somehow worse than looking like they’re naked because it’s a LIE or something.
“You don’t know what they look like naked,” greenleefs informs his fellow MGTOWs. “Those pants lift and squish together.”
Yoga pants enable women to use their ass power to extract wealth from hardworking betas and sex from Chads.
As one [deleted] commenter sees it:
The yoga pants is to show off their ass so that Chad and beta bucks (depending on which they are stalking) will drool on himself while he throws sex and cash at her.
Yoga pants are basically HiDef streaming porn videos.
Raisins3142 explains:
I think in part they are trying to compete with high speed internet + free internet porn.
Sometimes fat ladies wear them and, ew, gross.
As ilikerelish puts it:
There should be limits to where they are worn, and there should be a WEIGHT LIMIT for wearing yoga or legging pants.
Bing_Bang_Bam is similarly outraged that “[e]ven fat cows that have rolls and folds that shouldn’t even be there” wear yoga pants — a true “[c]rime against nature.”
Sometimes skinny old ladies wear them and you’re tricked into thinking that they look hot and this is very confusing
Hegend1999 laments those times “[w]hen you see a good ass in leggings and she turns around then you see that she’s like 70yo…”
Iqbal40862715 is similarly confused that he finds himself attracted to very much older women.
Yoga pants are a net nagative. They make everyone look good and it’s a total mind fuck.
Saw this 80 year old broad in a bathing suit the other day at a pool. She was probably an Elvis groupie in the 50s/legit perfect 10. Now she is cute and in good shape but wrinkly and old.
Goes into a bathroom to change Puts on yoga pants meets up with the grandkids and sure enough looks awesome.
Apparently women in yoga pants can jump right over that mythical wall they’re all supposed to hit at the age of 30 or so.
They’re not actually comfortable
“They aren’t comfortable,” asserts LJHova, “that’s just the excuse they use to convince themselves they aren’t whores.”
.They smell like ass (probably).
“I call them stink butts,” SirLonius explains.
You know women wear them multiple times before washing them and just a thin layer between butthole and the outside world.
They enable women to easily engage in casual workplace frottage with hunky dudes
According to Jcart105,
It’s comfy when Chad grinds his cock separated by the [layer] of his pants and thin layer of her yoga pants in the middle of work.
Er, what?
Seeing women in yoga pants is sort of like seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or something.
Global_MGTOW sheds some tears in the rain:
I’ve seen it all already. I’ve seen women wearing a see through shirt in a very public place with thousands of people, including children, showing off her rocket tits implants. I’ve seen girls wearing mini skirts so small that you can constantly see their panties with zero effort. Seen obese landwhales wearing yoga pants with the words “JUICY” written across the back.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Ok, I added that bit from Blade Runner at the end. Because, you know, these guys aren’t melodramatic enough already — and trying way too hard to convince themselves and each other of the existential horror of, basically, tight sweatpants.
Seriously, dudes? Seriously?
Seriously, broseph?
Nope. Because she has 10 years experience she already knows a shit ton more about branching dialogs than him, a non-developer. Not because he’s a man. She decided his attempt to inform her of a technique she’s intimately familiar with was condescending and rude.
A resource for you, to help you understand what mansplaining is (hint: it’s very much this):
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/10/what-is-mansplaining/
j:
Except that isn’t what happened. Her AMA was over, and she realised she hadn’t got to a point she wanted to, about how difficult it is to write an interesting main character in an MMO in a twitter thread. She referenced the AMA, but she did not say “Continuing it here on twitter! Twitter AMA! Let’s do this shit!!!!”
A man then came in and told her how to solve this problem.
So, say I’m a brain surgeon. I’ve been working professionally for ten years. I’m all “Oh, it’s hard to get to this little niggly bit in the brain, because of X and Y.”
Then some asshat rando dude just pokes his head in, and goes “you could just cut until you get to it.”
This isn’t a question, like “have you tried?”, or “has this been tried? Why didn’t it solve the problem?”
Someone with 10 years of experience in a specific field will have gone through ALL THESE SIMPLE SOLUTIONS in their time in that field. In their training. In their practise. Shootin’ the shit with colleagues. The surface level knowledge of someone will not be a breakthrough.
It’s like if you’ve lost your keys, and someone helpfully says “have you looked here?” And you’re like “YES THAT IS THE FIRST PLACE I LOOKED” because you are frustrated.
Also, catagorising the man being an asshat as (ew) means that she objected specifically because she thought he was gross? That wasn’t it at all. She was fed up because this happens all. The. Time.
She did an AMA and then later, on her personal twitter account did some follow up.
A man(ew)? That’s some passive aggressive bullshit right there. It’s already been explained why just because a man uses polite language to talk down to a woman, doesn’t mean he’s actually being polite or civil.
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view7/3106917/missjay-o.gif
No. She decided that an explanation of something really basic that she already knew was of zero value.
Oh, were the women and LGBT folk saying they were #notyourshield?
Whenever an internet mob goes after a woman, especially if gaming is involved, you’d better check and make sure anyone in the mob who claims not to be a cishet man isn’t a sock. Because this is a common thing that angry dudebros do so that they can pretend misogyny is not what motivates the mob. Gamergaters did this quite openly as was covered by this very blog.
@j,
I want to pull one thing you said out and look at it a bit more closely here, if I might.
This is a two part statement. One is true, one is opinion. Where you slice between them is important – to you, and to the conversation in general.
She did decide that what he was saying wasn’t worth her time to listen to. That’s true. There’s evidence.
The part “She decided that since he was a man” – that’s an evaluation, made by you, to describe why she came to her observable conclusion. There are a dozen reasons why she might decide to rebuff him – I can think of plenty, and you can too I bet. But of those choices, the first to come to mind was “because he was a man.” (EDIT: If it isn’t clear, that conclusion is a sexist one that diminishes her agency as a person. It paints her as being unreasonable from the start, allowing you to dismiss her behaviour as invalid without further work.)
You might be feeling put upon or attacked here – don’t! We all have this sort of internalized misogyny. Society’s soaking in it. It’s no shame to admit that it’s in you, too. It’s in all of us. Shame comes from accepting it or wallowing in it, not in its existence.
Take this moment as an opportunity. Learn from it.
I’d be high-fiving her.
And lets be crystal clear here: people have been waiting to get something on her since she made this tweet:
https://twitter.com/jclaussftw/status/1015024100828274688?s=09
Which, if you have a problem with someone who was harmed by a person not mourning their passing, you really need to examine your empathy skills.
THIS!!!!!
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
It does make sense and I’ve been aware of this phenomenon for a while. Don’t wanna virtue signal but IRL I try to be cognizant of that sorta thing. “But you know more about this sorta thing.” Is definitely part of my lexicon. It’s just if I wanted to respectfully share my ideas with someone more experienced than me I would use words like “I believe” and “might” or “perhaps” and then ask for their thoughts on the matter. I kinda see that he totally didn’t do the last part
It was passive aggressive. I shouldn’t have been, sorry.
I thought that’s exactly what happened. I found her reaction to be hateful for a conversation that, I thought, she invited. I’ll concede that I was wrong on the whole thing.
Don’t know much about gamergate other than it got really nasty so I wouldn’t know how to even check that sorta thing.
Nobody has done anything wrong though.
Mourning a death is a deeply personal matter. No one should feel obligated to mourn. However, I find relishing in a death, even if done politely, to be ghoulish.
Every Friday at noon for an hour.
Lets see if I get that right:
We have a woman who is a pro in her field.
And someone who is not a pro thinks he has to correct her on basic stuff (I am far from a programer, but branching dialog is somethink that is so basic that eben I know emediatly what it is).
So she got angry about it. That is understandable.
And then she got fired, because there was some complenment of it? Seriously?
From here that texts weren’t even remotly in that direction that a fiering should have been even remotly on the table.
Reminds me of the Gallosituation a few years back, at last Tor did only apologise.
And if someone doesn’t see that women seem to be a favorite target in those attacks, he should open his eyes and learn to read.
Actually the gamingstudio did send out 2 signals:
1. We are cowards that don’t care about our workers.
2. Women should search for a different place to work.
So, a woman gets fired for getting annoyed at a dude mansplaining her job to her and when a well informed woman comments on how terrible that was, you rush in with an opinion about how she totally deserved it even though you were neither informed about the whole situation or about the kind of mob harassment that women in the gaming industry get.
Do you not see the irony in that?
Maybe if a bunch of women are pointing to something as an example of yet another women in gaming getting harassed out of her job/the industry, you could try listening to those women right off the bat instead of assuming that they must be wrong and must just hate men?
No offense, but I think maybe people were giving you too much credit for the amazing discovery in the other thread that sometimes women are dateless in high school and feel bad about it. Apparently you still don’t see us as full humans with valuable perspectives and reliable narrators worth listening to. Which is again, ironic because you’re offended about a woman not wanting to listen a man’s perspective.
Actually, given that the president made a rape joke about a female senator and yet men on the internet today are angry about a woman telling a man she doesn’t value his opinion, it’d be quite justifiable for women to decide that we don’t value the opinions of any man ever. Men should be grateful we ever listen to or trust any of them.
@WWTH
Tangential to the topic, but it still amuses me:
About two weeks before my father died, he briefly woke up from a deep sleep and said, very solemnly:
“Yoga pants are why women have babies.”
Then he fell back to sleep and when he next woke had no memory of his sphinx-like pronouncement.
WWTH:
Women have the choice to whose advice the listen or not, should be indepent of the orange one or men on the internet.
Beeing listened to, except a few execpions is not a right, it is a gift.
Can I just add that this all comes down to her not being civil enough?
Kupo: And can I add that I find this reason extremly nonsense for loosing her job?
WWTH: <3
Re: gamergate – Well J, i'm sure you could type 'gamergate' into the search bar of this site, and you'll get a lot. It was a wild ride that still isn't over for some.
But, have some links. Here’s one about ‘notyourshield’, with a gamergate overview.
Here’s an article from 2014 about gamergate, on gawker.
Here’s the tag on the Guardian, there’ll be a bunch of stuff in there.
The fact that you could just ignore gamergate is an important thing. *shrug*
kupo – ughhhhh civility ughhhhh.
If you wanna impune my character then go for it. Not every woman involved in that conversation was sympathetic to your conclusions. I didn’t understand how this very specific case fit in what I’ve understood to be mansplaining because I misunderstood the premise.
@Rhuu
I just found the whole gamergate thing toxic tbh and I hesitate to even look into it.
I have several pairs of yoga pants and about half of them do actually have pockets. So for those of you opting out of yoga pants because you want pockets, I definitely suggest giving them a shot because yoga pants with pockets are definitely a thing.
@Rhuu
“Civility” can go fuck itself.
j: Once again I say, it must be nice to be able to ignore it. Many don’t have that option. (Dare I say… privilege?)
And impugning your character? I feel like this is another time for you to perhaps take a moment and have a think. Or at least quote what you are referring to, because if it was this:
????
Don’t use some #notyourshield people to justify your kneejerk reaction that a pair of highly skilled people deserved to lose their jobs for calling someone an asshat.
There are female, PoC and LGBTQ2+ trump supporters, after all. Humans are complicated!
And even if something is framed politely, that does NOT mean that it was actually polite. Once again, I refer you to the feeling of losing your keys and then having someone helpfully tell you where to look. You’ve looked there, of course you’ve looked there, that is the FIRST PLACE one would look.
That little ball of rage that one feels in that situation where someone is trying to be helpful but really really isn’t? That’s all the time. Also, the ‘helper’ thinks that the person searching for their keys is stupid, because of some societal bullshit, and is graciously offering their help.
Oh jeez, yeah. I mean, why damage your eyes or your poor, fragile psyche by exposing yourself to the toxic hatred women must endure for existing as game developers and critics? Better to not know and to sit up there on your high horse condescending to all the women who are so twisted, so evil as to be uncivil towards people who literally want them driven out of their (already extremely demanding and stressful) jobs. Glad you dodged that bullet!
So, you are capable of listening to women if they agree that some other woman is a man hating evil bitch who deserves to be fired?
And I’m confused as to how you got basic facts about the incident wrong and you seem to be unaware of the context around everything, and why it’s such a controversial issue, but you managed to listen to the women who agree that it’s great for the meany pants woman to be fired? You’ve read enough to have convinced you that she just doesn’t value the opinions of anyone who is a man?
I mean, which is it?
I prefer jeans – who definitely have pockets – but I often sew “secret pockets” on the inside with the left over fabric from the hem (because short gal). Very practical and safe for money\credit card etc.
The same could be done for yoga pants with a flimsy fabric?
I mean, seriously. I live in a country that is being run by a man who has sexually assaulted at least 16 women and who was caught on tape bragging about one of the assaults. The right to abortion is about to be lost.
Yet I’m on a feminist blog having to explain why it’s not cool for yet another woman to be harassed out of her job in the gaming industry because she was accused of misandry.
This, folks. This is why I am so utterly unsympathetic to what about the menz stuff and why I am so uninterested in trying to prove I’m not a manhater.
No matter how blatant it is that men are the privileged gender and women are marginalized, there will always be men whining about bad men have it and why oh why doesn’t every woman always drop everything to shower them in attention and soothe every manfeel. A certain subset of men (and not just extreme ones like incels, probably a significant minority) will just not be satisfied unless women are completely subjugated and content to just quietly go mad alone in a room with yellow wallpaper if she doesn’t like the subjugation. Fuck that.