Fox News Tells Women How To Dress, And Not Dress, In Public
Women of America, take heed! Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson is here to help you determine whether it’s okay for you to wear leggings.
Yes you read that right: Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson has become the absolute authority on women’s bodies and how and how not they may attire them.
Today the moral arbiters at Fox & Friends held a panel discussion with “famous fathers,” including Robertson, Fox News legal analyst Arthur Aidala, and husband of Fox News’ Julie Banderas, Andrew Sansone, to determine whether they would allow “their daughters to wear leggings to school.”
Co-host Steve Doocy kicked off the conversation by asking Robertson, “Are you comfortable with the women in your life parading in public in leggings?”
And while Robertson concurred that “they ain’t pants,” he eventually conceded, “Yeah, I’m okay with it.”
Not so much for Aidala, who explained his family dictate of, “If it’s not worn in the monastery, it’s not worn out on the street.” Do the women in his life have an enviable collection of habits amassed in their closets?
Then, models were asked to parade themselves in front of the panel of men, for each of the men to determine whether the woman in question was dressed with an appropriate level of modesty or not.
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While two of the women put on display for the male panel passed their objectifying evaluations – apparently leggings and a hooded sweatshirt are modest, and black leggings and a longer top could be worn to church since they’re black and thus monastery-like, a third woman was asked to come out in, as the men put it, “Pilates attire.”
“We all took nitroglycerin pills before she came on the set, just to make sure,” Aidala said after the third woman, wearing purple leggings and a black tank top, came before the panel. Apparently, her black tank top was either not enough black to be reminiscent of a nun’s sartorial choices, or Aidala has some very specific fantasies about nuns.
Also, it seems Aidala has missed the memo on bystander culture and the impact the words and behaviors of others, and especially men, can have on the way women’s bodies are treated as commodities, sexualized, and subjected to violence.
“Obviously her physique, god bless you, you’ve worked out, you’ve earned that. And there are appropriate places to wear that. But I wouldn’t wear that to church,” Aidala said.
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Because nothing makes women – safe to not only love and respect their bodies on their own terms, but safe to engage in society without threats of sexual violence at worst and gross objectification at best – like a man telling her whether or not she’s “earned” the right to wear whatever she wants to wear out in public. And to be told when she needs to keep that body she “earned” covered.
Keep doing you, men of Fox News.
