A Panel Of Fox News Dudes Judging Women Wearing Leggings As Pants Is Creepy As Hell
Even for FOX News, this is some deeply weird stuff.
Whether it’s dictating that women can’t get abortions, making weird, sexist comments about periods, or swapping tips on how to pressure women into sex, men who feel entitled to ownership over women’s bodies are everywhere, and they are mighty unpleasant. One of the most insidious and harmful expressions of that entitlement is the ‘loving father’ defence; the dad who doesn’t let his daughter go out dressed like that, because he knows what boys are like at that age. The internet is chock-full of viral stories praising men for publicly shaming their daughters into adhering to their father’s expectations of what they can wear, where they can go, and who they can be with.
It was that mindset that FOX News unwittingly tapped into a couple of days ago, when it aired a segment called ‘The Dads Decide: What Leggings Are OK For Their Daughters?’ featuring an all-male panel discussing what kind of leggings they would and wouldn’t let their daughters wear. To help them decide, FOX wheel out three women wearing leggings for the panel’s inspection, as the camera crawls up and down their bodies like a giant gropey spider and the three men make faces like this:
“Leggings. Ain’t. Pants. Does she have a point?!” screams FOX News host Steve Doocy from the foetid hell of his own existence, referring to a viral video doing the rounds of some woman in a car telling other women not to wear leggings as pants for some reason.
To answer that question, FOX turned to three men and dads; Willie Robertson from Duck Dynasty, Andrew Sansone, the husband of Fox presenter Julie Banderas and father to two extremely unlucky young girls, and FOX News legal analyst Arthur Aidala, who responded to the sound of his own name by doing this:
“I am a big strong law boy”
What ensues is five minutes of grown men visually undressing women decked out for their pleasure on live TV, all in the guise of fatherly concern for their daughter’s wellbeing. It’s bizarre, deeply uncomfortable, and creepy as all hell.