The internet is often full of gym or workout horror stories. Still, people don’t even need to work out for judgment to roll in, as several men demonstrated after their opinions on women’s workout attire were met with roasting.
In one tweet essentially engineered to provoke outrage, podcaster Elijah Schaffer posed a question for his followers. Why do women’s workout clothes, according to him, look like it’s “essentially lingerie”? While he concedes that some aspects should make sense, he doesn’t understand why women wear form-fitting clothes to the gym or wear something like a sports bra and nothing to cover the rest of their bodies.
“But why is it that women being empowered means they dress nearly naked in shared spaces?” he asked.
Schaffer then opens the floor up to his followers and anyone who will see the tweet.
Another tweet centered on a reposted video from GymToker Isabella Barnes. In March, Barnes posted a series of videos designed “to help men understand what we have to do make ourselves feel comfortable in a busy gym.” The first video showed her wearing an oversized, long-sleeved shirt that she pulled down from a tucked position at her back to combat sweat. The point of Barnes’ video is to illustrate that she has to make herself uncomfortable by wearing certain types of clothes so that she isn’t creeped out by the men around her who might leer.
But the Twitter user who reposted Barnes’ video is wholly unsympathetic to her concerns and shames her outfit choice as the reason behind it; it’s her fault for wearing revealing clothes in the first place.
And another tweet compared women’s workout clothes to Victoria’s Secret lingerie, suggesting that there is very little difference between the two even though Victoria’s Secret sells both sports bras and traditional lingerie.
The language and degree of severity might vary between some of the sentiments. And while some certainly agreed with their assessments of women’s workout attire, others took the men to task for their insistence that they cover up. (And in Schaffer’s case, called him out for his previously alleged treatment of women by resurfacing a 2022 article about being fired from the conservative site The Blaze because of a sexual assault investigation.)
“Why are men so quick to blame everyone but themselves for their lack of self control?,” @eclecticbrotha tweeted.
And some also pointed out that garments like sports bras and yoga pants have long been part of women’s workout attire by sharing photographs of people in form-fitting and high-waisted clothing working out in places like jazzercise classes.
Just because older photos of women wearing tighter clothing exist doesn’t mean the criticisms will stop. But it’s also an indication that women have been wearing what they want to work out for a long time, and contrary to recent suggestions, not covering up isn’t a new concept.
