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Won’t you think of the mothers of sons?

For years, Maryann White suffered in stoic silence. She prayed that fashions would change and the legging problem would go away. Alas, athleisure only became more popular. Eventually White could stand it no longer; distraught and desperate, she wrote a letter to Notre Dame’s student newspaper imploring female students to “turn their backs(ides) on leggings”.

“I’m not trying to insult anyone,” White writes in the letter, published on Monday. “I’m just a Catholic mother of four sons with a problem that only girls can solve: leggings.”

White explains that while her sons “know better than to ogle a woman’s body”, leggings make not-ogling impossible. She recounts a traumatic episode while attending mass at the university, when she was confronted by a group of young women wearing tight clothing. “You couldn’t help but see those blackly naked rear ends. I didn’t want to see them – but they were unavoidable.” Which honestly sounds like something she should have saved for the confession booth, rather than the letters page of her sons’ student newspaper.

“Leggings are so naked … so exposing,” she concludes. “Could you think of the mothers of sons the next time you go shopping and consider choosing jeans instead?”

Rather than heeding White’s plea, the louche ladies of Notre Dame held a Leggings Pride Day in protest and shared pictures of themselves wearing tight pants with the hashtag #LeggingsDayND. “The Leggings problem,” as it has been termed, has made national news.

Depressingly, this is far from the first time a spandex-based controversy has made headlines; the legging wars have been going on for years. In 2017, United Airlines famously banned two young girls wearing leggings from boarding a plane. In 2015, a Montana Republican was so disgusted by yoga pants he wanted to make wearing them punishable by law. Schools across North America have implemented sexist bans on leggings. Fox News has assembled panels to debate whether men would be “comfortable with the women in [their] life parading around in leggings”.

And it’s not just men policing women’s bodies; thanks to internalized misogyny, sisters are doing it for themselves. Last year the New York Times published an op-ed called Why Yoga Pants are Bad For Women, in which the female author explained we’re all wearing leggings because they’re sexy; if we want to liberate ourselves from the patriarchy we should be wearing sweatpants instead.

My own hot take about leggings/yoga pants is that I never want to hear about them ever again. It is incredible that there is so much hand-wringing in the west about how oppressed Muslim women are by the veil when the proprietary of leggings is a matter of constant debate.

Bare-armed and dangerous

Turns out it’s not just leggings that make you look like a whore, ladies! The morally righteous also find bare arms unbearable. At least three women have been told to cover their arms while wandering the halls of the British Columbia legislature. This has sparked a “bare-arms” protest by some government staffers and reporters.

Female editors resign from Vatican magazine

The all-female board of Women Church World, a monthly supplement in the Vatican daily paper, have resigned in protest at what they claim was a campaign to control and delegitimize them. In an open letter, founder Lucetta Scaraffia said the staff were scrutinized after writing about the sexual abuse of nuns. “It seems a vital initiative has been reduced to silence, and we return to the antiquated ... custom of selecting, under direct male control, those women considered trustworthy.”

Saudi female rights activists temporarily released

Three women’s rights activists jailed last year have been released on bail. Sources have told Reuters that more would be freed on Sunday.

Vice Media equal pay settlement

Vice has agreed to pay $1.875m to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by some of its female employees, who argued that the media company paid women less than men. A statistician hired by the plaintiffs found that “when controlling for job family/level, tenure and work location, the amount of underpaid wages to female employees appeared to range between $7,000,000 and $9,740,000”. The settlement is nicely timed as it is Equal Pay Day on 2 April.

Silicon Valley’s gender pay gap

Tech’s brightest minds can’t seem to disrupt sexism. According to new research, more than half of women in the US tech industry are being paid less than their male colleagues.

Nasa: we have a woman problem

The first all-female spacewalk was supposed to take place on Friday. History had to be put on hold, however, as Nasa didn’t have enough spacesuits in the right size. This isn’t the first time Nasa has shown a less-than-stellar understanding of women. In the 1970s, Nasa thoughtfully designed a makeup kit for female astronauts, because having the right lipstick on the moon would obviously be top of mind. Then there was the time that a Nasa engineer thought a woman would need 100 tampons to get through a week in space. Amazing how some men can be literal rocket scientists and still know nothing about the female body.