/pol/ - International /Pol/itics & /Bant/er

*hits pipe*
Women wearing tight legwear like leggings instead of men is an abomination that symbolizes the decline of Western civilization. Let me explain.
To the Greeks and Romans, pants were looked down upon as barbaric. Men would normally have their open legs below the knees bare, but women would wear long garments that would cover down to the ankles. In this patriarchal culture very much oriented towards the male form (the Greeks were even favorable to male nudity), women's bodies were virtually always covered more than males. This is something that has been seen in pretty much every civilization ever: an emphasis and value on women's modesty makes women cover more of the body and the female form than men, whose clothing is allowed to be more revealing.
Of course, Romans eventually adopted the trousers due to climates being colder up north, basically a matter of necessity. Two observations are to be noted here, first that this was something only Germanic men wore and not women. Second, if you were to preserve the principles of female modesty in dress relative to men and the appreciation of the masculine form while covering the legs, how could you possibly do better than adopting trousers? They still reveal the outline of the individual legs, there's just fabric covering each one now. This brings us to another important point: the tighter the legwear, the more the form of the legs is shown.
Historically, European men typically wore very tight-fitting covering for their legs. They primarily wore hose and/or breeches all the way from most of the medieval period into the 19th century. For over a thousand years (if not far longer) tight legwear, if there was legwear at all, was seen as the natural clothing for men, and exclusively for men.
A woman wearing hose would get her in serious trouble for crossdressing. Because long dresses do not depict the natural form of a woman's legs, they became perfect for women in a society that treasured female modesty; for the reverse reason pants, hose, and stockings were totally unfit for them.
So if legwear like pants on women were anathema for thousands of years, when and how did it become okay? Some of you may be surprised to learn that it only became okay as recently as the 20th century, and only really around mid-century after WWII did women wearing pants begin to become a normal thing in public. Not even 80 years ago! This was not an an easy process. In the 19th century many places had laws that made it illegal for women to wear trousers, including many major US cities, and Paris. Women wearing pants was also very much tied up with the feminist movements of the 19th century. It was associated with the "new woman" of modernity, was pushed by feminists to the point they would deliberately wear pants to get arrested, and any woman wearing pants was seen as likely making a feminist political statement. Pants on women was also something very much influenced, to an extent even directly imported, from foreign Eastern Ottoman influences (like bloomers, the "Turkish dress"). The adoption of trousers on women corresponded tightly with advances in women's status and rights, like during and as a consequence of the World Wars (it's not a coincidence that a lot of countries gave women the right to vote after WWI). It should not come as a surprise that women wearing trousers made many people at the time freak the fuck out and believe that civilization was declining. It was a total inversion of thousands of years of dress norms, and it accordingly came with the breakdown of traditional social norms governing the sexes (not a coincidence whatsoever).
<I browse reddit
Today we have "advanced" to tight legwear being mostly designated to women and looser forms being for men. We see it as normal for women to wear tights, leggings, stockings, etc., and for men to wear this would be strange and flout social expectations. People today look at a Renaissance or Baroque painting of people in contemporary dress and they think it's very weird that the men would wear those tight clothes hugging their legs, because that's supposed to be a thing that women wear.
(1/2)