School Bans Yoga Pants (but not for Usual Reason)

Yoga pants and leggings are snagging headlines again after a Massachusetts high school banned girls from wearing their comfy wear to school. Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before. Tight pants are "distracting” to males...

Yet Cape Cod Technical High School has an entirely different reasoning behind its revised dress code.

“Leggings, tights, yoga pants and any other extremely form fitting apparel are considered an accessory and must be worn with dress/skirt or shorts.”

School district superintendent Robert Sanborn claims the code has nothing to do with the male gaze, and rather the rationale is to prepare teens for the workforce, where they will be expected to dress the part:

“Vocational technical education is about preparing people for a career. It has to do with employability. We're passing on the skills that are needed in the workforce, to know that's not proper attire when you're at work.”

True enough, yet Sanborn's sartorial logic is flawed. If high school dress codes were solely concerned with "employability" and preparing kids for the workforce, then students wouldn't be allowed to wear jeans or shorts or any other number of apparel items to school because these aren't allowed in the average office.

Needless to say, the kids at Cape Cod aren't impressed by the amended dress code, as it only targets females.

Emily Connolly, a 16-year-old student, plans to fight for her right to study "in a t-shirt and leggings or yoga pants" by staging a protest on the first day of school in which legions of females will descend on the school wearing - you guessed it - yoga pants and leggings.

“Girls in today's society are forced to cover [their] bodies and considered more of sex symbols than actual human beings,” wrote Connolly on her Facebook page. “Just because some guys don't know how to ‘control’ themselves doesn't mean girls need to pay for it.”

In my day it was ripped jeans. Even though I was a straight-A student, I got called in to the office on more than one occasion over an exposed kneecap. Plus ça change...

Take heart, Emily. It gets better. One day you may be lucky enough to work from your home office where no one will force you to change out of your yoga pants.