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[–] 62 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Male gaze. Much like volleyball.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 days ago* (5 children)

    Volleyball athletes were multiple times offered less revealing clothing and denied them because it actually harmed their performance, compared to the current standard.

    New efforts for streaming guidelines do limit certain close ups or angles, given the outfits, though.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Y'know if that were true and it actually did give an advantage, you'd think the men would be wearing something similar too. You got a citation?

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  • [–] 49 points 3 days ago* (21 children)

    In Olympic beach volleyball, women have several options. More than the men in fact:

    The women can wear either a one-piece or two-piece bathing suit; shorts with sleeved or sleeveless tops; or a full body suit in cold weather. Due to the typically warm playing conditions, most opt for the two-piece. The men must wear shorts and a tank top. Players are allowed to wear hats and sunglasses.

    https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/beach-volleyball-101-olympic-equipment

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  • [–] 28 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    This absolutely ignores sponsorship pressures. Men get millions of dollars playing in full clothes. Women have to wear bikinis just to ensure a few thousand dollars “because it sells more tickets”. Choice or not, there are structural cultural norms that nullify the offer of alternatives. Misogyny doesn't disappear just because you can choose different clothes.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 days ago (4 children)
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  • [–] 17 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Olympic swimming is the opposite though, women are allowed to wear full suits, men aren't allowed to wear anything above the navel.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    Which begs the question. If the most efficient equipment to use is a full suit (remembering here the snark skin controversy), why are men not allowed to wear it, but women are.

    It is absolutely arbitrary and based on historical gender biases. But that is too complex for some idiots to digest.

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    [–] 7 points 2 days ago

    I mean golf is almost entirely just a rich Old white man's game.

    They've deigned to allow other leagues to happen, but "damnit if women are gonna play, they have to be pleasing to the eye".

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  • [–] 18 points 3 days ago

    Cause they won't let the men wear skirts too the sexists.

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  • [–] 40 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    The PGA bans shorts and the LPGA's dress code doesn't. There's more to it (why are the dress codes this way, historically?) but that's a simple answer to your question.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 days ago (13 children)

    They're called skorts. They're simultaneously useless, goofy-looking, playful and ridiculously fun to wear.

    Everybody should try on them at least once.

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    Because old men make the rules on most golf courses.

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  • Because wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume would interfere with their range of motion.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    A lot of golf courses used to be mens only, and the ones who did let women on the field had strict dress codes. Going as far back to Victorian times women had to have specific Golf dresses, corsets, crinolines, bustles, and multiple petticoats.

    So a lot of it is based on social mores surrounding both class and sex. Even after dress codes loosened in the modern age, the culture of golf tends to be immersed in the social normative of the upper class.

    Personally I actually think class has more to do with it than sexism in general. For example the first professional woman to play golf in slacks was in 1933, while the first black professional golfer was allowed in the PGA in 1967.

    Then again the dynamics between social norms in sex and class are dynamic and inseparable.

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    [–] 18 points 3 days ago

    The patriarchy... Seriously.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    It used to be men in skirts and the women stayed home.

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    [–] 10 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Men wear golf shorts to golf all the time. The fit is generally looser, just like the golf polos, though.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 days ago

    Sex.

    It sells.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    What are you talking about? Many women wear pants, but they have more options so some of them wear skirts ,or shorts, or 'skorts'... men don't wear anything but pants because they will lose every sponsor in a matter of minutes. Somehow men having fewer options than women/been told what to wear is men's fault and patriarchy or whatever, idk. Kinda ironic given that, iirc, it was invented in Scotland.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago* (12 children)

    Somehow men having fewer options than women/been told what to wear is men’s fault and patriarchy or whatever, idk.

    The only reason women are allowed to wear pants now is because we demanded it.

    It used to be illegal for women to wear pants. Take a wild guess as to who were the ones to make those laws.

    There are examples of women in Europe and the US wearing pants long before it was socially acceptable, as writer Kathleen Cooper detailed in The Toast, even though in countries such as the US, England, and France they could actually be jailed for it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some would dress as men to do things such as join the military. The most famous example was probably 18th-century Englishwoman Hannah Snell, who served for years in the British navy and later become a minor celebrity after revealing that she was a woman. During the US Civil War, Mary Walker, an assistant surgeon with the Union Army, chose pants over skirts (and was once arrested for impersonating a man).

    In polite society, though, the fight to make it permissible for women in the US and Europe to wear pants began in earnest in the 1850s, with the women’s rights movement. Feminists were seeking liberation, not just from patriarchal oppression, but from the restrictions of corsets. Though Edwardian and Victorian women had adopted them voluntarily, the undergarments literally made it difficult to move, sometimes even to breathe. Suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw dress reform as part of their battle for rights, and some adopted an alternative outfit in the form of baggy “Turkish” pantaloons worn with a knee-length skirt. In April 1851, Amelia Bloomer, the editor of the first women’s newspaper, The Lily, told her readers about it, and thereafter the pants picked up the nickname bloomers.

    A brief history of women in pants

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