A furious row has been raging all week after the American comedian Shane Gillis was accused of telling a sexist joke. In case you aren’t familiar with his work, Gillis set a Guinness World Record this summer by playing to the largest crowd for a stand-up comedy gig in history (73,946). But on the latest edition of Saturday Night Live, he caused uproar by making a crack about a highly sensitive topic: women’s shorts.
I won’t quote what he said because it’s rather graphic. But, essentially, he expressed the view that the skintight shorts favoured by many young female gym-goers these days are a tad too revealing.
Cue apoplectic accusations of misogyny, sexual objectification, failure to respect a woman’s inalienable right to wear as little clothing as she chooses, etc. Personally, I think Gillis’s critics are barking up the wrong tree, though, because they’re overlooking the second, far more important point that he made about young women at the gym.
Which is that, for some unfathomable reason, an awful lot of them now insist on filming themselves exercising and then uploading the video to social media.
My problem with such behaviour is not that it’s vain, self-obsessed and downright weird. My problem is that if I too happen to be exercising – and thus looking even redder, sweatier and flabbier than normal – I would really rather not appear in the back of the shot. Especially if the woman shooting the video has a vast number of online followers, all of whom will get to have a jolly good laugh about what a revolting sack of middle-aged blubber I am.
Admittedly, I don’t go to the gym very often these days. Primarily this is because I’m a bone-idle pig who would rather slob on the sofa rewatching 40-year-old Rambo films. But it’s also, in part, because there’s now a risk that 17 million complete strangers around the world will soon be in stitches over my jiggling moobs.
I appreciate that, having made this complaint, I too will now almost certainly be accused of sexism; for failing to respect a woman’s inalienable right to film both herself and everyone in a 50-yard radius while they’re puffing and wheezing like an asthmatic St Bernard. Nonetheless, I believe it needed to be said.
At any rate, if I ever do muster the willpower to get off my sagging backside and go to the gym again, I can promise you one thing: I most certainly will not be wearing a pair of skintight shorts.