Leggings have sons’ mom driven to distraction

Nearly half a century ago at an all-girls Catholic high school in Cleveland, students were required to wear stockings. To get around the rule, it was said, the girls used eyebrow pencils to draw lines up the backs of their legs, fooling the nuns into believing they were wearing hosiery with seams.

I’m not sure if that last part was true. If it was, the nuns would have been awfully gullible and, quite possibly, legally blind.

But the story came back to me the other day when I saw a report about a woman who wrote a letter to the editor of The Observer, the school newspaper of the University of Notre Dame and the nearby women’s college, St. Mary’s.

Maryann White was, she declared in her letter, “just a Catholic mother of four sons with a problem that only girls can solve: leggings.”

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

That shows how times have changed. In the same era in which girls had to wear hose underneath their skirts, boys in my public high school were forbidden to wear jeans, which were widely known to cause juvenile delinquency.

And, as the father of three boys, I’m guessing it doesn’t take leggings to catch the eyes of her sons; a burqa probably would do it.

But White is not the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of leggings and their potential to arouse the lust of otherwise decent young men.

In 2015, a state legislator in Montana was so alarmed that he introduced a bill to ban them. But maybe there’s not a lot of other things to keep politicians busy in Montana.

For educators, what girls wore to school always has been a thorny issue. They’ve had to come up with policies about the lengths of skirts. The depths of necklines. The tightness of sweaters. They’ve had to spend so much time on dress codes it’s amazing they’ve had any left for reading and writing, let alone arithmetic.

Now the distraction du jour is leggings. Schools in California, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and North Carolina have enacted dress codes about them. A Minnesota high school principal emailed parents asking them to forbid their daughters from wearing leggings to school because their “backsides” were “too closely defined,” making them “highly distracting.”

Despite these objections, or perhaps because of them, leggings have become musthave clothing for many women. They’ve even spawned a version for men called “meggings.”

If you ever see me wearing a pair of those, try to control your lust.