Hundreds of Women Don Yoga Pants to Protest Man Who Shamed Them

A Rhode Island man who body-shamed “mature” women for wearing yoga pants, saying it was a “disturbing” sight, set off a massive march outside his house on Sunday.

More than 300 people, mostly women, gathered in their yoga pants for a peaceful parade in Barrington, R.I. after 63-year-old Alan Sorrentino wrote a letter in the local newspaper last week criticizing the popular style as the “absolute worst thing to ever happen in women fashion.”

“Like the mini-skirt, yoga pants can be adorable on children and young women who have the benefit of nature’s blessing of youth. However, on mature, adult women there is something bizarre and disturbing about the appearance they make in public,” Sorrentino wrote in The Barrington Times on Wednesday.

“They do nothing to compliment a women over 20 years old. In fact, the look is bad. Do yourself a favor, grow up and stop wearing them in public,” he added. “I struggle with my own physicality as I age. I don’t want to struggle with yours.”

Organizers said the parade was “not a hateful protest” against the letter writer but a stand in solidarity against men who dictate what they think women should wear.

“This a wonderful group of people celebrating our bodies and our right to cover them however we see fit,” they wrote in a Facebook event page. “And while yoga pants seem to be a silly thing to fight for, they are representative of something much bigger—misogyny and the history of men policing womens’ bodies”

Sorrentino, who in his letter compared adult women wearing yoga pants in public to men sporting Speedos at the grocery store, insisted his message was meant to be satiric. He told the Boston Globe and WPRO-AM that he has since received death threats and suffered stress from the fury his letter sparked.

“It’s vicious and intimidating,” he said Saturday on WPRO-AM. “The fact that this is seen as an appropriate reaction to something I wrote in the paper is really disgusting.”