When comedian Shane Gillis remarked during his Saturday Night Live monologue that women at the gym now dress “like whores”, the response was predictable.
Some condemned his remarks, while others defended them as comedy, asking whether people had become “too sensitive”.
But the more concerning issue is not the joke itself; it’s how readily we dismiss everyday misogyny, particularly when it falls short of physical violence.
Why, in 2026, are we still discussing women’s clothing as though its primary purpose is to accommodate men’s sexual interests? And amid Australia’s continuing crisis of violence against women, why are we so reluctant to challenge the attitudes that underpin inequality?
One response was particularly revealing. A woman on Reddit dismissed the backlash as an overreaction, questioning why women celebrate revealing clothing as empowering yet object when men comment on it. Another argued that critics should consider the joke in its entirety rather than isolate its most provocative sentence.
Fair enough, context matters.
But examining the joke in full does not erase its underlying premise: women’s clothing is once again being judged through men’s sexual expectations.
Apparently, calling women “whores” requires context. Objecting to it requires justification.
These responses expose two troubling assumptions: that misogyny must reach some extraordinary threshold before warranting criticism, and that women’s clothing somehow legitimises men’s degrading assessments of their bodies.
A sexist joke is not equivalent to sexual assault, domestic abuse or femicide, but recognising differences in severity does not mean dismissing the social attitudes that can contribute to gender inequality.
The familiar defence of “it’s not that serious” implies misogyny is inconsequential unless it results in a criminal charge or another fatal statistic. Yet inequality is also reproduced through everyday expectations about whose dignity, autonomy and experiences matter.
Research from Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) offers an uncomfortable insight. Its 2021 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey found that while 99 per cent of respondents would be bothered by verbal abuse, this fell to 86 per cent for sexist jokes told by a boss and 69 per cent for those told by a friend.
Approximately four in ten Australians also agreed that women mistakenly interpret innocent remarks as sexist, while one in three believed women exaggerate their unequal treatment.
These findings expose a disconnect between our condemnation of overt abuse and our willingness to tolerate everyday sexism. Research has also identified associations between sexually objectifying attitudes and sexual aggression, physical aggression and intimate partner violence. While this does not establish that sexist humour causes violence, it challenges the assumption that the attitudes underpinning objectification are harmless.
If we want to understand how gender inequality persists, we must examine not only the behaviours society condemns, but also those it continues to excuse.
And what, exactly, are we excusing here?
At the centre of Gillis’s remarks is the assumption that women dress for men. Not for comfort, confidence, personal preference or simply because they like how something looks.
For men.
A woman enters a gym to exercise, and somehow her shorts become a public referendum on her sexuality, morality and respectability.
Why should a man’s sexual response determine her right to occupy that space without ridicule?
A fundamental distinction exists between finding someone attractive and believing their appearance gives you permission to demean them. Attraction is not entitlement. Even deliberately dressing to look attractive does not surrender bodily autonomy.
Perhaps nothing illustrates this entitlement more clearly than what happened when women challenged Gillis. Body image coach Corinne Wooden responded by appearing in shorts, only to receive comments including:
“5/10 with a brown paper bag special.”
“Camera angle says H03.”
“It’s there so men will stare at you. That’s the only reason.”
“Just keep to what you know and stay in the kitchen and make that sandwich”
“You said it, we didn’t….. hooker”
These comments are not included for shock value. We cannot meaningfully examine misogyny while sanitising the language through which it operates.
A woman challenges men’s assumed entitlement to degrade women’s bodies, only to have her own appearance ridiculed, her attractiveness rated and her argument displaced by judgements about her body.
As though dignity must first be earned through male approval.
These comments do not represent everyone defending Gillis, but they expose a recognisable pattern: men can ridicule women’s bodies under the protection of humour, while women challenging that ridicule find their own bodies subjected to further scrutiny.
And somehow, women’s objections become the problem.
This is why the conversation cannot begin and end with whether Gillis’s remarks were funny. Australia continues confronting domestic abuse, coercive control, sexual violence and intimate partner homicide. Yet we remain reluctant to examine how everyday attitudes towards women intersect with these broader inequalities.
Gendered violence does not occur in a cultural vacuum. Entitlement, objectification and the dismissal of women’s experiences are relevant to understanding the social conditions in which inequality and harm persist.
We should not need evidence that a particular joke caused a particular act of violence before challenging the attitudes it reinforces. That is part of what prevention requires: recognising harmful norms before they contribute to more serious harm.
What concerns me is how consistently women are expected to manage men’s reactions to their existence.
Dress modestly, but not too modestly. Celebrate your body, but accept men’s judgment. Be confident, but not attention-seeking. Challenge misogyny, but don’t be too sensitive.
These are not coherent expectations. They are moving boundaries that preserve men’s authority over women’s choices.
We cannot credibly demand an end to gendered violence while refusing to challenge the beliefs that make women’s bodies, boundaries and dignity negotiable.