WATCH: Even after a backlash against body shaming, a White Rock, B.C. city councillor said he agreed with the negative comments. Now he’s facing body-shaming backlash of his own. Jennifer Tryon reports.
A city councillor from White Rock, British Columbia is coming under fire after he vilified the clothing choices made by some pregnant women, suggesting their tight clothing looks like “sausage casings.”
David Chesney, a city councillor in the Surrey suburb, made the comments during an interview on The Goddard Report in which the topic of pregnant women in the public eye came up.
Chesney wondered aloud why pregnant women have “such a desire to push that out in front of anyone?”
“I run into women all the time in the local grocery store and they can’t get on any more skin tight, it looks like sausage casing, their belly button is actually pushing through the material, and I’m kind of look at that and I go ‘I get it, you’re pregnant, alright,’” he said.
He went on to suggest the clothing choices made by women of his mother’s generation were different.
“The fact is the styling was much, much different through the 50s, 60s, 70s, even into the 80s, women wore a little bit more loose fitting clothes,” he said.
“But as I say, nowadays, how they can yank on those Lululemon sweatpants and body dance skins and go out in public at eight months pregnant, I don’t find it repulsive, I just really have to question, why that? Why do you want to walk around like that?”
READ MORE: Kristi Gordon’s haters reflect bigger problem faced by women in media
He also suggested pregnant women prefer to work “until their water breaks so that they can have one year off from the time that the baby is born.”
“They’re not taking a month off ahead of time, they’re coming to work, they’re barely able to walk, they can’t sit down, they’re not comfortable,” he said.
The two men were talking about the controversy surrounding Global BC meteorologist Kristi Gordon who shared some of the hate mail she’s received for being pregnant on television.
Much of the hate mail criticized Gordon’s clothing as too tight and ranged in offensiveness with some people saying they preferred looser clothing on women while others called her a “hussy” and told her to have “more respect for the unborn child.”
The e-mails continued and got worse until Gordon read some of them on News Hour PLUS – a web-only portion of the newscast.
Globalnews.ca was unable to contact Chesney but he did defend his comments to CKNW AM 980.
“I don’t, I never said I found it offensive at all. I simply said that it appears to me that nowadays a number of women feel very comfortable wearing tight fitting clothes that resemble sausage casings,” he said.
Chesney did offer an apology in the White Rock Sun, which he edits, saying the comments had been taken out of context.
“I apologize to any women that may have been offended by comments that were taken out of context,” he wrote.
Chesney’s comments sparked a wave of criticism on Twitter, as social media users complained he was sexist.
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