The View’s Sara Haines makes wild leap from Shane Gillis’ gym shorts joke to alleged gang rape at Cornell University

"Well, I typically defend comedy at all costs because I believe there has to be an area where comedians are able to walk right up to that line because some of the best stuff is when people are being super risky and risque," Haines began. "But Dan Levy brought up such a good point."

"First of all, he is a god. I love him so much. But he's bringing up a great point of when the language like 'whore' is passed along, it, I might have not noticed it before in the past because it was in under the guise of a joke," Haines went on. Then she made a wild leap from a joke about gym shorts to an alleged gang rape at an Ivy League school's fraternity two years ago.

"And what, as we're talking about this Cornell 7, I'm not saying a joke makes an assault, but it it makes it much easier to look at as another human as an object, and so I think that it kind of just made me realize that I need to be more mindful in even in comedy because the the by the way what we wear to the gym like the idea of the term whore is the part that's the most offensive part because it's almost inviting in that the whore wants that attention, you know. So it's uncomfortable."

Gillis made a joke about something anyone who has been to a gym in the past few years has seen: women in super short shorts filming themselves as they work out. A woman who was a student at Cornell recently brought a suit against the school, a fraternity, and seven men who she claimed raped her in 2024, though the men, and text messages from her after the group event, indicate that it was consensual. Haines linked the two things though the only link is in her own mind.

On Saturday night in New York, Gillis stood before the Saturday Night Live audience and joked about being a fat guy at the gym. After joking about himself being at "the public gym as a fat guy," he said, "Also I haven't been to the gym in so long. I didn't know women just dress like whores now."

"Look, I'm sorry," Gillis said to laughter. "There's no other way to describe... Have you seen it? I've seen it. The shorts?" The audience laughed, many of them likely having seen the shorts. "Have you seen the shorts? Those neon. They're like the only— they're like artificial bait colored," Gillis joked.

"The wrinkles," he went on to laughs, "the wrinkles go like around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don't look. You're not allowed to look. For real, don't look, because they are filming. I'm in the background of like 10 TikToks right now."

Levy took to Instagram to state his disapproval. "Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists. There's a difference there," he said.

"And to be perfectly honest," he said later, "more men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it's complacency that has created the environment with which women are sexually assaulted, and it's a conversation as opposed to a crime. Men need to be defending women more. This is not a women's issue. This is an everybody issue, because the more that men objectify women in the media, the more that other men see them as objects and treat them as objects. They are not objects. They are superior human beings to men."