Snakes On A Plane

A man was apprehended recently trying to board a plane with several snakes and three tortoises in his pants. Officials were tipped off when the x-ray equipment revealed a surplus of spines. There's no mystery about why a man would do such a thing. He carries tortoises in his pants because mice are too fidgety, and he carries snakes in his pants because they are too large to fit in a four-ounce container. Nor is there a question why the perps in these cases are invariably men. There isn't a woman in America who would attempt such a dastardly deed. We don't have the pants for it.

Pants perform entirely different functions for men and women. Men's pants permit them to appear in public while concealing random peregrinations of the penis. There is always room in their trousers to hang their personal scratchable items as well as perform actual scratching. This much space affords ample temporary shelter for a fleet of reptiles and maybe the terrarium they came in.

Women's pants, on the other hand, function strictly as butt and belly containment vessels. They are fully occupied and you couldn't slide a greased skink in sideways. If at any point we do develop some atmosphere in our pants, we've got a pair of skinny jeans on the shelf waiting to pick up the slack. No one is able to throw away the skinny jeans, which remain neatly folded as a symbol of hope. They are stacked in strata upon previously retired skinny jeans, where climatologists of the future will be able to core them for samples of antique air.

It's a crapshoot whether the skinny jeans will have swung back into fashion when they are finally deployed. I lost weight recently and discovered that my skinny jeans are now known as mom jeans, designed for maximum containment. The high-waisted jean is the gold standard of flesh corrals. Many of your major organs and their adipose insulation can be safely impounded in them and any escapee flesh is neatly covered by the bra and contents, which snap right over the top like Tupperware.

Conceivably a woman could shelter reptiles by wearing 100% Spandex pants, except that they would make a trio of tortoises look like roaming boils. Stretch pants did exist when I was young, but they were for older women with beehives, afternoon martinis and a cigarette cough. We teenagers wore pants with no give at all. We winched them up as far as we could by rocking back and forth and then had to lie down on our beds to seal the deal, rolling off sideways because our pants had taken the bend out of us. If we did tip over, we'd go down like a plank. It didn't look too bad. These were the days before kids were routinely infused with corn syrup from infancy. And we didn't realize it was uncomfortable because we had nothing to compare it to.

Except for a brief decade with pleated-front trousers, which we also managed to fill up, nothing has changed. My most recent trip to a store revealed racks of jeans that could rub the fuzz off a pipe-cleaner person. They don't leave room for a mosquito bite.

The truth about the airport incident is that there is a nasty, lucrative trade in exotic pets and some men will do anything to get that money. A woman would never stoop that low. Stooping is problematic anyway, and we only got room for bacteria and yeast.