But Maybe I'll Wait Till Margaret Day

So I lost weight, and have to buy new underpants. The size should be whatever my current size is, minus one. The style is a whole different issue. As with most things these days, there is a paralyzing oversufficiency of choices: thong bikini string bikini boy short hipster hi-cut brief and, Lord Love A Newt In Springtime, the C-string. My current style has been derided as Granny Panties. There's nothing wrong with them that higher-waist pants wouldn't fix, but choices in pants have shrunk. And they're not granny panties. They are French Cut. Yes, they stick up two inches above my pants, which is supposed to be a good look, if you're not my sex or age, and have way different taste in music. There are too many rules. Who can keep track?

Anyone who thinks my French Cut underpants are voluminous should have seen my mother's underpants, which, when they were hanging on the line, were visible from blocks away. We played in their shade. Mom's underpants were satiny and capacious and had no elastic at the bottom, but featured a tiny leg with a one-inch inseam. In this respect they resembled what is now called the Boy Short. Basically, they were boy shorts that had ballooned into maturity and were beginning to geeze. Current styles include some that promise "full coverage," but they don't know the meaning of the term. Mom's underpants covered the nether portions completely and went quite a ways north of nether, also. This was a garment of sufficient capacity to cause men to lose curiosity about what lay beneath. My mother was a lady.

I was a miracle baby.

You know, people didn't used to wear underpants. That's a new thing. Modern underpants began to appear in the 1930s. Men's briefs were introduced with the tag-line "restful buoyancy." Such is the power of advertising that men contrasted their previous carefree years of Swingy Floppitance with the promised Restful Buoyancy, and lined up to buy underpants.

Women also managed to make it through a million years of evolution without underpants until the 1930s, when commercial forces collectively said, Depression? I'll give you something to be depressed about. To be fair, there is a certain point to underpants for women who insist on wearing pants. The underpants are a zone of protection against fabric incursions that delicate tissues cannot tolerate and laundry detergent cannot expunge. The solution is to go back to dresses. Women seeking warmth wore crotchless underwear at one point, with two unjoined pants legs held up by garters, and what we now consider the important part left out altogether. It was quite enough trouble to haul up all the skirts and petticoats every time you needed to tinkle without having to negotiate panty removal also.

Knickers were widely worn by women, and worn widely by some women. But even on them, they

were loose. We could learn from them. The day we women began wearing underpants, we had created a slippery slope. Sooner or later, we will hit the bottom.

Whatever Could The "C" Stand For?

I’m not the expert. I could be a candidate for the show “What Not To Wear” based on my underpants alone. I don’t like my underpants and they don’t do anything for anybody else either. I even wear them inside-out to keep the seams and poky bits on the outside, which really seals the deal, aesthetically. But when I saw the new C-string, I found myself asking, “what is the point of underpants, anyway?” Not the new ones—the point of them is obviously right there up the ass, but what is the point of underwear in general?

The C-string is designed for women who find the thong too dowdy. Referring to it as underpants is like calling Roast Bacterium an entrée. It is an attempt to reduce the underwear to its most essential part. If you wanted a more minimalist approach, you could just knit your pubic hair in place.

It’s sproingy, I assume. It snaps right into position, like some kind of crotch caliper. I’m not one to judge, but it seems to me we’re heading down a narrow path to a dark place here. Any underwear that needs to be tucked behind a hemorrhoid to keep it from going astray has a downside. I’m assuming the C-string shares some of the same technology with the underwire bra. And the underwire has a habit of working its way out, leading to sudden perforation, unexplained yelping, that sort of thing. If the same thing were to occur in the underpants zone, I would sooner admit to episodic Tourette’s than own up.

I did make an effort at modernity once. My friend Gina’s daughter had bought her a thong and she instantly passed it on to me. “It’s clean,” she said. “I only had it on for five seconds. You try it.” In spite of the warning implied, I put it on, found the hand-mirror, checked out the rear view, somebody screamed, and then the thong completely disappeared, leaving behind only a sensation I had not experienced since we got rid of the bad toilet paper.

Enthusiasts of the C-string appreciate the lack of panty lines, which—they point out—even afflict thong-wearers. But any attempt to avoid the rear-view visible thong misses the entire point of it, which is to draw attention to a negotiable area of the anatomy in order to strike a deal. “I’ve got something in my pants,” the thong says, pointing, “that you might want to take a look at, and it will only cost you dinner and drinks.” The crotch-caliper goes at the same transaction even more directly: “I already am willing to plant a stick up my ass. What else might I be willing to do?”

On its face, I distrust underwear with a lot of engineering in them. I might make an exception for an edible chastity belt that required suitors to earn their way in. Otherwise, keep it simple.

Men’s underwear, if anything, is even odder. The briefs do seem to offer something in the way of support or confinement or hiding-away. I don’t have anything flapping around in that area, so I don't know if perhaps a certain swaddling is a comfort. But boxers don’t seem to have any function at all. Boxers are the towel on the parakeet cage. Just something to throw over the occupants to settle them down. They’re there to let the wearer know there are even larger pants on the way. They’re like a training tool for the junk-whisperer: here’s a tiny, lightweight pair of pants, they say. Are we all right? Good? Okay now. Let’s try something a little bigger. Their main function is as a first-responder in a crisis flatulence situation.

Back in the day, it was popular to have underwear emblazoned with the days of the week. I can tell from my vitamin-dispenser that that wouldn’t work out well now. At some point I’d be wearing Tuesday and Wednesday at the same time to catch up. There really isn’t much of a point to underwear at my stage in life. Mostly it’s there to fend off the trouser seam when I bend over. With a long enough skirt, I know a way to get panty lines to plumb disappear.