Someone, no doubt, has taken a census of active bloggers and other social-media types, focusing on gender. I don’t know what the breakdown might be; maybe I’m stereotyping at least one sex, if not both, but I would not be surprised to learn that more women than men contribute to the ebb and flow of online conversation.
And I’m not complaining, not at all. Totally fine with it—
Well, one little corner of human existence goes sadly unremarked upon because of the gender imbalance. And because (at least in the West) gender-based cultural constraints forbid discussion of it.
I speak, of course, of men’s underwear. I speak in particular of… The Slot.
A woman I once knew confessed that she had never understood The Slot’s purpose until she had a son. “But surely, ” I said, “you must have seen, er, handled, er, uh, known about The Slot bef—”
Yes, she said. All of those things. It had just never occurred to her that The Slot might have some sort of at-least-daily practical value. (Apparently she regarded it as a little foible of the designers — a curlicue, a filigree, a aesthetic adornment of an otherwise plain functional garment: something added to men’s underthings just as, say, lace might be added to women’s.) Then she observed her son, imitating his father and, y’know, making use of The Slot. The light bulb blinked on.
Recently I have been alarmed to discover that The Slot (like seemingly everything else) is endangered by the forces of capitalists and/or just-because-we-can busybodies.
Now, it may help (if that’s the word) to know that I don’t buy underwear, like, every month. Every so often, I just know that it’s time. (Doing laundry often triggers the alarm bell, so to speak.) So I stop by a local department store and buy a three-pack. Other than price and, um, well, genre (boxers, briefs, boxer briefs, mid-thigh vs. thong, etc.), there’s really no shopping decision to make. Because something so basic, so elemental, so plain never need change.
A few months ago, alarm duly triggered, I ducked into the store on a lunch break. Grabbed a three-pack. Opened it the next morning, post-shower, and donned a fresh pair.
I don’t often say, aloud, what people mean when they type WTF?!? in a comment somewhere online. I did on that morning, however. Because the model in question, it so happened, was stubbornly Slotless.
It eschewed The Slot.
I’ve tried but failed to come up with a suitable analogy to help women readers understand my frustration, nay, my rage.* Why? There just doesn’t seem to be a women’s garment designed to be used sometimes with a protrusion and sometimes not. (You have no idea how hard I sweated over the wording there.) The closest thing I’ve come up with: imagine that all women’s shoes had always been open-toed, and manufacturers decided at some point that the open toe was superfluous, dangerous, unsanitary, or whatever. So they closed it off. Because, of course, if you needed for whatever reason to expose your toes to air you could just remove the shoe, or leave the bulk of your foot in the shoe but work the toes up and over the lip of the upper.
(The flaw in this analogy, of course, is that toes are not… not… That For Which The Slot Was Designed.)
Last month, The Missus and I headed out of town for a long weekend’s mini-vacation. Perhaps it’s a measure of how long we’ve gone without traveling, but I’d forgotten (I know, I know) to pack any underwear, other than the (Slotted) pair I was wearing at the time.
No problem! We’re vacationing in an area practically carpeted with outlet stores! I’ll just swing by the Jockey outlet and—
Luckily, I’d remembered the lesson of the last purchase. Because, it seems, men’s underwear makers have decided that further tampering is called for. The cunning vertical over-and-under Slot is now available horizontal (higher or lower as the gentleman’s need might be); it is available diagonal; of course it is available (as stated) in a completely absent manner. For all I know, it can be had switched around to the back or side (left- or right-handed use!) or — cripes — in a design-your-own multi-directional-Ziploc model.
I do know that I finally found something approximating “normal” all the way at the back of the store, in a couple of racks labeled “Classic” (a term also associated with 45-rpm records and movies starring Bette Davis). True, the fabric they were made of was some sort of weird thin stretchy-grabby stuff (don’t try putting them on if you’ve got a hangnail). But they were the right form.
And yet why, oh gods, why was this necessary? Didn’t any of the designers ever stand in a public rest room and try to wrestle himself — like a rodeo cowboy struggling with a bull tangled in the traces — into a useful posture as the fellows behind him guffawed into the crooks of their elbows?
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* I haven’t discussed this with any guys, either. Not at all. I assume they will understand and, uh, support me.
darcknyt says
Guys do understand, and support. This is travesty. What ain’t broke don’t need fixin’. Whose idea is this, anyway?!
Nance says
It’s fashion, friend. Fashion never did make good sense (I offer stilettos as a prime example), but, if you can make enough people feel dorky for not following it, you can make yourself a buck or two. Instead of the bi-annual three-pack, you might get an entire segment of the population to throw out all the oldies and purchase the newbies at once. Next? Planned undie obsolescence. And if that ain’t American, I don’t know what is.
Eileen says
Best analogy to female clothing I can come up with is the nursing bra … but as I’ve never had a baby, this is only a guess — but the whole purpose of the garment is to be able to nurse without taking off the entire dang bra.
My best guess is that “slotless” is a cost reduction measure. I spent this whole blog post thinking about coffee filters (this will make more sense in a minute). I recently purchased a coffee maker that used flat bottom filters instead of the cone filters the old machine had used. The flat bottom filter packs cost about $2.50 for 200 … the cone filters cost $4 for 100 — the only difference I can tell is that the cone filter must be seamed and the flat bottom is just stamped out. Now, if I was sewing underware and I could eliminate an entire feature and the subsequent seaming/edging I could reduce cost … and make men look like idiots in public restrooms … so much potential for the wicked.
John says
Darc: I try (and fail) to imagine what the patent must have looked like — how it could possibly amount to more than an existing patent, with a feature whited out. For sure, easier to write than one which actually has to explain the feature’s purpose in the first place!
John says
Nance: yeah, stilletos are right up there in the list of Fashion Products No Sane Person Actually Expects Anyone to Wear.
Although I’ve whined about the problem privately, I hesitated to post about it. So many things about women’s fashion are dumb, arbitrary, or outright cruel that for a guy to gripe about The Slot’s deletion feels childish. Or churlish.
John says
Eileen: nursing bra — good one.
The cost-savings angle, I’d thought about. The Slot is, after all, not simply A Slot — a slit cut in a piece of fabric. It is a made thing, with a rounded, finished hem, sometimes a button or snap. And it overlaps two pieces of fabric: a given square inch of That Which Is To Be Covered is shielded by two(ish) one-square-inch swatches, one atop the other. So dispensing with The Slot eliminates both thread for the seam and a tiny bit of the fabric itself. Multiply that by a gazillion pairs of shorts and within a year you’ve probably made up the salary of the designer who came up with it.
Thank you so much for the parenthesis in your second paragraph. I was ready to bail when I got to it.
The Querulous Squirrel says
OK, I’ll throw in the hat. Bras. When I was young, bras were simple, thin fabric, often stretchy, very comfortable. Some girls chose “padded” bras, which were thick and awkward and an object of derision and negation “No, of course I’m not wearing a padded bra.” Now, ALL BRAS ARE PADDED! They are thick and uncomfortable, lined with wires. Supposedly the purpose is to camouflage nipples because women are no longer supposed to have nipples (just like men aren’t supposed to have their protrusions). I get confused because some women get breast enhancements and other breast reductions but the purpose of these bras is definitely enhancement, whether you want it or not. I wear them every day and I hate them.
John says
Squirrel: Funnily enough, The Missus and I were just talking about some of that a few days ago. She was telling me about a bra of hers with one of those underwire things; the wire had actually broken, at which point it stabbed through the fabric and, well, into her.
Not for the first time, I caught myself wondering about the indignities their clothing visits upon women, every day!
I’ve noticed an advertising trend in the last couple-three years, in which what used to be called “plus-size” (really normal-size) women model bras to demonstrate how comfortable they are. Really hoping never to see men’s underthings pitched this way.
whaddayamean says
hahahaha ohhh boy this post made my day. not to say i find your righteous indignation amusing. ahem.
John says
whaddayamean: Of course you’re not saying that!
marta says
My first thought on reading this was also the nursing bra–which I was very grateful for when I was nursing. But some of them are made easier to use than others, let’s say.
Oh, and I’m with Squirrel. The look I got when I asked the salesman (yes, it was man working in Victoria Secret) for a padless bra. He clearly thought I was mad.
John says
marta: Now I’m annoyed that I didn’t think of nursing bras, too. Probably that ornery case of Y-Chromosome Blindness acting up again.
marta says
@John – Oh, that ornery Y.