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Underwear: Evolution
Jun. 26th, 2007 08:49 amAs part of my epic shopping expedition to Northgate Mall on Sunday, I bought some boxer briefs. I switched from bikini briefs to boxers when Sharee indicated she preferred them, which made me realize that bikini briefs probably weren't appropriate for my aging body anymore, if they ever had been. (I suppose I should find myself a girlfriend every five to seven years just to assess what style of underwear is appropriate for me as I pass through various phases of aging.) But the problem with boxers is that they tend to migrate in uncomfortable ways, and somewhere in the past year or so I read an amusing analysis of different styles of men's underwear in which the writer advocated boxer briefs as the best possible style. I've been wanting to try them ever since, and I finally took the chance.
The first thing that struck me as I looked at the boxer briefs available at Macy's is that all the packaging featured men with abs that had been carefully, lovingly chiseled out of titanium and then individually polished and glazed. Now my ideal of a man's body is more along the lines of a 25-year-old who does hard physical labor, so he's solid muscle but not of the freakish sort where every individual muscle has been tweaked to its maximum capacity, standing out on its own little rigid island of flesh. There's just too much topography in an iron-pumping muscle man, whatever Dr. Frank-N-Furter says to the contrary. Nonetheless, the racks of abs on those boxes certainly did drive home how unmuscled the relevant region of my own body is. My aging body has developed a bit of a paunch (I blame beer), which I realize isn't much as these things go, but for someone who grew up stick thin, it's still hard to accept gracefully. Plus my legs are still pretty scrawny, and it turns out that boxer briefs are possibly the worst style for that combination. They are form fitting, so they emphasize the scrawninesss of the legs, which in turn makes the paunch look utterly enormous. They turn me into some sort of bizarre distorted circus character out of a French cartoon. (They're just the right shade of blue for that too.)
Of course, despite their promise of unbiased reflection, different mirrors actually tell different stories, and maybe it's just our bathroom mirror that makes it look so. Still, it reminded me of the moment in Costa Rica when I put on my old swimming trunks and immediately went into a cold sweat upon seeing a bloated fishbelly-white body in the hotel mirror. It was completely terrifying, and I had a minor panic attack during which I contemplated never taking my clothes off ever again. Fortunately my nephew had an extra pair of extra-baggy swimming trunks, and the crisis was defused. (I'll never sneer at kids and their baggy pants again, honest!) Nonetheless, that peep into my aging psyche was not pretty. There's gotta be a way to take these changes with a better sense of humor!
It's strange how intimate the feelings generated by underwear are. The closer we get to the skin (and the genitals, I suppose), the closer we get to the inner self. No doubt when Salomé takes off the sixth veil, the seventh is revealed to be a shimmering, silky suit of form-fitting see-through underwear. Even the utterly mundane process of shopping for clothes in a suburban shopping mall can swiftly become a wrestling match with one's self-image and with the process of aging and thus with mortality. Which I suppose makes this my response to that midlife crisis meme that's been popping up around LJ today. You may, like Prufrock, wear your trousers rolled, but what about your underpants? They toll for thee.
The first thing that struck me as I looked at the boxer briefs available at Macy's is that all the packaging featured men with abs that had been carefully, lovingly chiseled out of titanium and then individually polished and glazed. Now my ideal of a man's body is more along the lines of a 25-year-old who does hard physical labor, so he's solid muscle but not of the freakish sort where every individual muscle has been tweaked to its maximum capacity, standing out on its own little rigid island of flesh. There's just too much topography in an iron-pumping muscle man, whatever Dr. Frank-N-Furter says to the contrary. Nonetheless, the racks of abs on those boxes certainly did drive home how unmuscled the relevant region of my own body is. My aging body has developed a bit of a paunch (I blame beer), which I realize isn't much as these things go, but for someone who grew up stick thin, it's still hard to accept gracefully. Plus my legs are still pretty scrawny, and it turns out that boxer briefs are possibly the worst style for that combination. They are form fitting, so they emphasize the scrawninesss of the legs, which in turn makes the paunch look utterly enormous. They turn me into some sort of bizarre distorted circus character out of a French cartoon. (They're just the right shade of blue for that too.)
Of course, despite their promise of unbiased reflection, different mirrors actually tell different stories, and maybe it's just our bathroom mirror that makes it look so. Still, it reminded me of the moment in Costa Rica when I put on my old swimming trunks and immediately went into a cold sweat upon seeing a bloated fishbelly-white body in the hotel mirror. It was completely terrifying, and I had a minor panic attack during which I contemplated never taking my clothes off ever again. Fortunately my nephew had an extra pair of extra-baggy swimming trunks, and the crisis was defused. (I'll never sneer at kids and their baggy pants again, honest!) Nonetheless, that peep into my aging psyche was not pretty. There's gotta be a way to take these changes with a better sense of humor!
It's strange how intimate the feelings generated by underwear are. The closer we get to the skin (and the genitals, I suppose), the closer we get to the inner self. No doubt when Salomé takes off the sixth veil, the seventh is revealed to be a shimmering, silky suit of form-fitting see-through underwear. Even the utterly mundane process of shopping for clothes in a suburban shopping mall can swiftly become a wrestling match with one's self-image and with the process of aging and thus with mortality. Which I suppose makes this my response to that midlife crisis meme that's been popping up around LJ today. You may, like Prufrock, wear your trousers rolled, but what about your underpants? They toll for thee.
