grief, there is a story. Apparently boy shorts (my
underwear of choice) are leading the curve, and sales of thongs have fallen by
20%. From Peter York, social commentator (and what kind of a job is that? I want
it): “It?s one thing to see Brazilian lovelies on beaches, but when
full-bodied Tracy next door has a visible thong it?s really a bit too much
information.?
I started wearing
thongs in the mid-90s. My version was essentially a triangle hoisted up by
strips of elastic. (I believe this is known as a t-string.) Thongs were my go-to
underwear. I wore them even with jeans, when unless you were wearing panties
sewn from scrap metal sheets there was no way your panty lines would be visible.
I never succumbed to the low-rise jeans/high-rise thong value meal combo, unless
it was by accident, and never bought a single thong clip for added bling, as if
ass crack weren’t enough of an attention-getter.
Getting pregnant was an underwear
nightmare. My collection of cheeky Topshop thongs (bright pink with skulls,
black with a photorealistic banana, white and green sprinkled with comic faces
of cute girls, royal blue with angel wings…) went to the bottom of the box,
drizzled with my post-fashionable tears. Most of my pregnancy pants were
“underbellies,” meant to be worn low, and so I had to find extra-large bikini
panties that wouldn’t show too much. In my eighth month, I gave up and bought a
six-pack of high-waisted white cotton granny panties.
Nowadays, lowrise boyshorts stay on top
of the box. They’re a lovely invention. They hold up my butt and don’t pinch my
waist. They don’t leave panty lines because they end right underneath the lower
curve of my behind, and unless I’m wearing a pair of tight white leggings (for
which fashion crime I must be featured on a TV show that specializes in
humiliating people, preferably pelted with objects such as maggots and
distasteful office pumps in muted gray), they are practically invisible. My
after-childbirth body sags in all the wrong places, and I think thongs will just
emphasize those places, like evil drop shadows on
fonts.
I’ll keep the thongs around
though. Especially this set which says “Freaky Friday,” “Sadist Saturday” and
“Sinful Sunday.” (Or something like that.) I may give up on men, but never on
witty underwear.