American Thighs (12 page)

There Is No “MAN” in “MANPRIS”

For some unknowable reason, I recently read a fashion article about men's fashions—in a woman's magazine. It made references to “man sandals” and “man bags” and CAPRI PANTS FOR MEN, which are apparently called “manpris.”

Excuse me—I can stand for some men to wear some sandals—depends on the guy, depends on the sandal—but it's a VERY fine line they walk in those open-toed shoes, in my opinion—assuming that you are like me in your preference for manly-looking men.

There is no such thing as a “man bag.” It is a PURSE, and if the nicest thing you can think of to call me is “old-fashioned” for having that opinion, then I'll take it and whatever else you can dish out. If he's gonna carry a purse, then he can tote the Tampax and I'll leave my bag at home. I am just not interested in my man carrying a simple clutch, no matter how much it might complement his ensemble. First of all, my man won't be wearing an ensemble—if he is wearing one, he is somebody else's man—my mistake.

Then the whole “manpris” thing. I am SO sorry, but there is not a straight man alive who could NOT look ridiculous in a
pair of Capri pants. Think of any even moderately masculine guy in the world—any of 'em—and then imagine him in a pair of Capri pants. You've just gone from Tom Brady to Ethel Mertz—no way around it. If you see a guy in Capri pants, please take his picture and e-mail it to me. We'll put him up in the Gallery at www.sweetpotatoqueens.com and start our own version of “Glamour Don'ts!” If you spot one carrying a purse, wearing sandals AND capris—you will win some kind of prize—but you can't stage it—it has to be a TRUE Sighting.

When I used to frequent the YMCA on a regular basis, my day started there at five in the a and m, not exactly the time of day when you necessarily want to see what are normally considered, in polite society, to be the private parts of any gentleman with whom you are not well acquainted to the point of extreme fondness. Right off, I can't actually think of WHAT time of day WOULD be conducive to your wanting to goon some strange guys' naughty bits, but for sure, five am is just way too early for it.

Nonetheless, there was a man—an older, very tan man—who was an obsessively regular attendee at that time of day. For an older dude, Robert was in pretty fair shape, but, of course, not NEARLY as good as he IMAGINED he was when he got dressed every day for his workout. Come to think of it, out of all the fabulous-bodied men I have seen in my life—and I've seen me a few—I cannot think of a single ONE that would, in my opinion, look GOOD working out in a pair of women's under
pants—even if they were, like Robert's, a nice shade of maroon.

Where he found MAROON women's underpants, I will never know—perhaps he just bought the big white ones and Rit'd 'em in the sink hisownself—but they absolutely WERE nylon women's underpants and he wore them—with a tank top TUCKED IN—and SANDALS—into the weight room—at five am nearly every day of the world.

On the days that he DID NOT wear the maroon panties, he wore a sky-blue tank-style short UNITARD and the ubiquitous sandals. Every couple of weeks or so, he would shun the panties and the unitard in favor of a pair of white hot pants, also with a very small tank top—and sandals.

The man did not appear to own a pair of athletic shoes and I don't believe he had ever HEARD of an athletic SUPPORTER. The hot pants at least were snug—bwahahaha—they were “snug” like paint on a fender—but they did keep things sort of hemmed up, if you know what I mean. The panties and the unitard were most commodious and allowed for free movement of all the contents. But all of his outfits were at least three inches on the bad side of WAY too short. Thanks.

Along about the time that a bunch of us, men and women, would be winding up our workout with some ab exercises on the big mat on the weight platform, Robert would arrive to do his “warm-up” routine—which consisted of standing about two feet away from us, with his back to us and doing some inde
scribable “exercise” that involved a whole LOT of bending over. There was simply nowhere in the room to look except at Robert's mostly naked behind. Helluva way to start the day, I gotta tell you.

In case you don't already know this—there is one always reliable way to discern—if you're really all THAT curious—whether someone has gotten that shoe-leather tan in a tanning bed. Get them to take off everything but their underwear and bend over right in front of you. If they've been in a tanning bed, their legs will be uniformly dark brown except for a horizontal white stripe right below each butt cheek. This is formed when one lies on one's back in the tanning bed and one's butt cheeks get mooshed down on the top of one's thighs—that little strip under there is hidden from the rays and remains blinding-white. So if you REALLY MUST KNOW, this is a fool-proof test—which does not, however, preclude its use BY fools.

We were NOT TRYING to avail ourselves of this information re: Robert and his mythic tan—we just failed, unfortunately, to go blind in time to avoid the proof displayed before us.

The Y staff was most solicitous of the members' likes and dislikes, wants and needs, regarding the facilities, staffing, and programs. To better hear from the membership in these matters, they installed a number of suggestion boxes in various locations around the building—one being the weight room. And so, SOMEBODY offered 'em a suggestion as follows:

And for SOME reason, they thought I wrote it! Go figger.

Die, Girdle, Die!

The feminine fashion markets today are flooded with all manner of garments promising safe and effective girth control—at least for the hours of the day that we spend clothed—and they promise to do it invisibly and with no personal effort required of us, the intended victim, ahh, wearer of these magic garments.

I scoff and I do so with authority born of miserable, sweaty experience. Call it what you will, it's a GIRDLE and I have definitely been there and worn that.

Okay this is one of those we-walked-six-miles-in-the-snow-barefoot-to-school-every-day stories, only it's actually, horrifically TRUE: when I was in JUNIOR HIGH, we had to wear dresses and stockings to school EVERY DAY. Let me just tell you—unless you lived in the Time Before Pantyhose and Tampax, you don't know shit about misery.

I'm not going to dignify antiquated feminine hygiene products with any discussion at all and I am thinking of becoming Catholic for the sole purpose of nominating Dr. Earle Haas for sainthood—he invented tampons, bounteous blessings be upon him and all of his house forever and ever, amen. Somebody did officially name him as one of the “1000 Makers of the Twentieth Century.” I trust he was at the very top of the list—and, in my opinion, Allen Gant, the pantyhose patriarch, should be right up there with him.

We had to wear stockings to school every single day and there was no such thing as pantyhose yet and garter belts, along with pierced ears, were for whores. We had to wear GIRDLES to keep our stockings up. This was because the huge Girdle Political Action Committee had successfully lobbied the World Fashion Powers and convinced THEM to convince US that “girdles were glamorous.” What do you reckon THAT cost 'em? I'm thinking somebody's plastic surgery got fully funded on that little boondoggle.

Miserably tight and wretchedly hot, certainly two of my tip-top desires for clothing, the attached garters that were smashed into your flesh by the legs of the girdle were of particular interest to me because, as it turns out, I have a mild sensitivity to latex. “Mild” in that, as a sexually active adult, I would not be able to detect the presence of a latex condom, any more than I could detect a lit match—down there. This, of course, was back before “latex sensitivity” had been invented, though, so nobody knew why I would develop such painful lesions on my thighs from simply wearing stockings like everybody else.

It's almost inconceivable, some of the crap women have been persuaded to put upon their own persons over the years—and the girdle was just one more example. You gotta hand it to guys—they might be led for a time down the path of mullets and Moe-Dos, and okay, I'll grant you, the leisure suit was pretty awful—but you won't see THEM goaded into wearing girdles. (Unless we could convince them that, no, we didn't mean
“girdles are hot” but “girdles are HOT”—in which case, they would all be racing out to get 'em and stuffing themselves into 'em, so fast as to induce head-spinning in casual observers, which, when you think about it, would be pretty entertaining, wouldn't it?)

I suppose the girdle was an improvement over the corset—but that seems a lot like saying it's better to get hit by a bus than to be thrown out of an airplane. It always seemed to me that if you had to wear stockings, a garter belt was at least a cooler way to keep them up—anything would be better than a rubber suit, seemed like to me—whores were looking smarter to me all the time. They pierced their ears so their earrings didn't pinch and they didn't sweat to death just to keep their hose hiked up—made sense to me.

Girdles were tight and hot and the garters made permanent indentations in your thighs—it's hard to imagine that it was possible to get women to willingly wear them, but, like every other female in the country between the ages of thirteen and a thousand, I fell victim to the dictates of
Vogue
magazine that, sooner or later, trickled down even unto the sweat-soaked, fashion-impaired hinterlands of Mississippi. And so it came to pass that I found myself weighing, at the most, including the girdle and my shoes, maybe 110 pounds—but it's 90 degrees inside our school (that was decades away from being air-conditioned, by the way) and, under my dress, I'm wearing a GIRDLE that is made of something called Lastex, which is rub
ber's second cousin, once removed, to keep my nylon stockings up. I am talking HOT and a disposition that could most charitably be described as “nasty.” Is there anything on earth more ill than the temper of a woman in tight clothing on a hot day? Perhaps if a wolverine could be fitted with a girdle in July—that might come close.

Girdle manufacturers made a pretty commanding case for their product—claiming that women who wore girdles described themselves as “feeling more organized, more alert, more authoritative and attractive.” I don't know that I could formulate a coherent response to those women. First of all, I don't know and can't imagine that those women actually existed or that they actually said those things, of their own free will, with no money OR drugs involved.

When PANTYHOSE came along, it was like a worldwide edict of “WOMAN—THOU ART LOOSED!” and I'm sure there were countless men who escaped wholesale slaughter every summer as a direct result of our dispositions being thusly improved.

Women were actually being slowly liberated—first from the corset by the girdle, then from the girdle by the pantyhose—true life-changing progress and only over the course of about fifty-some-odd years—astounding, in an evolutionary sense. Of course, for those of us who were LIVING THROUGH all this delightful progress, it was not unlike hell, if, like me, you think that one of its famed circles is a tight waistband on a hot
day. But now, all that we have suffered for and gained is in jeopardy if not altogether lost.

Bare-Legged but Back in the Girdle?

I have no idea WHO in the pantyhose cartel pissed off the fashionistas to bring us all into the current state of mandated year-round bare-leggedness, but, lordinheaven, I will be so glad when this feud is over. Whoever you pantyhose people are out there—cough up whatever ransom the fashion freaks are demanding so they will declare once again that women's hosiery is de rigueur and the ugly can stop.

Oh, please. Summertime, in a sundress with sandals, of course, just please, not too-too short if you're over forty. But I don't care how young you are and how gorgeous your gams are—in the wintertime, the bets are not so much off as they are frozen. Goose bumps are not attractive—no matter how tender the age of the goose. Whatever the season, for a woman to be all dressed up and have her bare feet stuck in a pair of pumps—yuck—it looks like a guy in a tux with no socks on. And have you looked at what it does to the insides of your shoes? Even bigger yuck.

But now let's talk about your older, more mature stems—or tree trunks, as the case may be—and the bare-legged thing. Oh, it is bad. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but until hose make
a comeback, you need to be wearing slacks. Sure, hunny, if your legs are good, you can still do sundresses and the like for casual wear. And I know you might be in great shape and therefore you might think you still look pretty snappy in your business attire and Ferragamos, but before you go out like that again, please, put on your reading glasses and gaze downward at the skin on your legs. THAT is what they look like to everybody in the entire world who's under forty—because THEY can actually SEE.