Is your underwear undermining you?
I’m gonna say something I never really imagined myself saying: I’ve been thinking about women’s underwear a lot recently.
Okay, so, not in the way that I suspect most people spend a lot of time thinking about women’s undergarments. Instead, through a more… philosophical? lens.
I’m not entirely sure what prompted this (obviously) deep soul searching. I’m sure a seed was sown during one of those discussions you have with friends about the words that just make your skin crawl.
Lugubrious… Secrete… Curd. And of course, the queen of them all: moist.
Whenever people around me list these off, I find myself feeling practically nothing. Occasionally, I’ll feign disgust at certain words, such as moist, in order to fit in or as an attempt to get a laugh (the need to be liked is strong in this one). But these common “icky words” have never produced a genuinely visceral reaction in my body.
But. I do notice a gut-wrenching reaction every so often in normal, everyday conversations. Ones not centered around these curiously unsettling words. I’ve found that there is one particular term that when I hear it, I feel compelled to cringe. This cringe factor grows exponentially if this particular term is used in a sexual context. Have you guessed it yet? Yup. It’s —
“Panties.”
It just sounds inherently dirty to me. But not like the sexy dirty when you like don’t wear underwear to surprise your partner. Or like sexting (or whatever people do with Snapchat these days) dirty. But more like a coal miner going through your clean laundry and sniffing your knickers dirty.
Y, tho?! What about this, seemingly innocuous word, elicits such disgust and unsettledness in my deep down parts?
Is it the sounds that make up the word? I’m fine with “pant”. I’m fine with “tease”. It doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it, which apparently ups the possibility of being a gross word (sorry, U). So that can’t be it…
Is it the thing itself? Nope. It’s not like an image of crusty underwear flashes to mind every time I hear the word.
So what is it?! And where to start looking for this answer?
It wasn’t until I was organizing my underwear drawer did I find my answer. It was then when I started to notice an unsettling pattern.
Every piece of underwear I possessed — bras, underpants — had these tiny little bows on them. I had never really paid them much mind before, and maybe you haven’t either. They’re really quite small and placed near more… distracting parts. (They’re sinister that way.) But they find themselves attached to almost all underwear sold to women.
At first I had my reflexive, “Cool Girl” response — where I tend to reject any and all things “girly”. But even after that initial repulsion passed (now that I’m slowly deprogramming myself), I felt weird owning and wearing these pieces of clothing — clothing that was supposed to hide/guard my most intimate (and societally valuable) parts — Clothing that had these tiny, little bows on them.
Because, I mean, I’m not sure about you, but I tend to associate bows with…
Yup — Girls. Young girls.
(I mean… I also associate bows with gifts/presents, which is taking me down a whole ‘nother road that might be best for a different time)
However, collectively we have decided, for some reason, to continue to associate females as they age with these childlike adornments. And mostly with their underwear.
I’m sure that this is somehow all tied to fertility. The idea that the younger women are/look, then the more likely they will be to pop out more humans, thus saving the race. But we’ve held onto this. We continue to hold onto the belief that the ideal woman is, in fact, a girl.
So what does this have to do with my revulsion with a particular word? Well, in researching this article, I looked up the definition for the word panties.
underpants or undershorts for women and children.
Okay, you might be saying to your adorable selves, what exactly is so bad about grouping women and children together?
A. Grouping women together with children, inadvertently and incorrectly connects traits to both. For instance, women aren’t as helpless as children. We have more resources. We have more knowledge. We have more strength. We’re not on The Titanic, people!
B. It takes away our power.
A smart woman talks more about how the language you use can affect people psychologically and behaviorally:
Maybe if we start using language that elevates women and doesn’t equate them with sweet, small, cuddly tender things, we’ll start treating them as more than that as well. Language sets expectations. Let’s set ourselves up to have women behave like mature, responsible women. In this way, we encourage women to keep being the complicated, wonderful, unique, gifted beings that they are.
- Mayim Bialik
Language matters. Just like using people’s correct names or pronouns matters.
I’ve been mulling over all of this for a while now, and it wasn’t until I was watching this latest season of Jessica Jones did the fire get lit under my bee-hind.
In this episode, a strong, female character responds to the comment of her “panties being in a bunch” with:
Women don’t wear panties, we wear UNDERWEAR!
The sexualization of girls and the infantilization of adult women are two sides of the same coin. They both tell us that we should find youth, inexperience, and naivete sexy in women, but not in men. This reinforces a power and status difference between men and women, where vulnerability, weakness, and dependency and their opposites are gendered traits: desirable in one sex but not the other.
- Lisa Wade, PhD.
So… What to do?
Well, I’ll leave that up to you. But I, for one, have decided that some changes needed to be made in my life. Both in language and in the underwear drawer.
I now make a concerted effort to refer to all women as women. Even though this sorta felt wrong at first. As if calling a 23 year old a “woman” instantly aged her 20 years. It felt inappropriate. But only because it was a new practice. I’ve found that with time, I realized that I am reinforcing and respecting the power of women around me possess. And that has helped the habit to catch on.
I now refuse to use the word “panties” when referring to underwear being worn by anyone over the age of 12. Actually? I think I might just be completely done with the word entirely.
And finally — I no longer own any underwear with bows on them. I’m more conscious when I begrudgingly have to buy new underpants to not select any with these innocuous little pieces of fabric. I also went through and carefully cut off all of these minuscule ribbons, pressed to remain in a perfect, flat, ever-perky shape.
None of those adjectives could be used to describe me.
And none of those should be used to define women.
