Underwear sociolinguistics

My posting on "Tighty-whities: the semantics" elicited some thought-provoking e-mail about the use of this expression and of other pieces of underwear vocabulary. A lot of what's going on, but not all of it, turns on attitudes towards the underwear itself -- the perceived social "meanings" of the underwear (briefs vs. boxers, Y-fronts vs. bikini briefs, white vs. colored, cotton vs. more exotic fabrics) -- rather than on attitudes towards particular linguistic expressions.

1. In my first posting on this subject ("Tidy-whiteys") I noted the disdain that some people have for white Y-front briefs, a disdain that seems to be based on the judgment that such underwear is conservative, unadventurous, uptight. Now Lal Zimman has written (on 21 March 2005) to say that the negative judgments are likely to be on both the clothing and the expression tighty-whities (or however you want to spell it), and to offer another route to these judgments:

Personally, I have always found tighty-whities to be a derogatory way to describe an article of clothing that is also being judged as negative (so it would be bad if I said "Ha ha, you wear y-fronts!" but if I say "tighty-whities", I'm insulting you both with the fact itself and the wording), unless one is talking about children's underpants (since little boys are expected to wear tighty-whities.) I think the origin of the negativity associated with tighty-whities comes from people in their 20s or younger, for whom there was enormous pressure at a certain time for boys to switch over from tighty-whities to boxers. Boxers were cool because of skaters, rappers, and grunge rock stars showing their boxers, and this desirability reinforced the separation of boxers as adult and T-Ws as childish. So (for me and my peers at least) around early adolescence, when a child is the worst thing you can be considered, the switch had to be made and T-Ws were forever looked down upon.

This is briefs vs. boxers, with the canonical briefs being white and cotton and fly-front. In the social world Zimman is describing, boxers communicate adulthood.

Competing with this social meaning is what I'll call the "hotness effect": briefs (of any sort) are hotter than boxers, because briefs display your equipment (in remarkable detail, if the briefs are tight enough and thin enough), and men are, well, vain about these things. The package is especially important to gay men, and it turns out that material designed for gay men portrays a world of briefs, not boxers.

Consider the Undergear catalogue, which (with its big brother the International Male catalogue) is transparently aimed at a gay male audience. The Spring 2005 issue of the catalogue offers not a single pair of boxer shorts. There are briefs of many varieties: bikini briefs, boxer briefs, thongs, jockstrap briefs (essentially jockstraps with seats). But no boxers; the occasional item labeled "boxer" is actually a boxer brief. Now, in the real world, some gay men do wear boxers. ( I can vouch for this, though I haven't done a systematic study.) From what I see at my (not gay-oriented) health club, plenty of straight men wear briefs too (probably because of the hotness effect, or just for the feeling of support that a pouch provides), but gay guys are in general much more committed to briefs over boxers than straight guys are. The Undergear catalogue provides a kind of distilled version of this commitment: in Gayworld, everybody wears briefs.

In the Undergear Gayworld, guys wear mostly colored briefs (though white is available as well), mostly in extraordinary fabrics (though cotton is available as well). There's the shimmery nylon/spandex Flawless Mesh Collection: "Super sheer, sexy mesh is virtually undetectable beneath clothing. Soft, smooth stretch fabric conforms to body. Available in a variety of brilliant colors... Nude, Black, White [more like Silver, I'd say], Purple, javascript:submitPost();Turquoise, Red." (p. 22) On the facing page there's the nylon/spandex Seamless Mesh Collection, essentially fishnet made into tank tops and box