The Men Wear Thongs Question I Finally Have a Real Answer To

My brother in law found a thong in my washing basket last year, in 2019, and I have never once been allowed to forget that it happened.

It wasn’t his, obviously. It was a “sample” that had been delivered to me in a subscription box I’d signed up for reviewing, way back when I used to write for websites and this particular website specialising in men’s grooming had decided underwear fell under grooming. You know how lifting something up by the waistband and holding it away from your body for maximum visibility of said waistband is probably universal *courtesy* across cultures? Callum lifted it with two fingers like it was a piece of damning evidence at a crime scene, brandished it in front of me in my own kitchen and said, and I am not paraphrasing this, “Right, who’s this for, then.” He will still, four years later, bring it up every Christmas. My sister thinks it’s the funniest story that’s ever happened in our family.

I think it’s kind of rude that one single pair of novelty underwear has managed to become synonymous with my entire personality at family gatherings, but I get why she thinks that. I understand why he says it. It is funny. Men in thongs, culturally speaking, are still punchline-only. It’s a humorous image.

Which is the entire problem with that mentality, because believe it or not I have now spent weeks actually looking into this because I couldn’t let the stupid comment bounce around in my head and also it’s way more interesting than you’d think. Turns out that no, actually the answer isn’t the joke at all. The answer is unsatisfyingly mundane and honestly a bit boring because it basically means that Callum had a point. It just wasn’t punk’d_about_to_rsquo_t_laugh_that_pohnky point.

The actual case for men wearing thongs, which nobody wants to hear because sounds like the joke

The thing that stops people talking when you say it out loud: men wear thongs, when they wear them, for very nearly the exact same reason women started wearing them years ago. Visible panty lines. Seriously, that’s it. That’s the hill we’re dying on. A pair of fitted trousers + a thin fabric + a bit of athletic kit that clings = suddenly your pants want to put on a subtonal festival for everyoneinsideyour trousers and it’s not what you bought them for. Women dealt with this years ago and never looked back. Men have been allowed, for some reason, to retain the problem and letting admitting there’s a problem admitting defeat.

I asked a friend of mine about this. His name is Dev and Dev has the best trousers of anyone I know but also will talk to me about underwear logistics because he’s heard this exact conversation before and knows that the nervous chuckle just isn’t an adequate answer. Dev also very seriously cycles and by seriously I mean full lycra, clip in shoes, fully committed. He told me he made the switch to a thong style underneath his cycling shorts about eighteen months ago because his usual fare of boxer briefs kept getting caught up in the padding of his cycling shorts and giving him – and this was not a joke – “a permanent wedgie for forty miles.” He didn’t say anything brave about it, he just said he did it. He dressed for comfort. Like picking out a saddle for your bike.

Which is the reframing that clicked for me. Nobody questions a woman putting on a thong under a skin tight dress. It’s practical. It’s understood. It’s reached “oh yeah, people do that” levels of cliché so people don’t think about it anymore. You wear shorts under shorts for winter and that’s never behaviour up for discussion. Let a man do the exact same thing for the exact same reasons and suddenly he’s improvising, making lifestyle choices, being funny for the group chat. All because a few inches of material cling differently when they’re not competing with another fabric. The thong didn’t change. The way material moves over a hip bone didn’t change. The only thing that’s changed is how comfortable we’re allowed to assume someone is about that decision based on the gender attached to their hips, and that’s less of a fashion critique and more of a reflection on how we still look at bodies differently under clothes.

The Men Wear Thongs Question I Finally Have a Real Answer To

I bought some myself, of course I did, research doesn’t begin or end at Googleing, and wore them under a pair of grey jumper pants that had become essentially unwearable without the exact pair of seamless boxers I own one of, which meant I’d been doing laundry around those stupid pants like they were held hostage. The thong eliminated all of that instantly. No lines, no bunching, no entire laundry schedule dictated by whether or not I wore that one pair of pants. There was a brief moment of self awareness when I put them on, I will not lie to you about that, there’s a look you give yourself standing in your underwear drawer realizing your leisurewear has bested you that I’m not sure we can unsee. But they stayed flattened to my hips the entire day. The literal second I forgot they were there, which was about ten minutes in, they just worked. And if I’m being completely honest with you, thong or no: that’s the worst critique you can level at a piece of clothing. If it disappears once it’s served its purpose you’ve won.

Where I think the line is, and it isn’t what you think

I’m not going to stand here and tell you to all go buy thongs and embrace them for all they are because now we’ve just replaced one blanket statement with another. This whole piece is trying to unpack nuances, so let’s do that.

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The line, in my opinion, is drawn at what you’re asking that pair of thongs to do vs what it was actually made for. See, Dev was wearing his for a reason. A very thigh rubbing jersey reason. It was replacing an under layer that wasn’t working for him and causing discomfort on long rides. That means that when he slips his thongs on, they have a job to do. They have context. They fit into a gap that needed filling in his life. My cousin’s husband, Owen, wore one once under a pair of ridiculously fitted suit trousers for a wedding he was attending because none of his normal underwear was working and it still happened, and that was enough to stop him getting lined. Both of those scenarios are taking care of an underwear problem with a solution that was designed for that problem.

Where it gets iffy for me is when a thong is bought to make a statement rather than solve one. If you’re picking one out because you think your partner will find it unexpected or daring, cool, problem not mine to solve because that’s you vibing with your partner however you understand them to vibe. But if you’re rolling into 2021 thinking you can suddenly ditch your whole everyday underwear drawer and replace it with thongs? Ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll be disappointed. Men’s daily wear isn’t tight enough, in general, to require that kind of solution and a thong under your favourite loose-fitting pair of jeans just feels… inadequate? Right back at the job it was built for. The only thing I have under very tight trousers is a pair of those thongs now because everything else just rides up my hips and it’s not fair on the laundry. I wore a pair to work yesterday, stupidly, because I started writing this and felt like I needed to experience it firsthand to finish it, and by mid-afternoon I understood viscerally why this style only really exists for cycling shorts and suiting and literally no other clothing responsibility. It’s not comfortable if your jeans don’t squeeze your hips. They exist to solve a problem that most men’s daily wear doesn’t give them.

Men should absolutely wear thongs if they want to. Please do. My real, actual answer to the question is: wear them when you’ve got a specific reason that regular underwear isn’t solving. Don’t wear them just because you think you should or have been told you can’t. They’re solving a regular underwear problem that your daily routine may or may not have.

The Men Wear Thongs Question I Finally Have a Real Answer To

Here I am admitting I was part of the problem

If you had asked me my opinion on the subject several years ago, I would have laughed too. Probably nervously. Not because I had ever given it any thought, I hadn’t, but because asking me to think about men and thongs was asking me to think about ifs and buts and all the ways our society laughs off half the population’s bodies on a daily basis. Buuuuuuuuuuut here’s the thing, I was that person. For years. I never interrogated why until I sat down to actually write this and realise I had been dunking on a perfectly good solution to a very specific problem just because I hadn’t been asked to think about why not before.

So here’s the updated stance, because I think you deserve that much after I’ve dragged it through dirt: I owe thongs an apology. Not a “whoops my bad guys I was wrong” apology, because they still look ridiculous on my body the same way my boots look ridiculous on Amelia’s. But I spent a long time as someone who could casually joke about a garment that provides a daily solution for hundreds of thousands of women worldwide, and that wasn’t flipped on its head enough for me to care enough to question why everyone else found it so funny in the first place.

My sister laughed when I told her all of this over a phone call. Her response wasn’t “Omg tell your brother in law” it was “but are you going to tell your brother in law?” and I said absolutely not. Some jokes are funnier leaving them exactly where they are. She agreed immediately. There’s a difference between understanding an issue well enough to have an honest answer to a question and feeling like you need to go back and air out everyone else’s dirty laundry at dinner just because you did.

Callum can have his moment. He got that thong practically screened door slammed in his face. It’ll be his little medal.

But to anyone who’s actually asking and not setting themselves up for a punchline: it’s comfortable as fuck once you’re doing the right activity for it. It’s not intrinsically any of the things people say around dinner tables. It’s a tool for when your leggings want to kill your pants’ vibe and nothing more. Like anything else in your underwear drawer, it’s great at one thing and terrible at everything else. The only reason we treat that as a question at all about men and not women is because no one’s allowed it to simply be yet.