Cities cracking down on Boxer Short fashion. Shouldn't we worry about other things?

This is simply amazing!!! Our "leaders" are worried about
seeing teenagers Boxer Shorts.

It's a fashion that started in prison, and now the saggy pants craze has come full circle - low-slung street strutting in some cities may soon mean run-ins with the law, including a stint in jail.

Proposals to ban saggy pants are starting to ride up in several places. At the extreme end, wearing pants low enough to show boxers or bare buttocks in one small Louisiana town means six months in jail and a $500 fine. A crackdown also is being pushed in Atlanta. And in Trenton, getting caught with your pants down may soon result in not only a fine, but a city worker assessing where your life is headed.

"Are they employed? Do they have a high school diploma? It's a wonderful way to redirect at that point," said Trenton Councilwoman Annette Lartigue, who is drafting a law to outlaw saggy pants. "The message is clear: We don't want to see your backside."

The bare-your-britches fashion is believed to have started in prisons, where inmates aren't given belts with their baggy uniform pants to prevent hangings and beatings. By the late 80s, the trend had made it to gangster rap videos, then went on to skateboarders in the suburbs and high school hallways.

"For young people, it's a form of rebellion and identity," Adrian "Easy A.D." Harris, 43, a founding member of the Bronx's legendary rap group Cold Crush Brothers. "The young people think it's fashionable. They don't think it's negative."

But for those who want to stop them see it as an indecent, sloppy trend that is a bad influence on children.

"It has the potential to catch on with elementary school kids, and we want to stop it before it gets there," said C.T. Martin, an Atlanta councilman. "Teachers have raised questions about what a distraction it is."

In Atlanta, a law has been introduced to ban sagging and punishment could include small fines or community work - but no jail time, Martin said.

The penalty is stiffer in Delcambre, La., where in June the town council passed an ordinance that carries a fine of up to $500 or six months in jail for exposing underwear in public. Several other municipalities and parish governments in Louisiana have enacted similar laws in recent months.

At Trenton hip-hop clothing store Razor Sharp Clothing Shop 4 Ballers, shopper Mark Wise, 30, said his jeans sag for practical reasons.

"The reason I don't wear tight pants is because it's easier to get money out of my pocket this way," Wise said. "It's just more comfortable."

Shop owner Mack Murray said Trenton's proposed ordinance unfairly targets blacks.

"Are they going to go after construction workers and plumbers, because their pants sag, too?" Murray asked. "They're stereotyping us."

The American Civil Liberties Union agrees.

"In Atlanta, we see this as racial profiling," said Benetta Standly, statewide organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. "It's going to target African-American male youths. There's a fear with people associating the way you dress with crimes being committed."

Boxer Short fashion under fire...Don't allow the boxer short police stop fashion!!

Airplane fashion is flying in circles, leaving women feeling exhausted

I haven’t always conformed to what’s considered fashionable or appropriate. While I may be an avid watcher of the American version of “What Not to Wear,” I am pretty sure the co-hosts would sometimes cringe at what I believe looks good on me.

As I’ve gotten older, what I’ve deemed appropriate has slowly changed to include fewer mini-skirts, less green eye shadow and no spaghetti straps, at least at work. But I still stubbornly cling to the idea that I’d rather be caught at the grocery store in three-inch heels and a vintage skirt than in the typical Corvallis uniform of sweat pants, flip-flops and over-sized T-shirts.

While we have all internalized what looks good and bad to us on other people — and on ourselves — and while we might sometimes wish to whisk a co-worker off to a full makeover, most folks do not impose their fashion beliefs onto other people.

Professors might complain about seeing visible thongs and boxer shorts in their classroom, but unless it’s really causing a disruption, they usually just grumble under their breath or to other faculty. And a majority of bosses will look the other way if the occasional open-toed sandal or dark washed jean appears on a non-casual Friday.

It’s when the definition of inappropriate actually interferes with normal life that things get sticky. Last week, fashion became news when a young woman in a sweater and mini-skirt was nearly kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because a male attendant deemed her attire “skimpy.” The 23-year-old was on a day trip and had no extra clothing to change into, but in order to not miss her flight, she agreed to tug down her skirt and pull her sweater closed.

The irony of this was not missed by bloggers, who pointed out that several decades ago, Southwest demanded that its stewardesses wear uniforms with skirts nearly as short that of the 23-year-old, and white go-go boots as well. Today, with roles reversed, airlines are no longer sexualizing their own attendants; instead, they’re allowing them to pass judgment on passengers who are deemed not “family friendly.”

The uproar around this issue points to the continuing battle over women’s bodies, and how they are clothed or unclothed, depending on the desires or prudery of the observer. At her day job at “Hooters,” the 23-year-old caters to customers who are paying to watch her in revealing attire, and yet on her own, wearing an outfit deemed skimpy by a stranger, she’s humiliated in front of an airplane full of people.

In a world full of advertising, television shows, music videos and movies that continue, decades after the women’s movement, to show women’s bodies as sexual objects, I guess it’s difficult to look at female legs or curves and not immediately think of sex. The same uproar takes place when women are breastfeeding in public, because even when breasts are being used for their biological function, we Americans seem unable to separate a breast’s exposure for functionality with that of sexual titillation.

Women, it seems, don’t get to choose when they are viewed as sexual and when they are not. A woman in a full-length business suit may be feeling sexually empowered and invigorated, while a woman in a mini skirt may simply be seeking relief from the Arizona heat. But dangerously exposed flesh immediately provokes a strong response from outsiders, who seem to think that their opinion of what’s appropriate is the only one that matters
Holiday Boxer Shorts - Christmas, Halloween, valentines, st. patricks day, fathers day

For me, sagging is a spectacle that defies the forces of physics - like water flowing uphill or plants growing from rocks.

When I see a kid flashing six inches of boxer shorts, I just can't imagine how his pants stay up. It seems to me that once the waistband wanders south of the hips it would become unstoppable.

Kenneth Moore, a behavior specialist at Lansing's Otto Middle School, sees sagging a little differently - as a "very big distraction to the educational process."
Or at least he did. On Wednesday, Moore called me to ask for help in his anti-sagging initiative. I, in the name of gravity, agreed.

The next day, for reasons unknown, Moore, in another phone call, withdrew his request. Reasonably, at first, but with escalating belligerence.

When I told Moore I planned to proceed with this column, he assured me he had witnesses who would verify his demand that I abandon it.

here was no need for witnesses. I freely admit he demanded it.

Then, Moore made references to the district's "legal consultants," implying court action against me if I failed to follow his instructions.

Ultimately, he hung up on me.

Curious behavior, I thought, for a behavior specialist.

No excuses

But anyway, Moore originally wanted me to help him collect belts. His plan was to keep a cache of them at Otto, so when a student explained his sagging pants by saying he didn't own a belt, Moore could nullify that excuse by handing one to the kid.

It would be a more efficient alternative, Moore said, to writing warning letters and sending kids home. That makes sense, in a "whatever works" sort of way.

Sagging, Moore said, has been on the rise at Otto, so to speak. He estimated 50 percent of boys ages 11 to 14 at the school follow the fashion. And the trend is strictly downhill.

"In some cases, it's indecent exposure," Moore said.

Prison roots

Sagging - the pants kind, that is - is believed to have originated in U.S. prisons. Inmates issued poorly fitting uniforms - but no belts because of the risk of suicide - had no choice but to let their pants droop. It became a popular urban culture style through hip-hop.

The prison connection is part of why Moore - and many others - believe sagging sends a negative message. Many school districts throughout the country prohibit it, and several legislative bodies have, with varying degrees of success, tried to make it illegal.

I don't know if the entire anti-sagging initiative is defunct or just the request for belts. But if and when the folks at Otto get students to pull up their pants, they can turn their attention to tank tops, muscle shirts, spaghetti straps, pajamas and all the other land mines waiting to blow highly distractible minds.

Then, perhaps, they can focus more energy on something like, you know, education.

Banning Boxer Shorts... What about Christmas boxer shorts fashion and fun

Warrior Ruben Wiki, TV presenter Alison Mau, TV funnyman Marc Ellis and singer Boh Runga already have.
All eight have joined the fight against prostate cancer.
Tialata, Frizzell, Agustina Ellis and Knox have all designed boxer shorts that are being sold through Barkers men's clothing, with $10 from every pair of boxers going to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Wiki, Mau, Marc Ellis and Runga are modelling the undies.
Prostate cancer kills about 600 Kiwi men a year so Barkers and the foundation joined the designers in the fundraising scheme.
Each designer was paired with a 'muse' who has modelled the boxer shorts for an ad campaign.
The $29.95 boxers are available at Barkers stores nationwide from September 15.
"We're excited to be working with some of New Zealand's leading personalities to raise awareness of prostate cancer," says Barkers managing director Zac De Silva.
The campaign aims to raise awareness and normalise it as a men?s health issue because even young men need to maintain prostate health.
As one of the sex organs, keeping it healthy helps men retain an active sex life into their later years.
"It's a tragedy that every year 600 men die when in half the cases death could quite possibly have been avoided with early detection," Mr De Silva says.
Holiday Boxer Shorts - Christmas, Halloween, valentines, st. patricks day, fathers day
n the late 1960s when we were in high school, we did not wear clothes that were out of rhythm with those of our parents. But today the youth dress in a manner that vexes teachers and parents. During that time, however, there was a fad among the young to wear their hair long; maybe as an offshoot of hippie culture.

My father was a frugal person and he used to justify this habit by saying that he spent where there was some value for the money spent. During that period, the cost of a haircut went up almost every month and my father believed that the barbers were the greatest capitalists of that time.

The old people used to hate the long-haired youth of that generation, but my father, for a change, used to like people growing their hair long, drawing satisfaction from the belief that now barbers would learn a lesson.

I learnt that in the early 70s during Park Chung-hee's regime in South Korea, people with long hair attracted punitive action from the police in the streets of Seoul and other cities of Korea. They used to be hauled up, brought to the police stations and forced to get their hair cut.

The president of that time, Park, may be turning in his grave to see the present generation not only growing long hair but also dyeing it red, yellow or green. I somehow thought that the youth of Korea grew long hair soon after they were released from their military conscription as a relief from the horrendously short crew cut they had to wear during their military service.

Then came the 90s when young people started wearing baggy pants and hoods. Suddenly, in 2005 a debate was brewing in the United States over a measure in Atlanta and some other places that would outlaw baggy pants that showed boxer shorts or thongs.

Offenders would risk a fine. City officials believed that sagging pants were an ``epidemic?that was becoming a major concern around the U.S. Critics claimed the measure was a new form of racial profiling that would allow police to target young black males who were the majority of those who wore their pants far below the beltline.

Some believed that it was attacking people's freedom of expression. They argued that when Woodstock was around, did they tell people not to wear their hair long, or hemp clothing? Or the T- shirts or getting whole body tattoos?

They retorted that this was targeting a certain group. They argued that the dress code should be outside the purview of the city administration as they had other more pressing matters to tend to.

Perhaps the origin of saggy pant's popularity was the heart of the controversy. How did the baggy pants below the belt thing start? When males are first processed in jail, their belts are taken, so that they cannot be used as a weapon or as a tool to hang themselves.

Deprived of belts, their pants would start hang down around their hips. When they were released from jail, they continued to wear their pants devoid of belts, as a sign of having served time in jail. Soon, hip-hop artists like Ice Cube performed and composed lyrics about that subculture.

The young were continually frustrated with society. They did not wish to face up to the challenge, and so instead took up drugs and exhibited the subculture as a mark of protest. Saggy pants were a kind of rebuff to society.?The young pulled down their pants instead of lifting up their heads.

They created powerful characters in the images of `bad guys.?/span> Hip-hoppers and rappers became superstars, and so did their clothing, all over the world. They wore backwards not only their baseball caps but also their pants. The sub culture spread like a virus around the globe and scenes in conservative countries like Korea and Japan were no different.

However, although girls in Europe and North America wore pants low, aping males, their counterparts in Korea did not do so. It was sacrilege in Korea for girls even to exhibit their belly buttons in public.

From its beginning in the 1990s, the new style has connected low society with high society, street fashion with high fashion. In Korea, from Namdaemun to Myeongdong, the cultures mixed. In Korea we normally see small size, tight fit dresses, but baggy pants have found their way in, in the shelves of many department stores.

What were hemlines in the 1960s became baggy pants in 2005. When you see on TVs and in cultural shows pop singers making strange obtuse gestures, thrusting hands forward with fingers spread apart, pointing horizontally, does this behavior not disturb you? Does the sight of trousers sagging too far south make you raise your eyebrows? As the borderline goes down, does your blood pressure rise in equal proportion?

What makes sagging so provocative to some and so fashionable to others? The reason is that there comes a time in everyone's life when you cross that invisible boundary that separates generations.

The shift in the paradigm can crop up on you anytime like those undetected strands of grey hair on your head. At that moment you realize that you can no longer tolerate that nonsense _ pounding of the heavy metal, provocative gestures and coarse rap songs.

You prefer to retire to the basement of your house and begin to play music on your stereo system with more melody and sensitivity.
What are we to make of the growing campaign against hip-hop streetwear? Last, week, the city of Atlanta introduced an ordinance that would ban baggy trousers that show boxer shorts (for guys) or low-slung jeans that reveal thong straps (for girls). In doing so, it became the latest in a lengthening string of political jurisdictions and private institutions, in the United States and the U.K., that have moved to police gangsta fashion using what amount to dress codes.

Often, the pretext for the ban is public safety. When Imperial College London banned hoodies from its campus back in 2005, college officials spun it as a matter of security. The ban, which included hijabs, was directed at any clothing that obscured an individual's face and interfered with the ability of security guards to match a person's face to the photo on their ID card. Similarly, part of the rhetoric against baggy pants is that their capacious pockets and tremendous folds of cloth make it all too easy to conceal knives, guns, drugs, and other illegal paraphernalia.There is no question that, in the upside-down status signalling of urban street theatre, the point of wearing gangsta gear is to convey the message that you are a criminal. Nothing says "I've been to prison" like having lost your belt and shoelaces, while every drug dealer knows that the trick to keeping warm while selling dime bags on a cold street corner is to dress in layers -- a do-rag under a hoodie, with a big puffy coat on top.

But at some point, a legitimate concern for safety turns into the official harassment of a minority underclass -- or perhaps of poseurs laying claim to that identity -- and it is not always easy to know where one trips into the other. As an example of an easy case, residents of Harlem were justifiably outraged a few weeks ago when local retailers started stocking a line of New York Yankees caps in gang colours like Bloods red and Crips blue. In Harlem, wearing (or not wearing) one of these colours in the wrong place can get you killed, and only after a street protest by community activists did the manufacturer agree to pull the caps from store shelves.

More often than not, though, a style or type of clothing is targeted for reasons that are more about public morals rather than public safety. The sponsor of the Atlanta ordinance, city councillor C.T. Martin, more or less admitted as much when he proposed it as an amendment to the city's indecency laws. Since that would be the same part of the municipal code that bans having sex or masturbating in public, Atlanta has set itself the rather bizarre proposition of preparing to treat wannabe Fiddies or Xtinas as equivalent to subway flashers and exhibitionists.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that many people oppose the introduction of these sorts of dress-code laws on the grounds that they are just racial profiling masquerading as a public safety initiative. The objection is that banning hoodies or baggy pants is inherently discriminatory, since they are part of a lifestyle that emerged out of a specific type of black culture, which continues to be dominated by black youths. It doesn't take Al Sharpton to smell the racism in the air here, especially given the zoot suit precedent of the 1940s. The large boxy suits, popular among New York blacks and Los Angeles Latinos in the '30s and '40s, were banned by the federal War Production Board on the grounds that they were "extravagant of fabric." The ban was followed by the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when sailors on leave in Los Angeles started beating up any Mexicans they could find wearing the outlawed suits.

In fact, these sorts of dress codes are just the direct descendants of the old sumptuary laws that once protected the aristocracy, by regulating the types of fabric, styles, and colours that commoners were allowed to wear. All sumptuary laws are expressions of official fear or displeasure and upper-class distaste, and their main function is to reinforce the aesthetic and moral sensibilities of the dominant social class.

Acknowledging that this is what is going on with the gangsta gear actually makes the job of figuring out what to do a lot easier. We live in a wildly pluralistic society, characterized by deep disagreement over aesthetics, morality, and how these contribute to the good life. If the clothing choices of one or more groups are causing too much social strife, then one possibility is to issue a national uniform and make everyone dress exactly the same.Before we go off half-cocked, though, it is worth remembering that we actually had a de facto public uniform, not so long ago. Take a look through an old photo album, any time before 1964 or so, and note the extreme conformity of dress across all social classes. Ladies wore dresses, not trousers, and no man would appear in public without a suit and a hat. But that widespread sartorial conformity was jettisoned by the counterculture, condemned as just another brick in the repressive wall of mass society. Bell-bottoms became all the rage, based on the dopey premise that if you freed your ankles your mind would follow.

It isn't a long toss from peace and love to Glocks and grillz, since hippies and gangstas are just acting out different variations on the same stick-it-to-the-man script. If we find it distasteful to see all those kids out there stumbling about with their pants around their ankles and their heads swathed in what appear to be ladies' nylons, we should remember that their choice of clothes might differ from the choices of their parents in style, but it certainly does not in intent.