Boxer Short fashion is hitting the news on all fronts. From Boxer Shorts history, Boxer Short psychology, Underwear Sociology, and of course Boxer Short criminology. Only one thing is sure, come Christmas, Santa Boxers will once again be the hot fashion gift.... Long live Boxer Shorts.
Halloween Boxers are right around the corner.
Some travelers follow their hearts, others their heads, but few follow their underpants like New Zealand-based writer Joe Bennett.
Bennett's purchase of a five pack of China-made underpants took him on an eye-opening quest from the checkout in a New Zealand store to the economic powerhouse to unravel the mysterious workings of global capitalism.
Tracing the NZ$8.59 ($6.5) pack back to a Shanghai factory, the rubber trees of Thailand and cotton fields of Xinjiang in far western China, Bennett went behind the scenes to meet the hundreds of people who manufactured and exported his pants.
While leaving him none the wiser as to how much the pants actually cost to make, Bennett says he learnt much from his underpant odyssey, titled "Where Underpants Come From". He spoke to Reuters recently:
Q: Why underpants? Why not trace an iPod or a garden hose, or any other of things China exports?
A: Because I bought some underpants and not a garden hose. It's that simple. I bought some pants and they set me thinking. It never crossed my mind to change the subject.
Q: Your trip grew from a peculiarly post-industrial kind of ignorance: you couldn't fathom how the pants were made, and at such a price?
A: We sit on this cushion of affluence in the West, which very few of us can actually justify because we can't engage in those industrial, commercial or scientific processes ourselves... Something as rudimentary as making cotton -- I haven't got a clue. If electricity stopped being generated I wouldn't be starting it up again.
Q: It was your first time in China. Were you worried about what you might find in the underpants factory?
A: I didn't go into anywhere that was a sweatshop, certainly, (though) I expected to see pretty grim working factories. I'm very confident that the actual pants in question are produced as close to ethically as its possible to produce underpants in China. Sure, people are working longer hours for less money, but that's the function of a different economy with a huge labor market.
Q: You note that when you grew up, underpants were a plain, uniform white -- now there's a rainbow of colors and styles. What does this flowering of fashion tell us?
A: The booming of pandering to vanity in the West and also the huge swelling of commerce anywhere you can expand a market.
Everyone's house in the West is full of vast quantities of redundant stuff, all of which they bought in the frantic search for happiness, and none of which has delivered. If you wear satin underpants you're not happier, nor more sexually successful.
Q: So what does that reveal about today's consumers?
A: Rich, silly and grasping, very much in the manner of donkeys chasing the unachievable carrot. You don't buy happiness in a department store. But the illusion is an illusion of crucial importance to a Western capitalist society. You must be lead forward to the next consumer good. Forgetting always that the last one didn't deliver the joy you were hoping.
Q: You predict the death of the boxer short as Westerners are becoming too fat to wear them comfortably. Any other tips?
A: Certainly the hugging hipster is the vogue at the moment. There will be other styles of underpant coming in. It's hard to predict. But people must keep changing things so that we throw away things that are not worn out.
Q: Did your journey into the unknown leave you wiser?
A: As a result of the whole process of research and travel, I was delighted, just simply delighted. I laughed a lot. I'd expected to endure the journey, and I enjoyed it.
Holiday Boxer Shorts - Christmas, Halloween, Valentines, St. Patricks day, Fathers day, Golf, Paintball, Fantasy Football, Fantasy Baseball
Big news came out of Flint Wednesday — news that made me want to drop my pants below my waist and celebrate my constitutional right to dress like a degenerate.
Fortunately for everyone in East Lansing, I composed myself before someone caught a glimpse and seared a retina.
But seriously folks, it’s a great day to be from East Lansing. Well, it’s a great day to be from anywhere other than Flint, where fashion police are lurking the city streets looking for butt cracks. Literally.
According to the Detroit Free Press, interim Police Chief David Dicks and his officers are now arresting people for wearing saggy pants that expose skivvies, boxer shorts or bare bottoms.
Dicks told the Free Press that pants pulled completely below the buttocks with underwear showing is disorderly conduct and saggy pants with skin of the buttocks showing is indecent exposure. A spanking may or may not be included in the sentence.
I don’t know about you, but I believe the strict interpretation of this law is purely blasphemous. I’m not sure where police officers get off telling its taxpaying, law-abiding citizens that they can no longer express themselves by revealing whether they wear boxers or briefs.
If this law were enforced in East Lansing, I’m not sure what I’d do. With gas prices being so high, there’s no way I could justify spending $10 on a belt. That would be superfluous.
Hopefully by now, you’ve detected my sarcasm.
In reality, it’s about time a city stepped up and did something to mitigate the visual blight caused by people who think they’re making fashion statements by letting their pants ride below their waists.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m fully in favor of the First Amendment. If someone wants to wear a shirt that reads “F—- the Police,” that’s a protected right that every American is entitled to exercise.
However, crude shirts and sagging pants are not parallel offenses. Crude shirts don’t bother me when I’m driving behind a motorcyclist and can see the tattoo on his butt, or when the person sitting at the restaurant booth next to me has his whitey-tighties riding up his spine.
I’ll support any legal measure that discourages people from wearing baggy pants. Kudos to Dicks.
WebUndies.com.
