[sebbie]

Part XXXII

I have been studying changes over time in the materials used in underwear over time, and how all of this is linked to my four different demands for men’s underwear that I laid out. I grew up in a period of time in which men’s underwear and women’s underwear were very different. Men’s underwear was made of ribbed cotton. Generally, white was the only available color in part because dyed cotton could easily change the color of everything else in the same wash. the summer styles were either a brief or what was called a boxer brief with longer legs. Colored underwear was considered effeminate and not something a real guy would wear, apart from the fact that dies used to color cotton were not “color fast”

Women’s underwear more complicated. For women, the underwear covering the groin was more typically called a panty than a brief. Men wore briefs but women wore panties not the other way around. Panties were typically made of cloth other than cotton. Men sweated but women did not. Nylon was the commonly used fabric, usually in a pastel color. Unless blended with Lycra/Spandex, nylon was smooth but had no stretch. The typical all-nylon panty used elastic for the waistband and around each leg opening but fit loosely otherwise.

A lot of women probably learned basic self-pleasuring by fondling key erotic female body parts over the smooth-textured nylon panty. This felt, well, good! So buying nylon panties by women was part of female self-pleasuring. The companies that sold panties for women almost never overlapped with the companies that sold ribbed cotton briefs to men. That was the way it was back then.

Men had no such option—well almost no such option. Back then college guys liked to go on what were called panty raids of female dorms and sorority houses, sneaking in under cover of darkness and raiding (stealing) panties for the co-ed’s dresser drawer. What amounted to theft was all in fun, more or less.

What the college men (boys) actually did with the panties they stole is an even more interesting topic. I guess a lot of guys seemed to find it to be erotic fun to actually wear the panties obtained via theft. For a lot of guys, this would have been the first contact their penises would have had with slick smooth nylon. This felt really neat to the underside of the male penis. More than just an abnormal fetish, the idea that the panty had contained the erotic female body parts only added to the fun. Crazy stuff for sure, stuff a horny college student longing for intercourse with a female might pursue.

One sometimes thinks that using items of clothing as a masturbation aid is a relatively recent development, but that is not the case. What followed involved the development of male underwear that was made of smooth fabrics other than ribbed cotton and in designs that, objectively, looked close to what was already being sold to women. Men quickly figured out that stretchy smooth fabrics felt a lot better rubbed against a semi-hard penis than traditional cotton materials, but they did now want to let other guys know what they were doing.

In the meantime, companies mostly marketing to females discovered that women sweat too, and that cotton fabrics could be sold to women, but particularly if made in feminine colors and blended with Elastane. A number of the biggest companies—Jockey®, Hanes®, Fruit-of-the-Loom® that had formerly almost exclusively catered to men expanded into lines designed to be sold to women. This idea probably had its origins in various women’s movement events as in if we are equal to men in all respects then we should be able to purchase underwear from the same manufacturers as men do.

Enough on underwear. Time to move on to swim briefs.

To be continued…