[sebbie]

Part XXXVI

The iconic swim brief was invented in 1928 by a Scott named Alexander McRae who started the company that became Speedo® and gave its name to the iconic swimwear. The Jockey brief was invented in 1935 and sold by Coopers Inc., a company that was founded by Samuel T. Cooper in St. Joseph, Michigan in 1876 originally for making socks. The history of the male athletic supporter goes back even farther than that. The original athletic supporter was invented by C.F. Bennett of a Chicago sporting goods company called Sharp and Smith introduced in 1874, and was intended for wear by guys who rode bicycles as messenger and delivery boys over rough streets. It was not until 1897 that this was so successful that Bennett formed what was to be called the Bike company with the major product being the male athletic supporter.

Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, athletic supporters were all but mandatory for any sort of gym-related physical activity. Guys routinely wore straps under loose-fitting shorts given that stretch fabrics were in their infancy. A strap was something that told the other guys that you were engaging in sufficiently rigorous athletics to “need a strap”. After all, a strap was what the bigger and more highly-skilled athletes wore.

Interestingly, for a lot of guys, getting your first strap was something of a “coming of age” thing that occurred at or shortly after puberty. Females had their first period or menarche typically around age 12. For guys, the big life event was the first conscious ejaculation of semen, analogously but rarely referred to as the thorache. Females have no direct control over exactly when menarche occurs but males do at least to a degree. For most males, this is likely a very private event. To a certain degree guys are proud of having reached that life milestone but it is not something they would talk about.

Wearing a strap for the first time becomes something of a substitute for conveying some of the same information about becoming an adult without words. The strap says I am a good enough of an athlete to be engaging in activities where I need the protection, but also, I am mature enough sexually to need to be concerned about this part of my body.

So, guys grow up with some similar misgivings about wearing a strap to wearing a Speedo®. Any guy realizes that the strap will fit snuggly around the penis and balls and the mere thought of that tends to cause certain body parts to get bigger. But a strap that doesn’t fit snug would be useless for protection. Given that everything is snug when properly in place, getting even a slight hard-on could be interesting but also make matters worse. What if I should ejaculate while wearing or even just getting into a strap? Does this happen to the other guys? The bigger guys seem to take this all in stride. How do they learn how to do that so nonchalantly, anyway?

It’s the same problem guys have when they begin to focus on the need to wear other kinds of snug-fitting clothing. In the 1950s and 60s, manufacturers were a long way from being able to sell other kinds of stretchy body-protective gear like we routinely see today.

The other problem straps have is that the basic strap leave’s a guy’s butt crack completely uncovered. Wearing a strap in the locker room is not THAT much different from wandering around the locker room nude. Why this was such an important part of the design of traditional straps has never been entirely clear to me. The leg straps clearly kept the ‘nads in a “safe place”. These were the “bicycle helmets” of the 1950s and 60s. If you engaged in sport, you had to wear one. All the guys did and you needed to do likewise or you were not an athlete. But couldn’t anyone come up with a design that had leg straps yet covered your butt with some cloth. What was this idea of athletes all being butt-naked, anyway?

True, in later years, after thong underwear and swimwear for men took off, some of the companies did come up with a thong style supporter, one that put a narrow piece of elastic between a guy’s glutes, but was that really a significant improvement? Straps were great in the locker room so long as all the guys had to wear them, and getting over the initial embarrassment of being seen by your peers wearing one was mitigated if all the guys were wearing them. But, as soon as other possibilities emerges, say a compression brief with a pouch for a hard cup, the traditional straps declined rapidly in popularity. It was an “everyone does this or we all do not kind of thing”.

So, the market for straps evaporated as other options became the accepted norm and coaches everywhere no longer required them as a condition for playing a sport. The traditional straps are still sold mainly by online vendors, but most of these I suspect are for what I call the recreational wear market. Guys are buying these because they thing being strapped is a fun way to masturbate or perhaps engage in sex play with a male partner wearing something similar. Part of the market also caters to the “strap-curious” teen guy who simply wants to see how he would look wearing a strap and whether or not the fit and feel is erotic. This is all just part of growing up!

To be continued…