Thoughts on just being a guy

[sebbie]

Just doin’ exactly what the other guys are doing!

The desire to wear a tight-fitting garment that will encase the penis and balls is nearly universal for males. Exactly what the desired garment is ( a swim brief, compression shorts or tights, snug-fitting underwear made of a stretchy slick material, etc etc) varies from one guy to another, but nearly every guy has some “interest” in the whole idea.

The tricky part always in not that but other considerations. This all gets intertwined with a guy’s feelings about who he is from the standpoint of sexual orientation. But, more importantly, what other guys might CONCLUDE about which sex I am attracted to based on what they see me wearing. I have never seen sexual orientation as being a 0-1 kind of thing—as in either I am gay or I am not. Still, I realize that a lot of guys think that as teens, being somehow identified as gay will lead to a lot of bullying by the purportedly “straight” guys. And it is not my ACTIONS that convinced the bullies but rather what I am wearing. Of course, for better or worse, swim briefs are often associated with the idea that this is something a gay guy would wear so it is best that I never be seen wearing one!

But then, wearing compression shorts, another commonly worn tight fitting garment, is commonplace among the athletes in a lot of different sports—professional team sports that pay millions of dollars to many players. Are these guys all gay too? Stuff like this raises more issues with respect to trying to tie what a guy wears to cover his groin to his sexual orientation. And the other obvious example is high school swim teams, where nowadays some are wearing briefs but others jammers, the jammers purportedly the bullies who engage in doing this are less “gay” I guess. A swimmer who wears a jammer will not be bullied but a swimmer wearing a brief might be!

I have been digging around on the Internet in an effort to unravel all of this. Water Polo is a sport that commonly is found at high schools in states on the coast (probably most often in California and Florida) but would not be a typical high school sport in most landlocked states. And the teams seem to be most common in what I would call “well to do” communities. Nationally, a high school swim team is much more common than a high school water polo team.

Many high school swim teams give swimmers a choice of wearing a brief or a jammer and currently we see a lot of interschool contests where there are some are wearing each style. However, in the case of water polo, there is no choice!

Water polo is a different story entirely. If a guy is going to play on a water polo team for the school, he must wear the team water polo swim brief. And having identical briefs made with the school logo is a big deal for building team “unity”. Because of what happens underwater in the sport, the brief must fit as snug as possible, so the opposing team cannot grab your brief and pull you down. So tight and small is good, and still tighter and smaller is better.

In order to be part of the team, a new player must be able to get his head around the idea that this will require him to wear something that is quite skimpy. But that is going to be OK because all the other guys are going to be doing the same thing. Surely a water polo player is not going to be bullied by a teammate wearing exactly the same suit. Besides it’s a chance to hang out with a bunch of other guys who are all good with this.

I suspect the teams annually place an order for new suits to be worn at meets during the year. I also suspect that the senior members of the team have a lot to say about the exact cut, color and fit of the new suits. The choice is made partly to intimidate the other teams they well be playing but also seves as a way of intimidating the new, younger players on the team as to whether or not they really want to be part of the team. As in, in order to be on the team you have to do this part like the upperclassmen are able to do. Are you able to do this and proudly wear the suit with the team logo on it?

Of course, water polo players must first be good swimmers so the idea of wearing a swim brief like this may be quite simple. Still, it is a chance to hang out with other guys who are quite OK with all of this as an important part of being on the team.

I have noticed that fewer and fewer swim teams take team photos on their members as they appear wearing briefs or even jammers. The team photos I see that show all the guys in briefs generally have some age on them.

But this is not true for the water polo teams. These teams seem to revel in the idea of taking photos with every guy clad in the official team swim brief, and some of these are really skimpy and snug-fitting.

To illustrate, here are three examples I found of Water Polo teams. Each appears to be the team from a water polo team a high school serving a generally wealthy coastal town.
https://www.vhstigers.org/apps/pages...REC_ID=1350215

https://www.ndhs.org/athletics/teams...s/water-polo-b

https://3.files.edl.io/b0cc/18/10/30...c679cecc0d.jpg


Twenty years from now these guys will look back on this time and say to themselves “It was great fun hanging out with these guys.” They might have also kept the water polo suit that they wore then as a souvenir and reminder of the wonderful days they spent with their teammates back then.