Why are you showing me your underwear?

The other day, someone accused me of having my panties in a wad.

Moi? The easiest going, non-excitable, non-opinionated guy around?

What brought this all about was that I was at a shopping mall when a young lady cut in front of me at the checkout line. I looked down, and not believing that I saw what I thought I saw, looked down again. She was wearing very provocative thong underwear, the tops of which were plainly visible because there was a lot of skin between her jeans and her equally provocative halter top.

Evolution or Darwinism, or both, has dictated that such people now have eyes in the back of their heads because she whirled around and caught me in mid-gape.

“What the (f-bomb) are you looking at?” she demanded.

“Your underwear,” I replied truthfully. “It looks awfully uncomfortable. I know, because sometimes when my underwear rides up like that on hot days—“

“You have no right to look at my underwear,” she declared.

“Then why are you showing it to me?” I asked.

Can anyone answer that question? Go to any shopping mall where high school or college girls hang out and it looks like thong city. For those of you less informed as to the delicacies of unmentionables, thong underwear are those skimpy bottoms that professional strippers and White House interns often wear. When not covered by other garments, such as jeans or a skirt, they leave little to the imagination. And I do mean little. It seems to have become the underwear of choice for many young ladies of today.

That’s all fine and good except that they also like to pull their thongs up high so that the tops of them—front and back—are easily visible when the young lady is wearing any shirt that doesn’t quite reach to the top of her jeans. How can wearing a thong like that possibly be comfortable?

And just in case any of you think I’m being sexist about this, young boy-dudes have the same problem, only it’s not thongs they’re wearing. At least, I don’t think they are.

The boy-dudes who think they’re cool are wearing these low-rider baggy pants in which the waist hangs down midway to the knees, leaving us no choice but to clearly see if they are wearing boxers or briefs. This is usually accompanied by wearing their baseball hat backwards, or even worse, with the bill sticking out over one ear or the other, which usually has a couple of earnings in it.

Do these kids’ parents know that their sons and daughters are out there showing the world their underwear?

When I was a kid, my mother was forever telling me, “Pull up your pants, I can see your underwear.” In grade school, you were mortified if your shorts crept up while you were at the blackboard working a math problem. In junior high and high school, it was downright dangerous to have your underwear even barely visible because it guaranteed you a major league wedgie that would leave you singing soprano for the rest of the day.

Even worse, your mom always knew when you’d gotten a wedgie because the elastic in the waistband was completely shot.

“Got a wedgie, didn’t you?” Mom would say, accusingly. “See? That’s what you get for letting your underwear show.”

Indeed.

A few years ago, it seems that a lot of folks got their panties in a wad out in San Diego when a female high school assistant principal took on the role of Thong Detector at the prom. It’s my understanding that she was lifting each girl’s skirt before they went in to check and make sure that they weren’t wearing a thong. Some said that she even went as far as to also peep down the front of the girl’s dresses to ensure that they were also wearing a bra.

And I thought being in charge of cleaning the erasers was a great job back in high school. I would’ve killed to be a Thong Detector. Only, girls didn’t wear thongs back then. And if they did, they never showed them to us.

So girls, if you insist on wearing skimpy underwear these days and showing it to us every chance you get, I only have one thing to say.

Don’t get your thong in a wad when we look.