The Vasectomy Dialogues: Why Do Men Love Wearing Torn Underwear?
"You look like a little boy," are not the words you hope your wife will say when you pull down your pants.
No, no, no.
I'm not spilling the marital beans.
I had just pulled down my pants to go to bed because if my legs could talk, they would tell me how grateful they are we splurged on bamboo sheets.
It still stings to hear those words even in a PG context — even if my wife, Justine, wasn't judging me pre-performance.
She wasn't wrong.
I did look like a little boy.
The trunks I was wearing had bright neon squiggly lines running all over the fabric like a chicken on methamphetamines.
They were also a little too tight, and my body was spilling out — even though I bought the size I've always bought.
I had recently decided to spruce up my underwear collection after my wife asked me one day, "When are you going to get new underwear?!?"
My underwear looked haggard, as if they were not allowed to eat bacon anymore, or as if they were worried that gas prices would soon reach a new high, and I would have to start walking everywhere.
What Justine doesn't understand is how uncomfortable it is for men to buy underwear.
Regardless, I followed her advice (ahem, demand) and decided it was time to embark on a journey to get a new underwear collection.
To start my journey of rediscovering the garments protecting the most valuable ornaments I have as a man, I needed to learn the vocabulary.
But quickly learned men don't have one word for men's underwear.
We have categories like boxers, boxer briefs, trunks, thongs, Speedos, jockstraps, strings, and briefs, often called tighty-whities when they are white, which coincidentally happens to be the worst color you can choose for men's underwear.
But we don't have one word that encompasses all that.
Women do.
They have panties.
I've learned that in a society, what is important is labeled.
Panties are important for our society.
Men's underwear, not so much.
The first step towards a more honest conversation is to have words we can use in said conversation. So, for the time being, we are going to call men's underwear 'Ballsie-sackies.'
Then there is the part where, if you want to get new ballsie-sackies, you first have to look at the oddly high-definition, enlarged pictures of what other men are packing.
I have to believe I don't live in a world where I'm the only man weirded out by being forced to look at other guys' junk before buying new underwear.
That's probably why there are so many poor men out there sporting poked and stretched-out boxer briefs.
There is a misalignment of incentives.
Do they want us to buy their product or run away from it?
Ballsie-sackies manufacturers should take a hint from beer commercials and portray men attaining unrealistic objects of desire. Like an out-of-shape man, wearing said underwear, a beautiful woman on each arm, and a promotion that it's rightfully his.
You may think, "There is no way you can fit that on the box."
Maybe.
But you can't tell me they don't oversize the models' bananas and put them right there in your face.
So the real estate is available.
Buying ballsie-sackies is a sharp reminder that it is very likely I'm underhung, and I'll never get a six-pack.
Like everything else revolutionized by technology, there are players out there trying to improve the customer experience by making it banana-less.
So, I started changing my ballsie-sackies by buying from those companies.
But when did 'medium' stop being 'medium'?
I can still fit into the first suit I ever owned.
Granted, I have to get it fixed at least once a year because the seams break on my left inner thigh close to my crotch.
The break is consistent with what happened to all my other suits.
It's like I keep a knife as part of my everyday carry tucked away in my ballsie-sackies.
I don't.
If I have to guess, the breaks happen because, on the first day of class in business school, they teach men to spread their legs wide in meetings to take unnecessary space to exude confidence, and gravitas, and a hint of balls.
But even though I can fit into the first suit I ever bought, medium ballsie-sackies seem to have shrunk before I even put them in the dryer for the first time.
When my wife saw me wearing that ballsie sackie, she said a loincloth could cover more.
Because I speak English as a second language, I didn't know what a loincloth was, so I googled it.
And there it was, and there I was, looking at other guys' bananas… AGAIN!!!
If I believed in the Law of Attraction, I would be concerned about what the ever-providing Universe was trying to tell me.
I'm still worried about what Google will advertise to me.
It gives me comfort to know that brilliant minds are working to solve some of society's most challenging problems, such as desalination and distribution of potable water, improving the efficiency of solar panels, and delivering food to remote villages in Africa.
I can only hope that someone just as brilliant is working on making the ballsie-sackies buying experience slightly better.
