CHANGING UNDIES AND MORES: MARILYN PENN
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Marilyn Penn
It’s not often that underwear takes on significance beyond its use unless Janet Jackson’s bra is malfunctioning or Victoria’s Secret is staging a major show. Recently, however, three separate stories in the news showed how important underwear can be, reminding us all that mother’s advice to always wear clean panties was, as usual, far from trivial. At the Australian Open, Venus Williams startled the crowd by wearing flesh colored undies, thereby giving the impression that she was mooning the audience. Venus defended her nudie look by explaining that her chartreuse tennis dress had slits which were enhanced by the monochromatic flesh tones underneath. This didn’t answer the question of why the panties couldn’t have matched the dress but never mind that match point. Tennis whites have long gone the way of knickers, Bermuda shorts and hot pants yet Venus’ reality look gave everybody pause – do we really want that much information about her buttock alignment? Is this appropriate for a game created thousands of years ago by European monks?
From the ridiculous to the bizarre, a pair of boxer shorts has taken on a pivotal role in the case of a man claiming to have been sodomized by a police officer’s baton in the subway while two others cops colluded in covering up the crime. The arresting officers have already been acquitted but lawyers for the plaintiff have filed papers charging the defense with evidence tampering. It seems that the boxers were shown to the jury with a square hole, an impossible configuration for sodomy by a retractable police baton. It would be hard to imagine Perry Mason explaining to the court why such an action would have created an L shaped hole, something that seems more of a rip than a classified hole, but the nature of this alleged crime might have been unimaginable and indescribable in those days as well. The lawyers have stated that the square-holed boxers are irreconcilable with boxer photos they received before trial, thus proving that the boxers were “altered and partially destroyed†in order to assist the defendants’ case. Now imagine the seamstresses at work in the police station seamlessly stitching an L shaped rip into a square shaped hole; if these little women were truly able to accomplish this without scarring the fabric, they should be doing plastic surgery instead of clothing repair. At least the presiding judge in the de rigeur federal civil rights lawsuit that accompanies the boxers had the requisite decorum to dissuade the lawyers from holding a press conference.
Lastly, in a city whose fastidious mayor has been busy monitoring our salt and trans-fat consumption, no attention has been paid to making the sale of returned underwear illegal. NBC used hidden cameras to expose the ease with which bathing suits whose liners had been ripped out and underwear whose fabric had been soiled with baby oil could be returned. At stores as prominent as Bloomies, Victoria’s Secret, Nordstrom’s, Macy’s and The Gap, the underwear was re-ticketed and restocked on the selling floor. Apparently bacteria and viruses associated with fecal matter can survive for many weeks so at the least, Mr. Bloomberg might arrange for those clever police seamstresses to sew cautionary labels on underwear reminding us to wash before wearing. The nanny state can now extend its ever-lengthening reach into our nether regions, instructing us when not to show them, what not to put in them and how to keep them spiffy clean.
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