One Man’s Emotional Quest For Fancy Underpants

Fancy Men's underpants

This whole thing didn’t start as a quest for fancy underpants. It started as a simpler quest. More necessity than decadence.

The story of my quest for fancy underpants began in Las Vegas. In June.

See, I’m a fairly sweaty person. I don’t smell, but that’s only thanks to being born into a world of modern convenience. I shower every day, and I wear deodorant that is almost guaranteed to cause some kind of armpit cancer, if that exists. If that DOESN’T exist, then good news, I’m about to build a legacy when I invent a new cancer.

To say that Las Vegas in June was a sweaty time for me is to really downplay the level of disaster. The apocalyptic scale of things.

I’ve heard the term swamp ass before. I’m familiar with it. To call what I had “swamp ass” would be completely inaccurate because, as I understand it, the swamp is a place that supports life. The swamp is somewhere bugs can exist without just sort of burning away in the air. Where you don’t see a whole frog jump into a pond, wait a few seconds, and then see that frog’s skeleton float up above the water line.

My entire underpants zone was sweaty, and it stank. That’s what we’re getting at here. That was the original reason I needed some underpants.

Now, let’s talk about the environment. Not the underpants environment, but the environment around me. Let’s talk about Las Vegas.

If you find yourself in Vegas and you’re unwilling to splurge a little bit, if you wind up on the strip and don’t plan to get a little drunk or stay out too late, if you walk through casinos and don’t plan to eat some crazy shit at a buffet that isn’t even all that good, if you don’t surrender yourself to Vegas just a little, you’re not going to have fun. It’s not the place for a sensible vacation. In fact, if there’s anything that Vegas is good for, it’s a vacation from sense. In what other context does it make sense to throw down a couple hundred bucks in hopes that a marble will land in a certain slot on a wheel? Where else do you go that drinking a tallboy on the street is not only allowed, but a matter of survival, of maintaining a small modicum of sanity?

Which is why, when I was in Vegas, when I needed some new underpants, I thought, “Hey. Maybe it’s time to splurge. Maybe it’s time to take a break from these sensible boxer briefs and step up my underpants game. Maybe it’s time to see what’s out there for a man of taste. A man who knows the value of a Beetlejuice gambling machine when he sees it.

“Beetlejuice gambling machine.” Yeah, in case you weren’t sure about how much of a casino-goer I am, I don’t even know WHAT GAME I played on the Beetlejuice machine. Good God.

Beetlejuice Gambling
Seriously, it exists.

What’s Fancy?

Perhaps I should be more clear on just what I do and do not mean by fancy underpants. Because in the past, most of the underpants for men that I’d seen fall into one of four categories.

  1. Plastic pack of 6 pairs of something.

These are fine. Nothing wrong with them. Although I do question the color choices a bit. Why not stick with black? Is anyone pleased when a weird maroon pair pops up? Or forest green?

  1. Silk boxer shorts.

I don’t wear boxer shorts. They’re always bunched up, in my ass. I feel like, rather than wearing boxer shorts, I could just stuff my crack with Kleenex, put some wads of Kleenex in my pant legs, and then go about my day. That way the presence would be consistent, at least.

  1. Underpants sold on the premise that they can be worn for 8 months straight.

This is what you’ll find at your outdoor sports places. They have this rack, and it’s all about how this one pair of underwear was worn by a business traveler for an entire trip to Japan. Listen, assholes. The issue isn’t that a regular pair of underpants will rot off my body in a given timeframe. The issue is that my body, especially the parts in the nether realm, produce odors. If the underpants aren’t absorbing them, then where are they going? Because I promise you, they still exist. They very much still exist.

  1. Underpants that are fancy, but too novelty for me.

I don’t want fire engine red briefs with white piping. I don’t want something with a word on the ass. I don’t want leopard. I don’t want some crazy leather thing. Basically, if it looks proper in a Will Ferrell movie, on WIll Ferrell, when we’re laughing at the sexuality of Will Ferrell, I don’t want it.

I was confident, however, that in Vegas, a city where fancy steak dinners are eaten in cargo shorts and people in suits drink from beers sold by length, I would be able to find something. In this place where dress ranges from casual to the point of outrageous, all the way up to fancy to the point where it looks like shit because shitty looks expensive, in this world of options, there had to be what I was looking for.

 

Purchase #1

This alt text is for your flapjacks.

Things started off badly in a store with mannequins hanging from the ceiling. I don’t really know the difference between high and low fashion, but I felt like, “Hey, this must be better than an Old Navy. They’ve got mannequins to burn!”

Despite the mannequins being strewn about, they only sold men’s underpants in 3-packs. No singles, which was a letdown. But this, this 3-pack of plain black boxer briefs looked fancier than what I was used to. There was promise. They looked like a better material. They featured no weird colors. No design to speak of. No writing on the waist band.

I’ve always thought it was weird that Hanes and Fruit of the Loom put their brand names on the waist band of their products. People, whichever people run those companies? Are you aware that the most common place I see the name of your company is right below the first hint of a man’s exposed ass crack? When I see the word “Hanes”, it’s almost always above an ass crack or below someone’s hairy gut.

Back in my hotel, which is easily the most restful place I’ve been with a goddamn rollercoaster right outside the window, I opened the package.

Right off, right when I unrolled the first pair, I noticed a big tag in the back. One that would fall right into my crack.

Look. Makers of underwear. I’ve seen some things. I’ve seen what the kids are calling “porno-graphics.” And sometimes in these films, there will be someone in a thong. And somehow there’s a tag, and it’s always right up someone’s ass.

I know space is limited on underpants. But putting a tag in someone’s ass? That’s just cruel.

I pulled the tag off one of my new pairs of boxer briefs. Which also ripped a little slit in the underpants, right between the waistband and the fabric meant to cover my ass. The rip was pretty small, but it was there.

I took hold of the tag on the second pair. And I tore that pair a new asshole too. Literally.

Third pair, I was careful, I was kind. Same thing. Ripped to hell.

I wore them. All three pairs. I still wear them. They’re okay. They’re a little fancier than what I’m used to. But they’re ripped. They still don’t quite make the grade. Underpants with a hole ripped in the back are not fancy.

 

Purchase #2

Crying baby for sassy underpants

My Vegas purchase didn’t work out. But I survived the weekend with my new underpants, and I played KISS mini golf, which I highly recommend for many reasons, not the least of which is the attendant’s bored spiel: “You can request any song you want. As long as it’s KISS.”

But when I got back home, I still wondered. I wondered what was out there for men folk. What was the Cadillac of underwears? What was the Victoria’s Secret for men?

Whenever I’m faced with a consumer problem I resort to the same tactic: relentless Amazon searching.

After some mildly embarrassing searches, followed by some way more embarrassing searches (turns out that, yes, Amazon sells vibrators and no, this is not what people are referring to when they talk about the “dark net”), I found a pair of fancy men’s underpants. They came all the way from Australia.

I’ll stop right here. Yes, now I know. Now I know, now that I’ve thought about it, Australia isn’t necessarily known for their fine clothing. Where do you get a fancy suit? Italy. London. Right? Where do you get fancy shoes? Italy. Hmm. Now that I think about it, I can never travel to Italy. I don’t have the clothes for that shit.

I chose to think of it like this: I ordered a pair of underwear so specialized they came from outside the U.S. My normal travel for a pair of underpants is 4.5 miles. These would be coming about 8,900 miles. That’s a good deal fancier, right? Almost 9,000 miles fancier?

 

Arrival

Face of disappointment

Let me take you aside for a moment to explain something. I live in an apartment building that’s locked from the outside. So packages are not dropped off. It’s a bad system.

Which is why I have packages sent to my work.

Something you’re not always in control of in this work/mail setup is what the packages say when they arrive. Sometimes it can be a tad embarrassing. But really, unless a very weird company uses their very weird name on the label, who’s going to know?

I have an answer to that.

See, it turns out that if a company clearly labels the package as “underwear” on a visible customs form, everyone at your work will know.

 

The Test

Underpants testing

I took my new underpants home. I put them on. Then spent the next several hours pulling them out of my ass.

I don’t know what it was, but I could feel the fabric crawl up the back of my legs, the underpants making tentative but consistent spelunking expeditions into my ass.

Have you ever worn underpants where, if you didn’t know better, you would swear your ass is actively sucking them in? That your ass has decided enough is enough, it’s time to switch things up and become the eating end of the body? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what I had going on.

I truly had found the Cadillac of underwear. It was expensive, it looked nice, but it was mostly a pain in the ass.

 

Purchase #3

hope and despair

A fire was lit in me that hot June in the Nevada desert. A passion for the finer things in life. As Katy Perry puts it, that’s what I get for waking up in Vegas.

As Katy Perry also puts it, there’s something of an unquenchable fire that fuels every man’s heart, while at the same time said fire is likely to consume him. She didn’t say that in a song, not in those exact words, but I think that’s the idea behind the fireworks song. Basically. People don’t always have to say everything exactly.

So. Where next?

For right now, who knows? Perhaps it’s my destiny to be ever-searching. Ever-yearning. Ever pulling at my ass to the point where my fingers are sore the next day from PULLING AT MY BUTT.

For right now, maybe the perfect underwear is, as Melville would put it, my white whale. I know it’s out there because it has to be. And I’ll keep searching, no matter what the personal cost.

Or is the white whale metaphor a Katie Perry thing too? I always get her and Melville confused.

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