What is it with men and women's panties?

Ok, so I thought about writing this last week, when it actually occurred, but things happened and my mood was foul and I had not energy for a silly post on underpants and biking in mini-skirts. But I realize that you all, that is, at least the male group of you, oh dear readers (which is sadly over-representative, as one very savvy person recently noted, it is overwhelmingly male this world of cyber geekdom, and here one can self-propagate with no more than the desire to do so, and the time to waste), seem to be fascinated with the mere mention of female undergarments, or lack thereof. I mean, really, one passing mention of panties in a sea of blather, and all your antenna were pricked... So, in honor of the enthusiasm of the likes of Oscar, Dean, Yuré and others who may have excercised greater discretion, I suppose I shall go there after all. Shy demure little me? Why yes.

So I have been on a gender bent of late (of late? you ask incredulously, when are you not dissecting the meaning of sex and its social constructedness? ah yes, sometimes I forget, I swear...) but honestly, honestly... you can't possibly be as unidimensional as you purport, I think it is more about the fact that your brains are programmed to leap for the moving target (vestigial hunting skills), but the polivalence kicks in after a while, doesn't it? (Oscar, I might add, has proven it to me with his excellent second chapter) You all really feel things beyond pure animal impulse, I'm sure of it, just like I am sure that it is as easy to lead you astray with a few pointed comments (the power of the tongue) as it is to take candy from a baby. We know these things about you as women, we just normally adhere to our moral standard and don't use them against you, pobrecitos.

I jest. (about which part? you guess;)

So my thought about last week, of course, was that wearing mini-skirts and riding bikes can lead to accidents on several fronts. I discovered this empirically, I am sad to say, and because the topic arose, I thought I would examine, from an objective academic stance, what currents of power are at work under these particular circumstances (he he).

Yes. A case study in the dangers of moral turpitude, or, in my case, just plain old turpitude. I am not, in general, a mini-skirt wearer. But, because Kirsten and I had such fun dancing around her living room in such garments, and I got such enthusiastic feedback, I thought I would do so more often. (ok, not really, I was simply out of laundry and I a had just shaved my legs, so I felt like I should take advantage.) I own exactly four mini-skirts, two of which are soft, stretchy cotton, and meant for travelling, black and grey respectively. One is a shiny black material, acceptable for clubbing (which I never do), but way too short for me to ever really dare going out in, so presumably it could be used for dress-up/ role playing, but I've never gone there, maybe someday. (Aside, this reminds me of Sole's literary fondness for the oldest profession... I think, actually, that we are all whores in one way or another, it is just that some people actually know their price and can name it... but I digress...)

So the last mini-skirt I own is a cream-colored cotton, with a vegetable-ink print and geometric designs, and generally is beachwear. I didn't realize what a difference it makes to have a bathing suit on underneath as opposed to one's unmentionables, but at least for me, it changed my whole approach to biking.

So, as usual I was running late, you might think that I would be able to get myself dressed and out of the house by 9:30 but I can never seem to get things to line up, and I end up racing in a laughable "sprint" on my clunker of a bike to my office with only a few spare minutes to grab my books and (in a river of sweat mixed with the perfume of a recent shampooing) present myself as possessor of knowledge (actually, of course, this goes against my teaching philosophy, teacher as obelisk of power, but you know what I mean), and so by the time I realized my folly it was too late to do anything about it. There was no turning back in search of more suitable garb.

This particular skirt, you see, has absolutely no give. It doesn't stretch, so the range of motion of legs is greatly limited by its confines. Not wanting to rip the seams, I was forced to allow it to just keep riding up, and up, until it barely covered my upper thighs. Now, you might think that I am not shy, and I suppose this is true, but I do have (an albeit liberal one) a sense of decorum, and flashing every passerby on my ride to work wasn't on my agenda for the day. This is when I had my first vision of bloody, mangled bike wrecks, just as I was approaching the intersection of highspeed bike lanes at the peak traffic moment (10-15 minute before the hour). Imagine maneuvering this downhill slope, while trying to wiggle the skirt back down to a halfway decent locus and with one hand casually draped so as not to blind innocent eyes. I had to make a choice, safety or propriety... we can all guess which choice I made. Meanwhile I was pondering, while breathing in the rich smell of sweetly rotting eucalyptus, the fact that accidents were likely to be caused by such blatant disregard for human decency. Not by me, of course, although I was very close to flipping my bike, I managed to hold it together, squeezing my thighs as tight as I could while still pedalling at a furious tempo. While passing the bike-lane construction site, just before my final resting spot, I realized that if I were cuter, this could have been, indeed, a dangerous situation, capable of causing grown men to drop heavy machinery and such. (One summer in Spain, when I was 13 and decidedly more attractive than now, just such a thing happened with a member of the royal guard falling from his horse.) Fortunately for everyone involved, I don't suffer from the Santa Barbara barbie disease. Although it seems this mini-skirt biking ordeal is becoming a wide-spread phenomenon. 5'10 blondes from all over are wearing negligible strips of fabric that mascarade as $50 jean skirts (from Abercrombie no doubt) and flaunting their pastel wares while on bikes. What can explain this madness? The confluence of the only readily available form of locomotion coupled with lagging identity development? The insidious and ignominious effect of marketing on impressionable minds? Or perhaps, they are all aliens, yes, here to colonize the masculine mind.... Er. No. Well, I for one, have learned my lesson, no bikes and miniskirts to work, only the beach, when it is abundantly obvious by my lack of shirt that what is peeking out from beneath the Barthian textile is none other than a tame blue swimsuit. No more moral delincuency for me, and maybe my inherent clumsiness may be curbed.

And speaking of moral turpitude, on a totally unrelated note, or a tangentially related one at best, I needed to share this with somebody, so it might as well be everybody. I don't really know how this is possible, because I don't really write such atrociously brazen things (do I?), but on my other "literary" site, in just this last week these have been the (scandalous) searches that have brought people to it. And besides the obvious titles, I know I have written about no such explicit things, I don't think.

“guiding a woman, through words and touch, to a powerful orgasm” (Chicago)
“que es un mitomano” (Peru) “definicion de” (México, D.F.) “mitomano” (Salinas, CA) (D.F)
“ice queen clothing” (Oklahoma)
“tip para cara manchadas” (Colorado)
“the house of the rising sun” (3x Connecticut, Pennsylvania)
“gyn + shame” (Germany)
“meet and have sex with fat face sitting woman in Minnesota” (LA)
and my personal favorite, with proper subcontinent accent:
“live photos of sucking and caressing the nipples of sexy women by men and sexy men by women (sexy sexy photos)” (India)

So in closing, to return to the overlying theme of gender that pervades this post, how many of these searches do you suppose were originated by female subjects? Hmmm?