Wednesday 12 December 2007

Underwear evolution - women

Pseudoscience of love - Underwear evolution: women
Unlike their male counterparts, the amount of material used in female underwear has been steadily decreasing over the last number of centuries. Indeed, so much so that, short of going commando, this trend unfortunately can not keep continuing and must level off. Thus, we are left with an exponential decrease, as shown in the graph above. For direct comparisons with men, bras are not included in this treatise, despite the growing number of men who need them!

Back in the middle ages, a potential suitor would need a machete to hack through the layers of chemises, smocks, petticoats and the like that a woman used as underwear. This cornucopia of genital attire possible doubled as a chastity belt of sorts! By the early 1900s, this mercifully had been whittled down to mere bloomers. The trend continued through to bikini style briefs and the g-string - surely the acme of female underwear design!!!

I have noticed that the string nature of modern women's underwear would appear to the untrained male eye to be giving them constant wedgies! While this would seem to be most uncomfortable to a man, the absence of "undercarriage" does have to be factored in! Unfortunately, most of this empirical evidence has been gathered from VPL (visible panty lines) and not, err, investigations in the field!

Underwear evolution - men

Pseudoscience of love - Underwear evolution: men
The variation in the amount of material used in male underwear (also known as jocks, kacks, smalls etc.) down through the centuries to the present day turns out to be sinusoidal in nature. This is shown in the graph above, where the most popular type of male undergarment from medieval times onwards is displayed.

Back in the Middle Ages, men wore convoluted kacks called a braie. This usually came with a codpiece, which was a zipper of sorts for, err, easy access! Fast forward to the 1800s and you had long johns, a full body suit, again with flaps (front and back this time!) for convenience. In the 20th century, underwear shrank at a rate of knots with boxers first becoming popular in the 1930s. Briefs started at much the same time but became popular later on, thankfully marking the minimum amount of fabric used in popular male kacks (Peter Stringfellow et al take note: g-strings should not be worn by men!).

Funnily enough, boxers and their derivatives have become very popular again in the past number of years, causing the final upturn in the graph above. This is probably due to their reputation for being roomier and being easier to access, although at the expense of support for the two veg! It may be a periodic sinusoid so perhaps we'll have to dust off those codpieces soon!

Who said this blog wasn't educational?!