Women's underwear is not made for women

I spent the first few weeks of my job at Victoria’s Secret beating out of myself the instinct to call underwear “panties.” I recoiled each time that word left me. Panties felt too sexual. Panties felt like porn. When I used the word with customers I felt like I was talking dirty to them. I didn’t understand it then, but that was the whole point.

Women’s underwear trends prioritize sexiness over comfort because we’re supposed to be living in a constant porn fantasy. We are meant to be constantly optimizing our bodies for attractiveness, down to the garments we wear that most people can’t see.

My favorite pairs of underwear are not panties. They’re full coverage boyshorts. They’re dark colors to disguise period stains. They’re cotton, not lace. They’re comfortable. Most days I dress in dresses or loose pants so that I can wear my underwear and avoid the dreaded lace thong, something I only wear to avoid having a “quad butt” in tight bottoms.

The type of underwear I enjoy is precisely the type of underwear I am supposed to feel embarrassed about. Dark, full-coverage, cotton underwear are called “granny panties” and reserved for your period because no self-respecting woman would pass up the chance to be in something tiny, scratchy, and lacy.

The desire to get women to constantly be in lingerie was an intentional effort on behalf of former Victoria’s Secret CEO Lex Wesner. Before acquiring the brand in 1982 he said, “Every woman I know wears underwear, most of the time. All of the women I know would like to wear lingerie all of the time.”

The multi-billion dollar brand Victoria’s Secret had a simple objective: get women in the sexiest product, not the most comfortable one. It worked, the store sells more panties than any other product. It has undeniably transformed the way women buy underwear. Lace and thongs became such normalized styles in women’s underwear that to many of us, it may not even immediately register as lingerie.

I found the propagation of lingerie especially concerning when I worked at Victoria’s Secrets’ younger and adolescent focused sub-brand PINK. Some of the panties on the PINK side had rainbows or popsicles on them, clearly designed for children, but the designs still came in thongs and they still sold lace options. Why would these items be sold to minors unless the objective was to get every woman and girl to exist in a constant sexual fantasy?

It’s a request not put on men. Men’s underwear can emphasize comfortable fabrics, sweat wicking material, and breathable waistlines. Men can think about comfort because they are not under the pressure to be desired.

As I worked at Victoria’s Secret for longer I started acquiring more and more panties. I wore tiny red lace thongs under my jeans and walked around thinking about how hot I was. I felt like a good woman because underneath all of my clothes, where no one else resided, I was still sexy. I focused on that feeling instead of the sensation of lace getting wedged deep into my ass crack.

Women are indoctrinated into a hatred of their own genitalia. We are supposed to find our vulvus, and everything they do, gross. This is why fish jokes about vulvas are so common. This is why women online engage in “hygiene olympics” where they talk about how they use a minimum of three products in the shower to clean their vulvas. This is why women were historically considered unclean and shunned from society when menstruating.

It’s also why when vulvas do normal things, like bleach underwear from the pH of your discharge, it is seen as dirty or embarrassing. A woman might throw away a perfectly good pair of underwear because they’ve been bleached and are now “damaged.”

Wrapping a vulva in light colored lace is an attempt at pretending like the vulva isn’t real and alive. It is not the inanimate plastic thing men want so desperately to fuck. It has discharge and blood and sweat. It will smell earthy, not perfumed. It will grow hair. A lot of it. It will have uneven folds and lips.

If we cared about women we wouldn’t tell them that they always need to be fuckable. We’d let them wear underwear. Underwear with optimal coverage, breathable fabrics, and wide enough gussets. We would have underwear commercials with bleach and period stains because those are the actual signs of use. We wouldn’t shame women out of their real bodies and into a constant sexual fantasy.