sheer potentiality

I’ve been doing some research since my initial post about how pants make no sense.

A couple people suggested Utilikilts. If I had $171 to spend on a kilt and belt I’d get one. It doesn’t really bother me that a Utilikilt costs $131 when I could easily get three or four pair of pants for the same price, because I don’t like pants and because wear and tear is three or four times higher for pants, to say nothing of having to wash them more often.

The used Utilikilt market doesn’t help much either. eBay doesn’t have much, and it would be hard to find something in my size. There are also alternative brands but they don’t save me that much money.

I think it would be ideal and most elegant to just wear some type of robes around, but that’s too much of a departure from cultural norms and would require inventing my own clothing instead of just buying it. So that’s out.

Sarongs are interesting, because they’re from Polynesia, and men wear them in Polynesia as an unbifurcated garment. Plus, I actually have one (a friend got one for me in Bali after hearing me rant about how there should be alternatives to pants). But sarongs are really just summerwear, and it’s not warm enough yet, so…

I have expressed my views on the subject of pants privately several times, but I think it’s time to come public about it. Simply put, I’m against them.

No, I’m not some crazy person who doesn’t want to wear pants. Hear me out. I just think that social norms are pretty backwards when it comes to the subject of below-the-waist garments. There are two general options: bifurcated (pants) and unbifurcated (skirts and other things that aren’t pants). And, for some reason, women were the gender that got assigned skirts, while men got assigned pants.

When you think about the mechanical issues here, this makes no sense. Women have neatly packaged internal genitals which means the free-flowing openness of the skirt gives them no advantage. It also means that women can comfortably wear tight pants, which they, of course, end up doing a lot. Pants are actually no problem for women, which is why women have all but given up skirts.

Men, on the other hand, have external genitals that hang down from the crotch. This is highly problematic! There are two solutions to this problem, neither of which is appealing. One solution is to physically constrict the genitals so they’re close to the body. This is uncomfortable and is bad for fertility, because it constricts the vessels and warms the testicles.

Another solution is to wear looser pants, or to wear the pants lower on the hips, but this results in looking like a slob who doesn’t know how to wear pants properly.

Most men use a combination of both solutions, and we get by, but obviously the best solution would be to wear a kilt or some other form of unbifurcated garment. In several cultures this is socially acceptable for men but in ours it is not, even though they’re inherently more comfortable for men than pants are—whereas skirts are socially acceptable for women, despite the fact that they serve almost no purpose on a female body! This shit is bananas.