I was older when I discovered the fine art of putting on one’s underwear. Except for when we were babes when our mothers did it for us and perhaps in our most senior years in the ending cycle of our lives, it is something we all do throughout our lives. It was our mothers who first put underwear upon us, like many boys I resisted. Who needed underwear if you can run around naked, but our mothers persisted and soon we were putting them on ourselves. As a small boy it was a challenge to stand there on one foot and slip the other through the underwear then stand on the other foot and do the other leg.  I could of course could have sat on the edge of the bed and put them on but what was the fun in that.  I even once tried to jump up in the air and put both legs through at the same time but that didn’t work out so well. My brother thought it was funny how I landed sprawled on the floor naked with one leg in the underwear and one out. After thinking about it I decided it was the underwear’s fault, my brother and I wore Fruit-of-the-Loom  tighty whities. The problem with tighty whities is the holes are too small.  Dad wore boxers which were roomer, “When I got older I’ll wear boxers and I bet I could do it.”, I thought at the time.

When were young we don’t think much about how easy it was to put on and take off our underwear.  I was at my niece’s house and her four-year-old son was in the wading pool in the back yard wearing only his underwear. When his mother called him to come in, he jumped out of the pool and, while running across the yard, took off his wet underwear without even slowing down.  In time I became proficient enough at it, standing on one leg at a time. Being an everyday thing, one soon forgets about doing it. I’m driving to work one day and see a Victoria’s Secret billboard and think, “Did put underwear on this morning?”   I squirm in the seat trying to tell but can’t so at the next stop light I check. Of course I did.

I became most proficient and putting on underwear in junior high school gym class.  I grew up sharing a room with my younger brother and so we dressed and undressed together our whole life at the time and thought nothing about it and seeing each other naked but that just didn’t prepare me for the shock of the locker room. Thirty boys rushing in, stripping off their clothes, changing into gym clothes all in less than eight minutes. Ten if you rushed from the previous class.  Of course you want to look, not-look, all those naked boys and their little….  But you don’t have time for that, you have to change and be out on the field or be counted late.  And then there was the dreaded jock strap. I suppose technically it could be called underwear, but I wouldn’t.  Mom got me my first one, it came in a little box that she handed me with my brand-new white gym shorts, matching T-shirt, and socks. I ask her what it was for, and she says, “It’s a jock strap. It was on the list of things to get.”  I ask, “What is a jock strap?”, and she replies, “You’ll figure it out.”  I took the gym clothes to my room and opened the box.  It didn’t come with instructions, so it took me a couple of minutes, oh, they don’t go on top of your tighty whities.   I soon learned in gym class to be out of my school clothes and into gym clothes in under one minute. You know I bet I could have jumped up into the air and put both legs through a jock strap.

Dad in his boxers. Photo by Mom

I did try boxers once, they came in a three pack from Sears. Sears was my go-to store for most everything, from tools, refrigerator, bed and bedding, tires, I mean I bought everything at Sears including my clothes. It was the best store ever. It helped that my very first credit card was a Sears card and the responsibility that goes with it, like you do have to pay for it at some time. So I took the boxers home and put them in the wash. My mother taught me that you always wash new clothes that you buy, you never know who might have tried them on. Well probably no one since the boxers were all wrapped up in plastic, although I did put aside the package in the store that was tapped up.  It was a couple weeks later before I tried them on. Yeah, only did wash about once a month those first years after moving out on my own, a pair of jeans were good for two weeks. With freshly washed boxers,  I put them on for the first time and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought I looked pretty good, kind of like Dad but skinnier at six foot two and 175 pounds. I went back to my room and put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes and headed to class at the University. I did a little squirming in the bucket seat of my ’68 Camaro on the way to class, the boxers felt a little bunched up.  I parked on some side street on the edge of campus as I didn’t have a parking permit to park on campus.  Walking to class the boxers felt better, the walking settled them down my pant legs and my man parts seemed less bunched up. I wore boxers for the next three days, although I wore the same clothes for several days, I did change my underwear every day. My mom told me, ‘”You always want to have clean underwear on in case you had to go to the emergency room, you didn’t want the doctor to see you in dirty underwear.”  After three days I decided boxers were OK, but I liked how my man parts were held a bit tighter with tighty whities.  Well, that and it would be expensive to switch, I had a whole drawerful of tighty whities, I could go a full two weeks of fresh underwear. I couldn’t afford to buy that many boxers. I didn’t have that much money,  I was collecting and turning in coke bottles for their deposit to get enough money to buy a couple gallons of gas at 32¢ a gallon.  Oh, and I didn’t try jumping up and putting both legs through the boxers at the same time.

Kwai Chang Cain

A few years later I was working full-time at the University and taking classes part-time, which was financially better but was taking much longer to get my degree.  Part of the “core curriculum" required for all degrees, no matter what the major, was a minimum physical education credit. I thought I was done with PE back in high school where I didn’t have to take it in my senior year, but here I was again facing the dreaded locker room.  I had been putting it off but when one quarter they offered a Karate class which would count as PE credit. How cool was that!  This was in the 70’s and the TV show Kung Fu had been on and had become one of my all-time top favorite TV shows.  If you’re not familiar with the show its about a half-American half-Chinese boy named Kwai Chang Cain who is raised in a Chinese Monastery and becomes a Shaolin priest and kung fu karate master but then he has to leave China after killing a prince, so he travels to America where he searches the west for his half-brother.  I signed up for the karate class and even better, I didn’t have to use the locker room, I had to get gi, those white pajama looking things karate people wear, and even better, I could wear my trusty tighty whities underneath. It was great, I loved it. I signed up then next couple of quarters for a free non-credit option of the class and was progressing. I got my first green strip on my white belt and was working on the second strip when it happened. Up to this point it had all been practice moves that you do alone, kicks, jabs, chops, but you never hit anyone.  Yeah, I knew there would be hitting, and kicking someday, they called it sparing. We were building up to sparing in one class, you and your practice partner would pull out your gi a couple inches from your chest while your partner would throw practice punches and hit your bunched out gi but not your chest. Or that was the way it was supposed to go. I go first, I pull my punches up perfect, just lightly touching my partner’s gi, Master Poe in Kung Fu would have been proud.  Then it was my partner’s turn, I puffed out my gi and stood there and my partner threw his punch and, WHAM, he hit me in the center of the chest. It wasn’t all that hard, and didn’t really hurt, but the shock, the surprise was like, woe, I’m not doing that again. Did Kwai Chang Cain wear boxers?

I was at work the next day and I told my karate experience of getting hit and not liking it to a friend who worked part time with me. She asked what I liked about the karate class, and I said the movement, the stretching, and doing the katas (a sequence of movements). She got all excited and said I should try taking a modern dance class, it is much the same thing, but no hitting. I was skeptical, but I respected her for she had been taking modern dance classes for a while and she had talked before about it how much she liked it. Then she pulled out the schedule for the next quarter’s free classes at the junior college and she talked me into signing up for it.  Well, I tried it, and I liked it. It was not quite as structured as karate but had movement, flexibility, and  sequences and was more free form. Plus, there were a lot of cute girls in the class and I was the only boy. The first quarter I wore shorts and T-shirts but most all the girls wore leotards so when I signed up for the second class I went out and bought some leotards, one piece upper and separate leggings, no not at Sears, but my friend recommend a place. When I went to try them on for the first time I wasn’t certain if should wear underwear under them or not. The girls didn’t seem to, or at least I could see any panty lines, yeah, that was nice. Years later I learned many of them wore thong underwear, I don’t know how they could stand that strap running up their butt crack. It was like having a permanent wedgie.  I opted for my ever trusty tighty whities, boxers would have never worked. I took modern dance and ballet classes for several years.

There was a time in the mid 70’s that I didn’t wear any underwear at all.  I had a girlfriend, or should I say part time, maybe girlfriend, that I had been seeing for several months and she would occasionally stay the night which, after one of the times, I found she wore no underwear under her jeans. Yeah, think about that, I did… a lot. I asked her about it, and she gave some logical, rational reason why not wearing underwear was better. She was that way, logical and rational, one of the things I liked about her.  The reason was sound enough that had to try it too, so I started not wearing any underwear. My tighty whities remained in their drawer.  It did have a nice free feeling to it which was ok with shorts, but jeans were a bit rough on the man parts.  I tried it for a while until one weekend I was invited to a party at a friend’s house. It was a great party, a dozen or so people, most of whom I knew, the beer was flowing, a joint or two was passed around and then the host said let’s go out on the golf course. The backyard of her house opened onto a golf course, so we all went running out on to the fairway and rolled around in the grass, quite stoned, looking up at the perfect starlit night.  Then the host says, “Lets go swimming.”, and we all head back to the swimming pool in her backyard. Clothes started coming off and people started jumping in. Most of the girls had come prepared and had swimsuits under their clothes but there were a couple that went topless. The boys stripped off their shirts and pants and jumped in the pool in their underwear. I stood there watching as one after another went in and started calling for me to jump in. Well, I had no underwear on, but after repeated calling, I stripped off my shirt and pants and jumped in buck naked.  Reminds me that time going skinny dipping in Grampa’s pool with Dad and my brother. I started wearing underwear again after that.

Generally, tighty whities were considered boys underwear while boxers were considered men’s underwear.  Boxers did have some advantages like in the James Bond movie when Sean Connery playing James, and his fellow spy, were close to being discovered and eluded their pursuers by stripping off their pants and shirts and, wearing only their undershorts and boxers, jogged down the street like a couple of men in their gym shorts out for a run.  It was in the ‘80s that tighty whities became “sexy” when Tom Cruise in the movie Risky Business danced around in his.

Me doing Warrior I in my "diaper shorts"

At the turn of the millennium, I started taking yoga classes and found I really liked it. It had some of the characteristics of karate and dance like movement, stretching and sequences, and like dance classes, I would often be the only man in the class.  I had divorced a couple of years earlier, hoped to meet women in class.  Like dance the women wore tight fitting leotards although yoga had become so popular they were now called yoga clothes. In a few years they would become so popular that women started wearing them as everyday clothes, I would see women at the grocery store in yoga clothes, some should not be wearing them. Being older and having put on a little weight, I wasn’t going to wear leotards, but they did have men’s yoga pants that were very short shorts with elastic around the leg holes keeping them snug to the legs.  Then there was the question of what to wear underneath them. The women in their fancy yoga pants mostly wore either nothing or thongs but occasionally you could see panty lines. Yeah, I noticed, how could I not when a beautiful woman was bending over on the yoga mat right in front of me. The women looked too as found out during one yoga workshop when I was doing down dog and looked between my legs to see several women behind me watching me and giggling amongst themselves. They were looking at my ass. When I stood up and looked at them and they all put on big innocent smiles, and then one of them winked at me.  I wore my trusty tighty whities under my yoga shorts helping to keep my man parts in place during all the contorted yoga poses.  I continued wearing the yoga shorts for until one day woman I knew called them “diaper shorts”.  Well, they did kind of look like diapers, so I switched to thigh length shorts made of Lycra.

Boxer Briefs

As the years went by, I continued to wear tighty whities until sometime in my 50’s when I switched to wearing boxer briefs. Going halfway down the thigh like boxers but being snug fitting like tighty whities, they had the best features of both. They didn’t make putting them on any easier, if anything harder, with their narrow and longer leg openings.

It was in my late sixties that putting on my underwear while standing on one leg started to become more difficult as balance became harder, in part due to an inner ear problem. While I could just sit on the bed and put them on, I wasn’t willing to admit defeat (or old age) and kept at it. Doing karate, dance and then yoga for many years helped. Focus, stand on right leg, carefully lift left leg, bend knee, place foot through leg hole, put foot back on floor. Repeat the other side, put up underwear to waist. Damn, their on backwards! Take them off and repeat.  One day I realized it became sort of a Zen thing to put them on in a smooth sequence of movements.

Then I got thinking about it. Do you always put the same leg in first? I did. Let’s see, I started say age four, that would be sixty years, 21,900 times, more or less, there were those months I didn’t wear any. From my years of yoga practice, I learned to do yoga poses on both sides to keep the body and mind in balance. I remembered the scene in the movie Karate kid when Mr. Miyagi is teaching Daniel karate by having him wax a car, wax on, wax off, alternating hands to do both sides equally. Yoga is also about awareness, being aware of your body, your mind, your surroundings. Then I thought about it in context of putting on my underwear, I had always done right leg then left leg. I didn’t think about it, it had become automatic.  So, I decided to alternate days. The first day left leg first, it seemed a bit strange. Second day, right leg, third day left, then right, right, right. I had forgotten and reverted back to my old pattern. Some patterns are hard to change.  

Then there is the putting on your underwear yoga pose., well, they call it something different, some Sanskrit name like ukatasana. Actually, the martial arts like karate and tai chi, have similar movements, they don’t call it putting on your underwear movement either. Standing, with underwear in hands, you lift one leg, slipping one foot through the underwear, then repeat standing on the other foot. Of course, you don’t actually use underwear in a class, but I recognized it for what it was. The movements go back to ancient times, for as long as people have been wearing underwear. 

Putting on underwear gets more difficult as I get older. The other day, or maybe it was a few weeks ago, another thing about getting older is that time melds together. I had come fresh out of a good hot shower and was putting on my underwear, standing on one leg of course. The first leg went in smooth enough but then came the second leg. The other leg hole in the underwear got bunched up ,which I didn’t notice, and when I try to stick my foot into it and it just didn’t go. Now I could have just taken my foot out, but you know I had to keep trying, my balance got unsteady, I start hopping around like a crazed pogo stick, the cat sees me and screeches and runs for cover under the bed, then I step on one of my slippers by the bed and over I go, falling backwards… fortunately onto the bed. I break out laughing, it all was quite funny. But thinking about it, I could have fallen the wrong way, hit my head and being lying there dead to be found weeks later. It happened to a friend’s mother.

Oh well, I shrug it off, still laughing about how funny I must have looked. With practice, concentration, focus I think I got a few good years of putting my underwear on left in me before I get so old, and life coming full circle, I will have to have someone change them for me like as a child.

For the sake of modesty models are shown with clothes on.

Larry Mixson, 10-14.2024