Columnist Susan Snyder: A brief look at underwear

Friday, May 3, 2002 | 10 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Fridays Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

If women's regular underpants were made to fit we wouldn't need thong underwear.

(If you're already offended, change the channel.)

And we likely wouldn't have parents in Poway, Calif., calling for the ouster of a high school vice principal because she made female students attending a school dance last weekend lift their skirts for a panty check. Any girl wearing a thong was sent home.

Evidently thongs aren't appropriate school attire whether they're sandals or panties.

For a moment, let's put aside this school official's artificial definition of decency and admit that many items of clothing are more deserving of such outrage and attention.

Forget nail clippers, we ought to have some sort of Taste Police at the airport checking tourists from the Midwest for panty lines, tube tops and resort wear borrowed from a sister back home who is two sizes smaller.

All offensive clothing should be confiscated before it is paraded through the Imperial Palace lobby. Honestly, do rooms on the Strip have mirrors?

But I digress. We were talking about thongs (not to be confused with tunes sung by lispers), and whether girls who wear them are nasty. That is what the California vice principal was implying by asking these poor girls to hike up their hemlines.

The fact of the matter is, comfy women's underwear scares people. In the 19th century women's-rights supporters Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer set society on its ear when they decided loose, knee-length pantaloons worn under slightly longer skirts were more comfortable and practical than the boned, layered and suffocating Victorian ensembles women endured for decades.

"Bloomers" were declared indecent, and Bloomer was ridiculed as brazen and immoral.

Same schtick, different underpants. Maybe the Poway vice principal is peevish about thongs because her underwear fits. Perhaps she isn't like the millions of women out there who are not shaped like most underpants.

For unless we are talking about giant, jib-sail drawers that ride up under your armpits at the top and bunch up in areas we won't discuss, few provide adequate coverage without panty lines.

Women are forced into the discreet tug-and-cover every time they stand up or pretend that nothing is wrong as they walk out of the room with elastic bands drawing maps across their posteriors.

I have long suspected that the Underwear People are in cahoots with the Bathing Suit People, who assault women about this time every year with three basic choices in varying colors and fabrics:

Suits your daughter can wear.

Suits no one can wear.

Suits your mother wore in 1955.

Take your pick -- and leave your ill-fitting undies on when you're in the dressing room.

It is a wonder we put up with such nonsense, let alone pay for it.

"The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort and usefulness; and while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance," Bloomer said back in the 1840s.

Maybe we should pity people like that school official in Poway. She's out of style by more than 150 years.