An Ode To Granny Panties
June 2003
I have chucked my cotton granny panties and pulled on proper bulldagger boxers.
I've been fighting it for years, but our oh-so-diverse community has no room for someone like me. I have finally given in to lesbian cultural orthodoxy. Those granny panties are not sexy.
I have worn them as long as I can remember -- a style passed down from carefully chaste and wrinkled oldsters to each new generation of good girls. One hundred percent cotton, made in Canada, "wash warm 40c, do not bleach, tumble dry warm, do not iron."
No fancy cut, natch. These skivvies cover everything -- big thick elastic band across the waist and a full eight inches of fabric down to the thigh. I feel safe. I feel wholesome. I feel nice.
My girlfriend hates them.
There's a delicious moment the first time you have sex with someone new, the moment when you get down to your dainties. First the pants go, and then... there is a horrible moment as her eyes go all big and she stares at the knickers. Everything freezes.
A one-night stand knows that it is impolite to make fun of her partner's drawers. She recovers, removes them, and shoves them very, very far under the bed.
She never calls back.
There is no room for granny panties in proper dyke society. And one day my girlfriend ordered me to go shopping. She had been very patient, she said, and enough was enough. My undergarments had to go. Or else. And gawd knows, I didn't want her disposing of her own sexy femme things and adopting my own bloomers in retaliation.
But there ya go. Femmes wear hotsie totsie, itty-bitty, vavoomy things. Butches wear boxers. These are time-honored traditions. And after three decades of virginal unmentionables, I was being forced to cope with my true butch cultural heritage.
I trembled. I blustered. I told my girlfriend it was ridiculous to throw away a dozen perfectly good undies. My mother gives me six for Christmas every couple of years.
And I'm a soft butch -- long haired, with girlie mannerisms like talking with my hands and blushing furiously when I think someone's cute. I couldn't throw a punch if I was attacked in an alleyway --but we ole softies have no organized support groups. There are no lesbian klatches for the mushy. No peer counseling, 24-hour phone-lines for the mugwumps.
There is no soft butch community that I can lean on, that I can call upon for aid in my time of need. Our only butch role models are big toughies who jingle the change in their pockets; mono-syllabic, two-fisted drinkers with flat-tops. And they wear real underwear, dammit.
I went to a big-box department store, turning beet red the moment I walked across the invisible line that marked the entrance into the men's underwear department. I was agog at the huge space it took up. "What size is your husband?"
Uhm, they're for a Person of Size, I stammered, edging away. I wear men's shirts, men's pants, men's socks... but the intimacy of underwear has a mystique all its own. Luckily, a big sign appeared to my left announcing a Calvin Klein sale, 3 for 2, and I know he's very cool. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to rely on my gay brothers for fashion advice. But there were gazillions of different styles and colors and sizes and... I just grabbed whatever and fled. It turned out they were too small. I never tried to return them.
Months later, I headed to the U.S. and bought two dozen XXL at a crowded Gap store. Khaki, purple, red, white, blue. I won't have to shop again for decades.
They bunch up sometimes; I have to smooth them out under my pants. They're otherwise comfy.
But I'm still having trouble with the idea of boy bloomers. I think that makes me a coward. Or a hetero assimilationist? Self-hating? Filled with a deep-rooted inability to accept my identity?
I'm working it through. I am proud of who I am. Plus I don't want to spend the next few months sleeping on the couch. So grrr. Grunt. Rawr. These days, I wear boxers, yo.
Now about my fat butch titties....