I wrote the following article for Kitsch magazine, a literary magazine here at Cornell. I will also be adding a few more paragraphs and some footnotes and handing it in as my research paper for Intro to Semiotics (now THAT’s what I call multitasking). It was a lot of fun to write because I got to Google things like “diamond-studded bra” and “thong controversy”.

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Fifth grade: the last moment of freedom before one is crushed by puberty’s clammy grasp. A time of innocence, a time of freeze tag and wiffle ball during recess, a time when it is still acceptable to admit that you cry every time Simba tries to awaken Mufasa after the wildebeest stampede. And, now, a time when you can buy your first thong at Abercrombie and Fitch.

The chain clothing purveyor, best known for the awe-inspiring 20-year-old Adonises plastered across its bags, recently made waves by marketing thong underwear as part of the “Abercrombie Kids” line, which is directed towards girls in elementary through middle school. Parents were outraged, non-parents were appalled, and Family Values associations everywhere foresaw the coming of the apocalypse.

At the same time, the media was embroiled by a controversy over a school dance. A female administrator at Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego had instituted an impromptu “thong check,” lifting girls’ skirts as they entered the gymnasium and sending them home if their rears were not fully covered. The public was furious, demanding that the administrator resign. She saw nothing wrong with what she had done, and stated that she had only been trying to protect the students.

Why such a fuss over such a small article of clothing? At no point did Abercrombie proclaim that they wholeheartedly endorsed prepubescent sexual activity or even that the underwear was intended for viewing by anyone except the skinny, awkward wearer herself. Presumably, thongs for girls serve the same purpose as thongs for women: that is, they protect the wearer from the dreaded Visible Panty Line (VPL). It’s a matter of personal appearance, right?

Unfortunately, it can’t be brushed off that easily. Though the manifest (utilitarian) functions of underwear–e.g., protecting our more delicate areas from the roughness and chafing of our pants, and preventing accidental exposure when wearing a skirt–are important, the latent (symbolic) functions of underwear are just as powerful, if not more so due to their subconscious nature. If underwear served only as a barrier between us and our pants, then there wouldn’t be such a huge variety of it out there, but off the top of my head, I can list at least seven types of underwear for women alone. Clearly there must be something more to this small, flimsy article of clothing than meets the eye.

That is, on the rare occasions that it does meet the eye, overcoming a puritanical suppression that has persisted for centuries. Every member of American society, with few exceptions, wears underwear; why, then, is it such a travesty for others to know that you belong to this unmaligned (and even favored) majority? A female in her underwear is no more exposed than a female in a bikini (indeed, often less exposed), but the former has been deemed unacceptable for public viewing while the latter runs–and jiggles–rampant on beaches and boardwalks. The female underwear industry allocates what seems like an incredible portion of its resources into developing new and improved remedies for panty lines: thongs, g-strings, microfiber, laser-guided undies that emit white noise for ultimate discreetness. The scandalousness of the skin that underwear covers has extended to the covering itself, rendering it a private thing meant for the wearer’s eyes only. It is interesting to note that the sexual double-standard for men and women is also clear in the way that the public treats underwear: while men are free to walk around with the waistbands of their jeans at their knees and their boxers billowing like a ship’s sails at full mast, any “proper” woman is expected to keep her unmentionables… well, unmentioned.

But at the same time, women choose their underwear under the assumption that someone else will see it. It comes in a myriad of colors and patterns, in decadent materials such as velvet, silk and lace. Presumably, one’s underwear is seen only by a select few, and even then for only a comparatively short time, but as much effort goes into choosing the proper underwear before a date as goes into selecting the actual clothes that are worn over it. Because of the intense associations with which it is imbued, underwear has become a representation of one’s sexual self, conveying all of the nuances that words cannot fully describe.

And as with our sexual selves, we have a love-hate relationship with underwear, walking the fine line between exhibitionism and suppression. Though thongs are purportedly manufactured to prevent panty lines, a recent trend has been to pair them with low-rise jeans, prominently displaying your thong straps (as well as your trussed flesh) to the world–a trend that can’t be completely unrelated to the Starr Report’s pseudo-pornographic recounting of Monica Lewinsky’s first interaction with Bill Clinton, wherein she showed him her very own thong straps. And though over the years bras have become as smooth and unobtrusive as possible, bra straps have become the newest method of clothing embellishment; some manufacturers have even gone so far as to provide interchangeable straps to match one’s outfit. Underwear is not always condemned to a life of invisibility–but, as we learned from Monica, it’s easy to be too bold in this capricious world.

None take advantage of this danger so much as advertisers do. Only given a thirty-second television spot or as long as it takes to drive by a billboard or flip past a magazine page, advertisers have to grab attention quickly and effectively. They must present something unexpected, something that violates norms and shocks the public. Three years ago, Victoria’s Secret garnered much publicity with its release of the “Millennium Bra,” a diamond- and sapphire-encrusted brassiere priced at a cool ten million dollars. It was the ultimate extravagance, absent of any rational explanation; it took something that was used primarily for functionality (providing support) and kept under wraps, and transformed it into a spectacle, a bejeweled boondoggle that no longer served any manifest function–a shrine to indulgence and unabashed sexuality. At around that same time, Coca Cola came out with a commercial in which a man describes, with tenderness, his wife’s old, faded cotton underwear, comparing it to the underwear his mother wore when he was a child. In addition to raising questions about Oedipal love and its relation to soft drinks, the advertisement turned heads with the blunt message it conveyed about underwear’s place in a mature relationship. (Perhaps more unrealistic was the husband’s reaction to this transformation, an appreciation of the wabi-sabi nature of “the kind of underwear that [he] saw in the hamper when [he] was a kid.”)

Still, though many an eyeroll was spurred by the Coke commercial and many a jaw dropped in disbelief when the Millennium Bra was unveiled, the public ultimately shrugged its collective shoulders and accepted the marketing ploys. Other advertising campaigns have not been so fortuitous: in the 1980s, Calvin Klein caused mass hysteria with an advertisement featuring a then-15 Brooke Shields donning a pair of jeans and saying, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” In 1999 a Calvin Klein billboard consisting of a picture of two young boys jumping around in their underwear was yanked from Times Square under accusations of being child pornography. “I think they’re in very bad taste,” then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the press with regard to the advertising campaign.

It seems that, while the gap between men and women is narrowing, we are cordoning off a new group of people for whom the mere suggestion of underwear is taboo: children. A mere ten years ago, Nickelodeon could run commercials featuring a dozen Lamb-Chop-underoo-clad children dancing around in a circle, but now a picture of two boys doing something that could not possibly be construed as sexual is pulled from an advertising campaign due to paranoia about heavy breathing in pedophiles.

Children have become our last remaining vestiges of purity and innocence in a time where everything else is about sex, and we defend these oases with all our might. To allow, as Abercrombie did, something so imbued with sexuality as the thong to even graze the skin of a child is to deface a monument to virginity. Few children choose their underwear with a sexual situation in mind, but in our haste to protect them from the adult world, we treat them as though they do. The painful irony of the situation is that with our shock at advertisements like the one pulled from Times Square, we are establishing that children in underwear are indecent in the first place; we shackle our children to the notion that underwear–and, consequently, sex–are things to be ashamed of. This, above all, is what underwear signifies in our culture: our ambivalence toward our own sexuality.