Men get defined by their choice of underwear – but is it fair?

Whether you are a man who wears briefs, boxers or boxer briefs, chances are you’ll be judged for it – if only by ourselves, writes Adam White. But where does this impulse to define people by their pants come from, and is there any escape from it?

There is so much cultural emphasis placed on what’s inside a man’s pants, we tend to forget how loaded the actual pants can be (iStock)

I was 12 years old when I first thought about underwear. Not because I didn’t wear the stuff before then (that would be weird) but because that was the age I first watched Bridget Jones’s Diary. Bridget’s big pants – think Nineties shapewear without the Skims sheen, and later remarked upon witheringly during sex – were my Goosebumps, the root cause of years of nightmares and paranoia. For I had discovered at that moment that the completely innocuous bit of fabric between your skin and your outerwear wasn’t just a bit of fabric. It was a signal. A statement. A piece of fancy wrapping paper for scary sex stuff, and the most intense, judgement-filled sartorial item you could ever own as an adult.

Of course, much like film certificates, the dangers of quicksand and the age you lose your virginity, underwear would ultimately take up far less space in my grown-up brain than I once imagined. But I do, every once in a while, get pangs of pants panic. The instant virality of shots of celebrity beefcakes in their Calvin Kleins? Panic! Press releases about National Underwear Day (allegedly every 5 August)? Panic! On Friday, Charli XCX released a filthy, frantic tribute to the humble knickers. “You wanna guess the colour of my underwear,” she sings on “Guess”. “You wanna know what I got going on down there.” Do we? Oh God, do we?! Panic!

Pants – their colour, their size, their cost – matter. Women, inevitably, get it worse. Thongs are never just thongs but signifiers of attitude and behaviour, class and sexuality. A pair of Bridget pants, despite being the total opposite of a thong, are treated much the same. It has long been established that, if you’re a woman, someone will read into your underwear and decide it speaks to your soul. No matter how much actual material you’ve chosen to cover yourself with.

For men, this is a little less clear-cut. Perhaps because there is so much cultural emphasis placed on what’s inside a man’s pants, we tend to forget how loaded the actual pants can be. But anyone surveilling the landscape of male underwear choices will find just as much insanity and hypocrisy as there is for women.

Take briefs, a style synonymous with sweaty B-list Calvin Klein hunks photographed in moody black and white – those shots of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White from earlier this year, for instance, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson-types bearing immaculately and not-at-all-enhanced, egg-shaped front-lumps. But briefs are a tricky sort of pants: look like a Greek god and you’re golden; look like you haven’t stepped into a gym since secondary school and you’re playing with fire.

And labels matter, too. As ludicrous as it sounds, the CK briefs have an undeniable cachet that the cheaper Primark version does not. Wearing the latter would merely open up a can of worms: you’re after a particular look, but for whatever reason aren’t able to, or can’t afford to, go the whole hog. The issue here is that Calvins are expensive! Forty-two quid for a three-pack? In this economy? Perhaps just stick with the cheaper boxer briefs, right?

Hold fire, though! Because boxer briefs are similarly fraught. They are more functional and less outwardly sexified than regular briefs but also run the risk of being a bit drab. Because human beings are very complex creatures, this does hold its own appeal: there is nothing performatively effortful about boxer briefs, nothing ostentatious or smug. Do you speak the language of Sex and the City? Think of boxer briefs as the Aidan Shaw of pants – maybe not your first choice, and maybe a milquetoast bore, but he’ll know how to fix your end table, so you can’t complain too loudly.

Far more controversial than any of the above is the boxer, a too-loose calamity that is very much the San Andreas Fault of underwear: a disaster is imminent; you just never quite know when it’s going to happen. Social judgement is a given here. Then there are mini briefs, a style only ever acceptable on tiny children, and lend adult men the look of, well, a Charli XCX fan not yet brave enough to buy a jockstrap.

Renée Zellweger’s Bridget holds up her control pants in 2001’s ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ (Miramax/Working Title)

The ironic part of all of this, though, is that the colour or shape of your underwear fundamentally doesn’t matter all that much. Most people never even see your pants. You don’t woo with them, or date with them. All the hard parts of being alive and attracting people occur long before your underwear becomes a factor. So perhaps we need to stop worrying about it so much, and whether what we wear down there says anything about us.

The lesson I should have taken from Bridget Jones’s Diary all those years ago was that Hugh Grant’s roguish Daniel Cleaver was going to sleep with Bridget regardless of the size of her pants. Once you’re rutting around on the carpet of someone’s living room, the state of your underwear is a bit of a non-issue. I don’t know what I was worried about.