postgenderific

[postgenderific]

Can men wear women’s lingerie?

Well, yes, but no, but also sometimes; mainly it depends. Frankly, if it fits, then why not. Does that help?

Welcome to Part 3 in this series of articles looking at underwear as a highly gendered product, just like make-up, skirts, etc. In Part 2 we drew the distinction between men who identified as male and just wanted to wear nice underthings; and men who wanted to wear nice underthings to appear and/or feel more feminine. And that leads us to ask the obvious question: do we really need ‘men’s lingerie’, or would women’s lingerie fit just as well?

Short answer is yes with a but, the long answer is no with an although…

Okay, pack a lunch and let’s get into it.

Yes, of course Hims and Thems can wear women’s lingerie if they want to, but the problem is triangles.

Speaking in generalisations, men’s bodies are an inverted triangle with the point at the bottom. Think of the shoulders as being the horizontal, the testicles being the point.

Women’s bodies are the opposite – the widest point of the hips is the base, the point of the triangle is around the neck somewhere.

Fundamentally, men’s and women’s clothes are cut differently. If you’re on the thinner side and have more of a straight up and down figure then the difference is not going to be so pronounced.

It also stands to reason that different items are affected in greater or lesser degrees by this generalisation, but let’s have a look at specifics.

Bras

You might think that there’s no point Hims and (some) Thems wearing a bra. The bottom line is simply, they can if they want to. Why not? Every gender wears items of clothing purely as an adornment, as an expression of their individuality.

If you’re not sold on that argument, consider this: why do men wear ties?

If you’re new to bras and are mystified as to how the sizing works, and I’m not going to lie – the more I learned about how bras are sized the more confused I actually got – let’s briefly go over the steps, because this is relevant to the question of whether men can wear bras..

Measure around the rib cage directly underneath your breast. That’s your band size in inches, just like you’d measure a men’s shirt; for example, 34”.

Then you’d measure around the body  again, this time at the fullest part of the breast, usually where the nipple is. Let’s say our hypothetical measurement is 37”.

What we’re interested in is the difference between the two measurements – in this case, it’s 3”. That difference is described by a letter, and that letter is the cup size. A means the difference is 1”, B is a difference of 2”, C is 3”, and so on.

So in our example, the bra size would be 34C – meaning a band size of 34” and cup size C (meaning a difference of 3″).

Sister sizing

Now you’re probably thinking that that makes a lot of sense so let’s ruin that by talking about sister sizing. How’s how it works:

You can go up a band size if you go down a cup size.

You can go down a band size if you go up a cup size.

Even if you have a 34” band size you might find 34C bras don’t feel comfortable. This could be due to body and breast shape, the way fat and muscle is distributed in the body. So, you could go up a band and down a cup (36B) or down a band and up a cup (32D). In terms of sister sizing, 32D = 34C = 36B.

Now, this is important to know because trying to measure yourself for a bra if you have a masc body can be misleading. You could measure yourself as per the above, find that your measurements are 40” and 41” respectively, and decide that a 40A bra would be the right fit.

So you buy one and try it on, and find that the cups look saggy and nasty, like your bra just doesn’t fit. In that case, you’d go down a band size, or maybe even two, and then increase the cup size. Doing that would pull the cups tight against a masc body, so even though it sounds like it shouldn’t fit because the band is too small, the extra tolerance comes from the cup size increasing.

Pro tip from someone who tried drag once and was very confused by this: Amazon Try Before You Buy is your friend.

Calculate your ‘true’ bra size, then get a couple of sizes either side. If 34C is your true size, definitely also get 32D and 36B, but maybe also get 30E and 38A; and then send back the ones that don’t fit before you have to pay for them. Don’t get padded ones (unless that’s the effect you’re after) because they have less flexibility in the cup. I normally wear a 38” chest shirt, but a 34B bra fits me best.

In this, as in all things, brands matter. A 34B from Brand A could be a totally different fit from a 34B bra from Brand B.

Another pro tip: if you have a masc body and don’t have breasts, you may well find that a non-wired or non-underwired bra is more comfortable. Sometimes they’re described as just that, sometimes they’re described as triangle bras or bralettes, although I think there are subtle differences in reality.

Knickers

Do you know what tucking is and how to do it? No? Good, read on. If you do know, you’re already ignoring this bit anyway.

If you have a penis and testicles, the vast majority of briefs won’t fit you. There are three reasons why and they’ll all drop out of the side of  briefs if you get the wrong ones. If they don’t have a high cut leg and a low rise waist you have a better chance. Compare these from Bluebella’s Sawyer collection, the high waist brief and the thong. Only one of these will keep you undercarriage in check.

Styles that look more like jockey shorts will be a better bet, as long as the leg isn’t cut too high. French knickersn,like the ones from Bettie Page for example, are basically boxer shorts.

What you’re looking for is room in the front. Or you can learn how to tuck.

Suspender belts

Ignoring all of the different types of garment that might hold stockings up, suspender belts often look like the best bet for wearing lingerie, but it’s not quite that simple. To keep them in place, they often rely on being positioned around a women’s waist and being tight enough not to slip below the waist as they are pulled taut by the stockings.

For men, who have a far less pronounced difference between waist and hip, there’s a good chance you’ll find the belt sliding down and it won’t be comfortable.

Ideally, if you don’t have the hips to fall back on, you’d go for something that sits higher and deeper and has more fastenings, like a waspie, and wear it tighter to the skin like the from Olympia set from Playful Promises.

In general, you want to avoid the ones that look like five pieces of ribbon. Generally they are more, ahem, boudoir wear than for decorating the back porch. No, that isn’t a euphemism.

You can get really plain suspender belts, by which I mean that they’re not adorned with lace and tulle and flowers. This basically becomes underwear then, rather than lingerie. If you were looking for a suspender belt free of such adornments to the point where it was basically gender neutral, this is the sort of thing you’d go for.

The other pro tip is to go for a belt that has metal clasps. They’re just easier to fasten than plastic clips and if you get them in a chic contrasting colour, they look the absolute bee’s knees.

Corsets

Going back to the theory of triangles and body shapes will account for why so many corsets won’t fit well.

Of course, if you get a corset with enough tolerance, you can adjust the ribbons at the back to pull the corset snug around your torso. It might look like a badly stuffed turkey from the back if it’s a cheap corset and the boning doesn’t adjust, but you can always wear a blazer over it.

In general though, avoid a corset with gores. Gores are additional inserts at the sides to allow extra room for hips. If you don’t have hips, these gores are just going to gape in a very untidy manner.

Enterprising types have turned corsets upside down so that the gore allows extra width for men’s broader chests, and that will work fine if you have a plain or simply patterned underbust corset like the one below (underbust corset = finishes under the bust; an overbust covers the bust).

You can get men’s corsets but I have never found one that didn’t want to be a steampunk Van Helsing, so if you want to look like a vampire extra from What We Do In The Shadows, go nuts.

The other option is a custom made corset. It won’t be cheap but it will fit beautifully and look the business. Options include Orchid Corsetry, Vollers and Valkyrie Corsets.  

Bodysuits

I guess in men’s underwear parlance we might call it a ‘singlet’, although that’s a term that hasn’t been in common use since Herbert was the most common boy’s name in the UK. You could also think of it as being like a leotard, like the ones you might see on a Mexican wrestler.

Fundamentally, it’s an all-in-one item that comes in both underwear and outerwear varieties. In women’s fashion that line is blurred by both the design of items and generally by the whole underwear as outerwear trend.

Bodysuits are a much newer phenomenon in men’s outerwear. Asos and places like that sell them. You can buy the underwear type from a few places online, but as lingerie they’re a very limited commodity.

Hosiery

Is hosiery lingerie? Probably not, but it’s often worn with lingerie so let’s include it. By hosiery we mean tights, stockings and hold-ups.

Pro tip from someone who has stood at a football ground in Wigan for three hours in winter: tights. That’s it, that’s the tip.

Tights are great. You can wear them under trousers or jeans, especially ripped jeans, for a contrast effect. Don’t wear them too thick if you do because you still need to bend your legs.

Thickness/sheerness is measured in denier – the higher the number, the thicker the tights. 200 denier is basically Smaug’s skin; 3 denier will be disintegrated by harsh language. I wear tartan and argyle pattern printed tights under my black wool kilt with my DM boots and they look amazing.

Hold-ups are super convenient. As the name suggests they hold up by means of a stretchy elastic band at the top. By finishing short of the groin, they’re really convenient to wear under jeans and trousers and you won’t end up adjusting them or taking them down when you go to the loo, as you will with tights.

I find – maybe it’s because I have skinny thighs – that if I don’t get the sizing exactly right, or if I buy a cheap brand, that they don’t stay up during the course of the day. You really don’t want them suddenly slipping down your shins while you’re wearing trousers and flopping around your ankles unbeknownst to you whilst you’re traipsing round the frozen food aisle in Tesco.

I honestly think that when straight cis men think about lingerie, 99% of the time they think about stockings and suspenders. The key is choosing a good quality belt so that your stockings stay up. After that, get a decent quality pair and they will last longer (you can spend three-digit amounts on a single pair but I don’t advise that). Don’t try to wear holdups with a suspender belt – the band will be too thick to fasten properly.

The last thing to think about is whether to wear the suspender belt under or over your underwear. If you wear the belt under your briefs, ie put your belt and stockings on and then your briefs, you won’t have to undo your stockings every time you need to pee, which is important if you work at Amazon and the amount of time you spend in the loo is measured to the femtosecond.

Some people just prefer the look of the belt over the briefs, but it’s an entirely personal choice, there’s no right or wrong way unless the belt is designed to go over matching briefs. If you wear something larger than briefs, like shorts or French knickers, sartorially speaking you night not even have the option to wear the belt over them – the leg might be longer than the strap.

So in summary: yes, men can wear some women’s lingerie, as long as it fits. Some items will fit fine, some you’ll have to really shop around. The main reason you might think about wearing women’s instead of men’s is basically choice. The number of brands producing men’s lingerie is vanishingly small at present, but the flip side is that their ranges are never going to grow until men start buying it. Catch-22.

Men wearing lingerie – men’s or women’s – are at some point going to draw insults from small minded bigots. At some point you will be called ‘gay’, it’s pretty inevitable. You can point out that being gay means something really rather different and suggest they ask whatever school they attended for their money back if they think that “being gay” means “wearing lingerie”.

[postgenderific]

What is men’s lingerie?

What’s the difference between underwear, lingerie, and lingerie designed for men?

This is Part 2 in my series of articles about products that are unnecessarily gendered; for example, make-up, skirts, heels, and in this case, underwear, and in particular about underwear and lingerie. In the first article, we adopted the hypothesis that the difference between underwear and lingerie came down to functionality vs aesthetics and that crucially, gender was not an element in that discussion.

When I Google “Men’s lingerie” I get 96 results. When I google “women’s lingerie” I get 3,010,000 results and honestly, I’m surprised the number is that low. Unisex lingerie? Just 61 results.

So it’s clear that if I want to buy something that’s more than just a minor variation on what I can buy in Tesco, I need to do some work. It seems, on a closer examination of the aforementioned and frankly piss poor 96 results, that lingerie for men falls into three categories and we need to do some work to unpack these findings.

Category 1: when there’s practically no difference from regular underwear

Here’s Men’s lingerie and sexy underwear from Inderwear.

Look familiar? It’s hard to make an argument that the majority of these products prioritise aesthetics over function. Yes, they may look nice, but in the end there’s only a superficial and cosmetic difference between these and supermarket pants. No shade on them, I’m sure they’re fabulous products.

But we’re confining ourselves to questions of form, functions and aesthetics and in that respect, it’s hard to categorise these as lingerie rather than underwear. If I were a more cynical enby I might even speculate that they’re only described as men’s lingerie to take advantage of the increase in searches for “men’s lingerie”.

Category 2: lingerie for men that is specifically designed to look like women’s lingerie

There is a percentage of men who wear men’s lingerie deliberately because they want to look or feel more feminine, but lao recognise that men’s lingerie fits better than women’s lingerie because of they way individual items are made.

You may immediately have thought, “crossdressers”. Perhaps you thought, “drag queens, obviously”. There are other use cases, and we’re going to look at those in more detail later. But for now, take a look at X-Dress, above.

or HommeMystere…

to see what I mean.

Category 3: lingerie designed for men

Now, this is going to be a very subjective distinction and some people aren’t going to see a distinction at all. This last category I consider to be ‘lingerie, cut for men’s bodies, using styles and fabrics that were stereotypically described as feminine’.

The difference is this: lingerie in this category is for people who see themselves as male and want to portray themselves as males; whereas lingerie in the previous category is for people who wish to make themselves look more feminine, possibly even to the point where they pass as women. The distinction comes from intention, whether they intend to look more feminine or masculine*.

Brands in this category include Moot…

and Menagerie.

* I appreciate that individuals assigned male at birth but who don’t identify as male (people like me, ackchewelly) might also want to wear this lingerie, not to appear more masculine in this instance, but simply because it fits better.

So that answers the question of what men’s lingerie is. The next thing to consider is whether men’s lingerie even needs to be A Thing, and whether we should just wear women’s lingerie and not be weird about it. That’s in part 3…

[postgenderific]

What is the difference between men’s underwear and men’s lingerie?

If clothing is the representation of the self, then maybe underwear is the representation of the inner self.

As might well become obvious, I have A Thing about products that are unnecessarily gendered; for example, make-up, skirts, heels, and in this case, underwear. I thought I’d do a series of posts on each topic and look in more detail at exactly why they’re so gendered and whether they need to be. And as it’s an easy, confidence-building first step to a more gender-free style – because literally no one can see it – I thought I’d start with underwear, and in particular, men’s lingerie and underwear. Welcome to Part 1!

Part 1. Introduction

I have come to love underwear. In contrast to outer garments, it’s a low risk, high yield area of self-expression, experimentation and most of all, fun. If you’re getting up in the morning and preparing to go about your business you can wear red satin boxer shorts with a Snoopy print if you want to, and it’s just for you. You can wear them under a business suit, under joggers, or just under a tiger print onesie and nobody is any the wiser. And you’ll get a smile every time you think of them.

It wasn’t always this way for me. Back when my relationship with my body and my gender wasn’t so healthy, well, I dread to even cast my mind back to the old, bedraggled, shapeless, scruffy, boring things I used to wear. Some sort of synthetic material in a colour that could only be described as ‘grim’. The idea of spending £25, £50 or £100 on a single item of underwear simply wasn’t one that occurred to me; the idea of spending £30, £40 or £50 on an entire adult lifetime’s supply of underwear was more palatable.

In a world where Brad Pitt can attend a film premiere in a brown linen jacket and skirt combo and Mark Bryan is in the pages of Vogue in a leather mini skirt and stiletto pumps, underwear represents the last most gendered frontier of fashion. Google for “men’s underwear” and women’s underwear” and you’ll get two very different sets of results. Go one step further; Google “men’s lingerie” and “women’s lingerie” and compare the difference.

I imagine that a lot of people didn’t even know men’s lingerie was even A Thing. The word ‘lingerie’ is historically a French word for ‘underwear’, a synonym for ‘sous-vêtements’. It wasn’t a gendered word, in that it didn’t specifically mean female underwear, which would be ‘sous-vêtements féminin’. The root derives from the word for linen, and the word ‘lingerie’ may be described as literally meaning ‘body linen’.

I only came across the concept of lingerie for men because I was looking for something slightly different in the underwear field, literally googling “different types of underwear for men”. As with most men’s clothing, men’s underwear is almost freakishly boring and conservative and strangled of options. You have briefs and shorts in various styles; you have vests/tank tops depending on where you are in the world; and… umm… socks and sock suspenders, I guess? (Can you imagine women going crazy over sock suspenders the way men fetishise stockings and suspenders?!)

And that gave rise to the question, “what is the difference between underwear and lingerie?” It turns out that the answer is not that straightforward and I’m still not entirely convinced that there is a universally accepted definition – most dictionaries define ‘lingerie’ as ‘women’s underwear’. So, I thought I’d dig into it a little bit, ask some questions, make my own mind up, maybe even use it as an excuse to treat myself to some new underwear because why the fudge not, and then come back here and tell you all about it.

Why do we fetishize lingerie so much?

Lingerie fetishism is the act of becoming sexually aroused by lingerie, and isn’t classed as a paraphilia until it starts to interrupt everyday normal life, or until sexual arousal or completion can’t be achieved without lingerie being involved. The term ‘lingerie fetishism’ is a broad umbrella and can refer to anything from enjoying seeing your partner wearing lingerie to buying used schoolgirl panties from vending machines in Chiba Prefecture.

The problem is that things like the very concept of lingerie; the idea that someone wearing lingerie must be sexually promiscuous; and the idea that someone wearing lingerie is only doing so for ‘your’ benefit has become deeply engrained and completely ignores the reasons why people wear lingerie. I say ‘people’ here deliberately, because as we’re discussing here it’s not just women who are wearing lingerie.

People wear lingerie as an act of self-love, to give themselves confidence, because it’s great for their mental health, to feel more empowered, and just because they can. They don’t need a reason, they don’t need permission, and they don’t need a partner to show it off to.

I saw a post on r/LingerieAddiction, which is a fashion subreddit dedicated to lingerie. An excited and sexually charged post from a man breathlessly exclaimed that both he and his wife had discovered that they enjoyed it when he wore women’s lingerie in the bedroom. In a tone that suggested he thought he was amongst like minds, he asked for recommendations for what else he could wear. It would have taken 10 seconds to look at the other posts or the subreddit’s description to realise that it was a fashion sub, not a sexuality or nsfw sub. But no, he just barged in and assumed everyone else in the sub wore it for reasons of getting off.

You can’t post a picture of painted toenails on r/malepolish without a foot fetishist leaving unwanted comments. You can’t talk about men’s lingerie on r/PantyReviews4Men without explicit sissy comments. Reddit is quite bad for it, but so is Instagram, so is Twitter.

No one has a problem with kinks and fetishes, but I wish people would please think first. If someone posts a picture of the latest Nails Inc collection on Instagram, they likely weren’t doing it in the hopes of procuring a badly-spelled comment about how desperately someone needs to come over said toes. And just because someone posts a Story of the latest set they bought from AP or Playful Promises or Moot or X-Dress doesn’t mean they need, want or deserve to know how horny it made you. It’s fine to be horny about it, but be respectful with it. You can tell them they look amazing in ways other than a manky dick pic.

What is the difference between underwear and lingerie?

Form follows function. ~ Louis Sullivan

This maxim, originally coined in reference to modernist architecture, gives us a helpful starting point.

Let’s take men’s pants here, and as always when we use gendered terms like this we’re using it as an abbreviation for “pants belonging to cisgender men, nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth and male-identifying people of other denominations” purely for purposes of readability. Men’s pants are primarily there to a) keep things from swinging about in a manner that can only be described as ‘dangerously haphazard’ and b) to stop inadvertent soiling of the outer garments (“No matter how much you shake and dance / The last two drops go in your pants”, amirite?).

Form following function, the shape of the brief then is to keep one’s penis and testicles from lolloping about the body’s southern hemisphere. Once it’s clear that your overly tight tighty whities are limiting the scope and ambition of your little swimmers, it makes sense to have something looser that still preserves the modesty, and boxer shorts are the answer. Jockstraps take the concept of briefs to its ultra-logical, high performance extreme. In between those styles are the tiny variations, like jockey shorts; more form fitting, shorter than boxers but longer than briefs. More of a marketing solution in search of a need than an application of the ‘form follows function’ maxim, but okay, at least we have some variation.

Now we apply the maxim to women’s clothes. They have the same thing, admittedly in more styles, but still with the same basic functionality and utility prioritised over aesthetics. But then we consider lingerie as we understand the word today. Lace, for example, is a staple of lingerie and has always been a luxury fabric due to the hand-made nature and the time it takes to produce, and as such it becomes a status symbol. It’s not a particularly practical material, basically being fabric with holes in. It’s expensive, and when worn in places almost no one will see it’s impractically expensive. There’s just no point wearing such an extravagant item of clothing when a cheaper, functionally superior and more utilitarian version exists… unless it’s primarily worn for aesthetic value.

And I think that’s where the line can be drawn. An undergarment may be classed as underwear if it prioritises function over aesthetics; that is, if it’s worn for the job that it does. If it prioritises aesthetics and luxury over functionality and is worn because of the sensuality, the experience and the reaction it draws from others (for example, as a status symbol) then it’s lingerie.

Researching the question, I think it’s fair to say that others have followed a similar train of thought, and that this is not a groundbreaking conclusion. But then I returned to my original quest, researching different types of men’s underwear, and I realised that in itself and according to our new working definition, lingerie is not a gendered term. In any variation of the sentence, “underwear is function over aesthetics, lingerie is aesthetics over function”, there’s no mention, implication or inference of gender. In theory, I should be able to buy men’s lingerie, women’s lingerie and unisex lingerie, just as I can buy men’s sweaters, women’s sweaters and unisex sweaters.

So, can I? We’ll take a look at that in the next part, What is men’s lingerie?