Stop Wearing Underwear and Watch What Happens to Your Body
I Went Free Balling for an Entire Week – Here's What I Learned
I was a bit of an oddball growing up. A nonconformist. For me, there was no such thing as “received wisdom,” and “convention” was a dirty word. That attitude shaped everything I did, from using a fork to eat ice cream to shooting free throws underhanded during basketball games. I wasn’t stubbornly nonconformist. If it turned out that my original approach was worse than everyone else’s, I dropped my way of doing things and fell in line, but the principle remained: I needed to be convinced there was a good reason for doing something the way everyone else did.
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Well, here I am, a grown adult (allegedly), and things haven’t changed too much. I am the last person to stop wearing shorts when the seasons change, happy to pair winter boots with running shorts on quick trips outdoors, and despite what all my fashionable friends say, I happen to like Crocs (they’re comfortable and functional!), and wear them without shame.
Recently, I came to a startling conclusion as I was surveying my clothing collection: I own a lot of underwear. Boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, even the odd leopard-print thong (don’t ask). A decent chunk of my clothing storage space is dedicated to underwear, and I started to get that uncomfortable question that nagged me since youth: why? Why do we wear underwear at all? Is it really so necessary? Is it a hygiene thing, or a style thing, or an etiquette thing?
Then I had a kind of epiphany: women’s underwear has been shrinking for years! In the past, they wore short-like undergarments, corsets, stockings, and bloomers; now they’re down to thongs and g-strings and tanga panties.
Talk about efficiency!
While women’s underwear has been shrinking, getting more streamlined, more sleek, less cumbersome, men have been stuck with the same old boring options: the boxers that ride up and chafe your legs, or the briefs that constrict you in all kinds of unpleasant ways, or the boxer-briefs, that somehow manage to offer the worst of both worlds.
That was it. That was all the convincing I needed to cast off convention and free myself from the shackles of underwear. And that’s exactly what I did. I decided to one-up the women by going all-out: instead of wearing almost no underwear at all, I would literally wear no underwear at all – for an entire week. It was a bold experiment in living, an opening salvo in the men’s underwear war I wanted to launch single-handedly.
From the very first day, the experiment proved … interesting.
To begin with, I live in a colder climate, with harsh winters and heavy snowfall, and while I wouldn’t have thought my flimsy boxers were offering much added warmth, I found out the hard way that they were. I thought I knew what a cold winter day felt like, but trust me: until you’re free-balling in sub-zero temperatures, you don’t know the meaning of cold.
Okay, so score one for the underwear. Even after a single day, I wasn’t eager to repeat this experiment. But I was still curious – what about the comfort factor?
Here I’m happy to report I was definitely on to something. Freedom! When I wasn’t feeling winter’s wrath, I was much more comfortable, much less constricted. I became acutely aware of the fabric of the clothes I was wearing, from silky pajama pants to rough, tough denim. It was an entirely new sensory experience! Was this what the dreaded underwear industry has been hiding from us?
On the fourth day of the week, I was just about to declare the experiment a success (and proclaim the death of underwear). Sure, I had to sacrifice regular outdoor walks, but in the middle of winter, that didn’t feel so bad. But then I came to my scheduled home workout, which consisted of me in a tank top and running shorts in front of my living room television, trying to mimic the movements of much, much fitter people as they conducted a dance workout class.
I quickly realized that underwear serves a discretionary purpose, and while I’ll spare you the visual, let’s just say that, had I been working out in a public gym, I would have quickly been arrested for indecent exposure.
Score another point for underwear.
By the sixth day, I thought I’d settled on a rule: underwear is for workouts with shorts and long walks in winter, but for pants and indoor time, no underwear was clearly superior. Unfortunately, that’s when I had an … incident, and had to put an abrupt end to this experiment.
Let me set the scene: it’s day six and I’m riding high, convinced I’ve just revolutionized men’s clothing for good. I’m wearing my favorite pair of skinny jeans, enjoying the feel of the luxe denim. Suddenly, nature calls and I have to go to the bathroom. Like most men, I pee standing up, and like most men, I don’t put much thought into it: it’s more or less on autopilot. And that’s just the problem. When I went to pull my zipper back up, as I’ve done a thousand times in my life, I forgot that I wasn’t wearing underwear, forgot that I had no protection between the harsh teeth of the zipper and my delicate, unprotected nether region.
I don’t know if I’ve ever yelped so loudly in my entire life. I startled my neighbor’s dog so badly that he barked through the night. The pain was excruciating, like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I immediately called a trusted friend, himself a doctor, and when he finally stopped laughing, he asked me if the bleeding was minimal (yes, thankfully), before assuring me that an ice pack and time would probably be enough to heal me.
So, dear reader, here I now sit, ice pack firmly in place, alive but uncomfortable and certainly humiliated, having learned a most painful lesson. Underwear is important. In fact, it’s vital. It will keep you warm. It will prevent embarrassing and potentially criminal exposure. And it will protect your most sensitive body parts from whichever masochistic fashion designer first decided to put zippers anywhere near human reproductive organs.
Lesson learned.
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