Walk a Mile In My Pants
The renowned political theorist and activist, Hannah Arendt, once argued that the extreme political issues we now face throughout the Western World were rooted in our transition from “Political Man” to “Economic Man”. What she meant by this was that, with the progression of industrialization, our priorities had switched from expressing our identities in the political realm to expressing them in the economic realm. As individuals in mass society, our political views and expression count for very little — and the only way to get a leg up or create any kind of change is by climbing the economic ladder. Basically, getting a promotion at work had become more important than casting your vote.
We have traded the toga for the three-piece suit.
This transition to Economic Man is at the root of many of the hardships we have faced, and continue to face today in the West. After all, it was the transition to Economic Man, as Hannah Arendt famously observed, that alienated us from the political realm and gave rise to the conditions that brought in the Nazi Regime and made them so appealing to so many at first. But the hardships did not stop after the end of the Second World War. We are still often confronted with a certain alienation the older we get, as our friends and peers begin working themselves to death trying to advance their careers, and no longer have enough time for community. There is still the anxiety we feel at work as we ask ourselves, “Am I meeting expectations?”, “Am I going to get fired?”, or “Am I really going to work here all my life, never having done what I really wanted?”
There is one other hardship that seems to never come up in these discussions: the effect of the transition to Economic Man on men’s testicles. Perhaps the most recognizable physical trait of Economic Man is the three-piece suit he is made to wear day in and day out. The rigid business suit constrains him to the domain of the corporate world, and also literally constrains his testicles. The zoologist, Desmond Morris, had observed that more recently in human history while female fashion cycles were concerned with displaying sexual features, the male fashion cycles had actually been concerned with displaying their status. This is an interesting coincidence, as the business suit has come to suggest a certain income bracket and status for those who must wear one every day. It would seem that the thirst to maintain that status, which makes Economic Man put on that suit every day has got him, quite literally, by the balls.
Ironically, while the three-piece suit and its variants are often viewed as markers for civilization and modernity throughout the West, from the perspective of practicality and health, the pants that come along with it couldn’t be more of a step in the opposite direction.
First of all, they are damaging to men’s health. There is a growing body of research that has been looking into the effects of keeping the male genitalia in an enclosed space, and the results are not good. According to the earlier studies in 2013, keeping the testicles in a warm environment (i.e. enclosed in tight pants) will have a negative effect on spermatogenesis; Kompanje (2013) discusses the deterioration of sperm quality in Scottish men coinciding with reduced frequency of kilt-wearing since the 1950s, as well as the benefits of wearing a kilt for fertility and sperm quality due to its cooling of the scrotum; Jurewicz et al. (2013) demonstrated that men who wear boxers also exhibited fewer sperm abnormalities. Later work by Sapra et al. (2016) builds on this, with their intensive 12-month study of 501 couples finding that the men who would switch to wearing looser fitting boxers, or no underwear at all, for bed time had an overall better quality of sperm versus their boxer brief-wearing counterparts.
Secondly, putting aside the long-term negative effects of pants, many of the other harmful and uncomfortable effects of these modern pants are felt by men on a daily basis and do not need to be substantiated by academic research. All men have been victims of chafing, swamp-ass, or jock-itch at some point in their lives and the cause-effect relationship is as intuitive as it gets. Chafing happens due to irritation from sweaty parts rubbing against each other or against clothes. Swamp-Ass or Swamp-Crotch is caused by regular sweating in unbreathable garments. Finally, jock-itch (or, Tinea Cruris) is a fungal infection that develops when fungi that exist naturally on the skin are exposed to continuous warmth and moisture — most commonly in tight, sweaty underwear; and, if left untreated, it may end up needing medical intervention (Lehrer, 2019). All of these conditions are due to the same thing: restrictive pants and restrictive underwear that confine the crotch for hours at a time in a sweat-humid environment where feces and urine are constantly passing through, and where there is no aeration. With pants and underwear, the crotch has become a mushroom farm.
Thirdly, pants are impractical and they restrict mobility. Don’t let action heroes like James Bond fighting villains in their tailored suits fool you — if fight or flight mode kicks in and you are wearing one of those, you are in trouble. No matter the era, any man stuck in a sticky situation, whether he’s looking at defending himself from a mugger or running away from a large predator, is going to have a hard time doing so if he’s unable to open his legs up more than 4 inches. To find proof for this impracticality — self-evident as it is — one has only to look at the uniforms for any professional sport that demands any kind of athleticism (excluding golf, obviously). Footballers wear nice baggy shorts with their jerseys; basketball players, too, dribble up and down the court in their nice baggy shorts and jerseys; the kimono worn by most martial artists is always accompanied by a pair of loose-fitting pants. Even in the sports like hockey or gymnastics, where the garments are tighter, they are often made of a stretch material that allow for maximum mobility.
Luckily for us, there is a solution to all of this. Bring back the Man-Skirt. Or, at the very least, accept baggier pants professional attire.
This solution has existed for the majority of human history and began falling into disuse only after the restoration of the English Monarchy when in the year 1666 Charles II declared that “French fashions” would no longer be tolerated and decreed that men would now wear coats and breeches — or trousers (De Beer, 1938). Before this time, the everyday dress of men in almost all of the cultures around the world had consisted of spacious, baggy bottoms or variations of a man-skirts. Throughout Europe the Tunic had been worn by men since the Roman era, and before them we had seen the Greeks sporting Togas in civil life and Pteruges for battle. In North Africa, men have been wearing the variations of the Djellaba. Throughout North and South Asia as well, men had traditionally been wearing their own versions of baggy trousers; in the Arab World men wore a Thaawb, and further to the East, throughout Persia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Northern India, and Pakistan men wear what is called a Sirwal, or Shalwar, depending on the region. Even further to the East, we continue to find baggy trousers as the bottoms traditionally worn by men; The Hanfu in China, the Ao Dai in Vietnam, or the Kangkeng Le in Thailand.
Whether it be baggy pants or man-skirts, these traditional bottoms all have one thing in common: they wisely favor comfort and practicality over imposed fashion standards. Many of these styles of pants continue to be worn even today, albeit to a lesser extent as globalization has obliged more and more people to adopt western-style clothing.
As a note to end on, it is important to also address those who will wish to discredit the idea of getting rid of modern pants for men by pointing to the research that suggests the advent of pants came before the historical examples of baggier pants and man-skirts, and long before the three-piece suit. To clarify, based on the current evidence it has been concluded that the earliest pants had actually developed as a by-product of the domestication of horses (Beck et al., 2014). As it proves, horseback riding is a lot easier while wearing pants, rather than loose, robe-like garments. However, the large majority of us are no longer travelling or fighting wars on horseback, or for that matter even riding horses for fun (equestrian is an expensive sport). Furthermore, as Beck et al. point out, the oldest trousers found to be worn by ancient horsemen — dating to between the 10th and 13th Centuries BCE — had straight fitting legs and a wide crotch-piece, more akin to a baggy pair of Levi’s than any formal pair of dress pants made to go with a collared shirt and blazer. We can thus concede that while pants may have been essential in the time of cavalry units and nomadic tribes, they are no longer essential to the way of life most people in this modern era are leading. The large majority of us spend most of the day seated in one place — be it behind the wheel of the car, at our desks at work, or at home on our couches. As we adapted our clothing to our needs once before, we must do so again.
