Man. Woman. Curdled custard. Authors have made millions from explorations (in print {ehem}) of the seemingly incomprehensible differences between the hairier and the curvier sexes. Talk of Venus and Mars, emotion vs logic, blahdiblah. All those tiresome clichés over the barbecue — the blokes in the garden moaning about their missuses (the plural of wife) and the ladies loitering in the kitchen whinging about their useless insensitive hubbies.

Deepening the male-female mutual comprehension divide — for those who experience it — there seems to be yet another point of difference. My Google homepage, which serves up a range of feeds from news services, sciency things and other trivia, suddenly delivered me into the world of flashing one’s underwear. One of the feeds is from wikiHow. It tells people all sorts of useful things like how to survive falling through ice on a lake, how to fold a napkin, how to become a sophisticated adult (I passed). On the day in question, the featured article was How to Get out of a Car Gracefully Without Showing Your Underwear

Now, I don’t know about you, dearest fully-clad reader, but I ain’t never shown me knickers whilst disembarking from an automobile. It was a danger I had never imagined. Life as a male can be so innocent. Are women everywhere living in fear of that first step out of their car? Afraid of lecherous men hiding behind carpark pillars? Secret cameras embedded in the pavement next to the parking meter?

I clicked the link through to the full article and understood the problem immediately. Just look at the educational image.

I mean, she’d show her undies if she so much as breathed deeply. Scandalous. No wonder the advice includes:

Even if you’re careful, you might end up showing a glimpse of your underwear. Make sure they’re clean and flattering just in case.

Indeed!

The solution is quite technical and I shan’t bore you with the multi-step instructions for exiting the vehicle. It’s a mixture of dance-step and yoga. The advice to:

Practice in private before you go out, and have a friend watch you so you can make sure you look good and you’re not showing off your underwear.

seems particularly important. If you have no sense of rhythm, ladies, I’d say your best bet is to wear culottes.

I’ve been digesting the article’s words of wisdom over the past days. Watching people getting out of cars. Observing people on trains and trams. Staring at women in cafés. I just don’t see the problem. Or, more to the point, I think the problem has been obviated. Have you noticed, dear suited-up reader, that people are showing their undies all over the place? Why worry about knicker-no-nos while getting out of a car if half the population is already showing the back of their G-strings at Sunday brunch?

Although I at first felt this was a girlie problem, I now believe one should be much more concerned about male undies. We’ve become inured to the once-outrageous fashion of displaying the branded elastic waist of men’s briefs. Now that every Brad and his mate is showing his Calvins or Aussiebums, it’s a disappointment when someone’s t-shirt rides up to reveal an absence of branded elastic. While men-with-undies thought they were groundbreakingly risqué, ‘ghetto’ boys had been letting half their bum hang out of their jeans for quite a while already.

If anybody has been looking (the mothers in the audience might nod in horrified agreement), a good proportion of the under-20 population has been showing rather more than their waist band recently. Yesterday, on an innocent suburban train journey, I copped an eyeful of a teenager’s right buttock. His jeans slid below the leg of his briefs as he got up to leave the carriage. It’s a wonder he could still walk when the beltline of the jeans was so dangerously low. And what was keeping the jeans up at all?

With G-strings at brunch and buttocks on the daily commute, getting out of a car without showing one’s undergarments is quite obviously a redundant concern.

– DM