As a child, I loved my Buster Brown cotton underwear. I wore them everywhere but the bathtub. I even wore them under my swimsuit when I went swimming. They functioned as a safety net for me. I had been molested as a child, and somehow I decided that as long as I had my underwear on, I was safe. Though I stopped wearing my Buster Browns under my swimsuit by the time I was nine or ten, I clung to protective power of panties through my teens.

It was my mother who introduced me to the hygienic attributes of undergarments. Fortunately for me, her underwear hygiene lessons were directed as much to my brother as they were to me. I didn’t know until I was a teenager, watching TV ads about feminine deodorant products, that there was anything unseemly about my girl’s body. My brother and I both laughed at Mom when she told us that we’d better make sure we always had on decent (meaning clean and lacking inappropriate holes) underwear just in case we got in an accident and had to go to the hospital. I actually thought she was weird until I went to college and realized that all my friends had grown up with the same message.

It is the intersection where the hygienic and the sexually arousing properties of panties collide that I find most interesting. Simply put, women bleed, and panties are always the first casualty. To control the damage (because women’s lingerie is expensive), many women keep at least a few pairs of comfy, old, and perhaps not so attractive panties around to wear during their periods. The collision occurs when men (and sometimes women), anticipating sexual stimulation, are shocked and dismayed by the sight of their female lovers in “granny panties.” This makes me wonder if these shocked men (or women) somehow blanked out during the menstruation section of health class. Perhaps they just aren’t astute enough understand that when a woman is bloated, cranky and feels as if her uterus is falling out in clumps, she’s unlikely to care about her partner’s arousal. The irony is, that while many men are hell-bent to get into women’s panties, they are either totally disgusted by, embarrassed by, or simply refuse to hear about women’s periods. This, of course, reinforces the cultural message that there is something inherently unclean about women’s bodies. This sort of paradoxical thinking can only happen in a framework that both despises the feminine and objectifies women’s bodies, dissecting them into individual components designed to give men pleasure. Sexy lingerie is simply a way to continue that objectification by packaging those parts that men (and some women) want to think about and rendering the rest of a woman either invisible or simply insignificant.

It is of course this misogyny* and objectification of women’s bodies that makes rape and other forms of sexual abuse not only possible, but likely. And rather than questioning this hatred and objectification, many of women help to perpetuate it. We spend a fortune on lingerie designed to conform to the objectified view of what women’s bodies are supposed to look like by flattening the tummy, molding the butt, and perking up the breasts. We spend another fortune on lingerie designed for its arousal potential: high cut, “barely there,” see-through, flimsy, binding or itchy undergarments are chosen over their comfortable, fully-covering, well-made counterparts. Our partners are only shocked when we don our “granny panties” because usually are more conscientious about wearing something “attractive.”

The point isn’t that in order to prevent rape we should burn all our “pretty lingerie” and switch to either sturdy granny panties or men’s briefs or boxers. This wouldn’t change the mindset behind the rape culture, nor would it suit most of us. Instead, it’s important to be conscious of what you’re doing and why. And it’s important to make sure that your partner(s) treat(s) you as a whole being rather than as an object, regardless of what you choose to wear or not wear.

*the fear and hatred of women and all things feminine

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