RUTHFULLY YOURS

Going along with society’s current theme of mushing both sexes into one androgynous, confused, mass of human flesh and chromosomes, two women have created gender-neutral underwear. Finally!

The collection is called Play Out and the designers, Abby Sugar and Sylvie Lardeux, desired to create “lesbian-inspired” underwear. BuzzFeed declared the collection “the world’s first gender-neutral underwear collection.” A staff writer on the popular website enthused that designing these undergarments “was a way to break out of a constrictive gender binary.”

The collection’s patterns are clearly intended to attract both men and women, but how can they possibly fit both sexes? After all, the primary purpose of underwear is to keep the parts that differentiate males and females safe and covered and, despite the LGBTQ movement’s protests to the contrary, those parts are different and thus require different casings. Surprise! The world’s first gender-neutral underwear collection is not that neutral.

If you were to visit Play Out’s online store, you would immediately see something curious on the main page. While almost every other online clothing store has categories for “men’s” and “women’s” clothes, you would expect the gender-neutral underwear website to have one category, or maybe none at all. However, at the top of the page is a list for “Underwear” and another one for “Men’s Underwear.” How can this collection be truly neutral then?

The creators attempt to explain:

Even though we would love to upend the standard language surrounding fashion and gender, not everyone would know what we are talking about. We have described our two lines of underwear, and we list our underwear for sale on our website as the “men’s” and “women’s” cuts so that everyone can find us using language that they are familiar with. . . . We consciously design everything — from the styling, coloring, and both cuts — to be appealing to every gender! We have had people of all gender presentations and identifications wear both styles of underwear. The difference in the cut is that the “men’s” style is slightly longer and has extra fabric in the front so that we are able to offer underwear for every body type.

In an effort to demonstrate to themselves and society that men and women are not really that different, the designers have proven that the two are, in fact, very different, anatomically at least. But at least they can agree on pattern.

— Christine Sisto is an editorial associate at National Review Online.