I hope you enjoy the following piece.
Julie Wilson, Xianhom@aol.com
The following letter appeared in the "Letters to Julie" column in the October 1993 issue of Christian Home:
Dear Julie,
Please send me your free book on female superiority. It took me many years of suffering, but now I agree. For 16 years I waited on my husband hand and foot. But then a year ago I caught him cheating on me. I am a Christian, and I went to my church group and discussed the problem with my friends. Then I told my husband that I would divorce him and take everything if he did not do as I said. He cried and begged me not to leave.
I told him to throw out all his men's underwear. I bought him panties, bras, slips, pettis, girdles, stockings, nighties, dresses, skirts, shoes, blouses etc. I finally had the power. Since that time I have been happy, and he has learned the female side of life.
A month ago he appeared in a dress and heels in front of my church group, confessed his misdeeds and asked for forgiveness. He (or should I say "she"?) has been forgiven and our life has been better than ever. My husband has become my best "girl" friend.
I always loved to dance and my husband hated it. Now I go out dancing on weekends with gentlemen of my choice, and my husband (or should I say "wife"?) is home waiting when I return.
My husband has become friendly with my women's club and often plays cards with them etc. when I go out. The girls want to make him ("her") a member. I think it might be a good idea. He is a much better person and is much happier since "she" became my girlfriend.
I went to our lawyer and changed my name back to my maiden name. My husband is going to take my maiden name as part of his name.
Even his mother thinks this is great. She says he looks more at home in skirts.
Men are so immature and pliable when you really confront them. They fear anything feminine, but when confronted with it, it turns out that they really envied us all the while.
Girls, you don't have to accept being slapped around and dominated!
Doreen in NY
Doreen's letter seems to have had an impact. Here is a letter from December 1993:
Dear Julie,
I am writing with the hope that you can settle a dispute that has arisen between my wife and me.
For some reason, my wife has developed an unfounded fear that I will be unfaithful to her with other women. I have told her repeatedly that I have never been unfaithful to her and never would be. That's the truth.
That doesn't seem to satisfy her, however, and I can't accept what she wants as a solution to a nonexistent problem. She wants me to start wearing women's panties instead of the boxer shorts I have worn all my life. Her logic is that I would never cheat on her if I had to reveal to another woman that I was wearing panties. I have to admit there is no doubt about that.
I have refused her demands because although I have a high respect for women, I know I would never feel comfortable in their clothes, and I don't know what I would do if I got sick or injured and had to go to a doctor or hospital knowing I was wearing panties under my clothes. How could that ever be explained to a doctor or nurse? I would be worried and self-conscious all day long.
We also have a son and two daughters ages 11, 12 and 14 that I'm concerned about. They would almost certainly find out. I could just see Dad's panties hanging on the line with Mom's and the girls'. What would children of this age think of a pantywaist father?
Despite my objections and concerns my wife is still pressuring me and has even taken it on herself to buy three pairs of panties that she says will fit me and put them in my underwear drawer. To add insult to injury, she even showed me where she sewed small name tags in them so there would never be any doubt as to whose panties they were.
This issue is creating a strain on our marriage, and I cringe whenever the subject comes up or whenever I open my underwear drawer and see the panties my wife intends for me to wear. I have never done anything to give her reason to suspect me of being unfaithful, and I feel her demands are unnecessary, undeserved, unfair and unjust. I have never worn panties in my life, even as a joke, and I don't think I should be forced to start now.
Julie, I'm hoping you will support me on this subject so we can get this behind us. My wife gets copies of your paper from a friend of hers, and I know she respects your opinion. From what I've read, I know you usually favor women, but I also think you try to be fair, so I told my wife I would be willing to follow your advice. I want to be a good husband and father. Please sign my letter innocent and happy in boxers.
Dear Innocent: Over the years I have had several women friends who made their husbands or boyfriends wear women's panties under their street clothes, and so I believe that I can answer all your questions about this practice.
You say that your wife's proposal is "unnecessary, undeserved, unfair and unjust." Let us take these one at a time. You say that you have never been unfaithful to your wife and that you do not intend to be. I believe you.
But that is not the point. There are plenty of men who are faithful to their wives for years, and fully believe that they will always be faithful, who quite to their own surprise find themselves yielding to temptation when the right situation unexpectedly presents itself. The question is whether you will continue to be faithful in the future, and I don't think that you know the answer to that for sure. You may feel confident about this, but there have been a lot of other men who also felt confident only to wake up one morning with a shattered marriage.
Therefore I believe that it is inaccurate to say that your wife's proposal is unnecessary. There is too much at stake here to be complacent. But you also say that it is undeserved. When you say that, you seem to be thinking that the only circumstances in which it would be appropriate for your wife to take steps to head off infidelity on your part would be if you had given her clear evidence that you were at least contemplating such a course of action. This is not the case. What your wife wants to do is to help you resist temptation. The fact that you have been faithful in the past does not mean that you won't be tempted in the future.
Adultery is a common problem in our society today. All you have to do is turn on the television to see it nonchalantly portrayed as if it were an ordinary facet of life. In today's society, every married woman can only worry that her husband will yield to temptation. So your wife is going to worry just because of the times we live in. Her concern does not have to be based on anything she has observed about your behavior, just the statistical fact that so many men are unfaithful.
You go on to say that it is unfair and unjust for your wife to ask you to wear women's panties. Here you seem to be saying that she is trying to punish you for something that you haven't done. You are mistaken about this. True, you haven't been unfaithful to her, but on the other hand she is not trying to punish you. As I said before, she is only trying to help you resist temptation. If she were to wait until you actually committed adultery, it would be too late. Even if the odds were only one in ten, or one in 100 that you might do so in the future, it still seems to me that wearing panties would be a very small price to pay to head it off. Think of it as buying an insurance policy. If people bought fire insurance only if they believed that their homes would burn down within a year, no one would ever buy insurance. All your wife wants is a little insurance against adultery.
You say that you have a high respect for women but that you would never feel comfortable in women's clothes. I think that is a bit of a contradiction. Most women wear articles of male clothing from time to time without feeling the least bit uncomfortable, so why would you feel uncomfortable wearing female clothing? Let me tell you why. Almost all men have picked up a certain contempt for women when they were boys, although for a lot of men this contempt is mainly unconscious. I suspect that for you it is also unconscious, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there.
I have written on this topic of why women will wear men's clothes but men will not wear women's clothes at some length before, and I do not want to repeat myself here. If your wife has a copy of the August 1993 issue of Christian Home, you can read my editorial about this. If she doesn't have a copy, you can send me a stamped, self-addressed envelope, and I will be sure that you get a copy of the editorial. You should read it over and then discuss it with your wife.
You also raise the question of what to do if anyone finds out that you are wearing panties. First you mention the possibility that you might have to go to a hospital or to a doctor, and you wonder how you could explain your feminine underpants. I once talked to a surgeon about this, and he said that he had seen a lot of men who wore women's underwear. "It's more common than you think," he said. Men who no one ever suspected of wearing female clothes get pulled out of auto wrecks not only in panties but in garter belts and nylon stockings too. This doesn't happen every day, but it does happen often enough that hospital staffs are used to it. I can assure you that if you were unexpectedly carried into the emergency room, you wouldn't have to explain a thing. No one would ask you about it because they have all seen it before. And the minute that you are discharged it will be completely forgotten.
A doctor's appointment or a scheduled trip to a hospital would be different, however. It seems to me that if you had an appointment to see a doctor, you could ask your wife's permission to wear your old boxer shorts just for the occasion.
You also ask what your children would think. I mentioned before that I have friends who have put their husbands in panties, and so I can tell you what to expect here too. It won't bother the girls a bit. They may be surprised, but surprise is not the same as shock, much less trauma. You will find that they accept it quite easily.
Boys are a little harder to predict. The problem here is that boys tend to look down on girls and think that females are inferior. If your son has picked up these bad attitudes toward the opposite sex, then he might be disappointed that you are wearing their clothing. On the other hand, since he has a good mother and has grown up with two sisters (this makes a big difference), he might have developed enough respect for the opposite sex that he wouldn't care what you wore.
Here you have to keep in mind the basic asymmetry: Females often wear male clothing, but males hardly ever wear female clothing due to prejudices about girls picked up in childhood. These prejudices are cultural in origin and are not innate. if your son is prejudiced against the opposite sex, then it is the responsibility of you and your wife as his parents to help him deal with his prejudice. Again, let me suggest that you read my editorial and discuss it with your wife. You have time; as long as you don't parade around the house in your new underpants, it should be quite a while before anyone catches on.
So my advice is this: Wear the panties that your wife has picked out for you except when you have an appointment to see the doctor. It will give her a degree of peace of mind. You can tell your wife that [1] you have no intention of ever being unfaithful to her and that [2] in order to prove this to her, you promise to wear whatever underclothes she wants.
Here is the August 1993 editorial:
CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
We at Christian Home often point out that women will sometimes wear men's clothes, but that men almost never wear women's clothes. We further point out that this discrepancy is easily explained by the contempt for females that boys pick up and internalize at an early age. Boys learn to look down on girls, and as a result, they become allergic to articles of feminine clothing. Girls, however, do not acquire the same low opinion of boys, and so they are quite comfortable wearing boys' clothing from time to time.
I occasionally get a letter from someone who insists that we are wrong about this. These writers say that no women in their areas ever wear any articles of male clothing. Most of these letters come from men, although I did get one from a woman who lives on a farm in Texas. So for all of you who have written me to say that women never wear men's clothes, I will present you with evidence.
The phenomenon of women wearing male clothing is so pervasive that it is often portrayed in women's magazines. In order to prepare this article, I went around the corner and bought a few such magazines. Then I went through them, looking for pictures of women wearing men's clothes. Here is what I found.
On page 80 of the July issue of Cosmopolitan there is a picture of a woman wearing her boyfriend's shirt. The picture is meant to illustrate an article about the problems unmarried couples have when they decide to start living together. The photographer shoots them moving things in the front door, and in order to portray their having been a couple for some time, she/he has the woman wear a man's shirtÑwhich the reader will then assume must be the boyfriend's shirt.
Borrowing a shirt from one's boyfriend or husband is a common practice for women. But men never borrow blouses from their girlfriends or wives. They won't wear them around the house, much less out in the street. This is because they view women as inferior to themselves and their male buddies, and so they see wearing a frilly blouse as degrading.
Let's move on. On page 143 of the August Glamour there is an advertisement for Sassaby which portrays a woman wearing her husband's pajama topÑand presumably nothing else. The husband is wearing the matching bottoms, and she is rather playfully getting in his way while he is shaving. The point of her sharing his pajamas is to portray them as a close, romantic couple.
But it is difficult to imagine a man wearing his wife's pajamas. Can you see him in perhaps her lace-trimmed nylon baby doll with matching panties?
Of course not. Men have too low an opinion of women to do such a thing. Their contempt for women is so deeply rooted in their male psyches that they won't wear feminine clothes even in the morning before work when only their wives could see them.
This Sassaby ad is aimed at women in order to get them to buy Sassaby products. Try to imagine an advertiser targeting men with an ad showing a man in his wife's pajamas. Not only would it not help sales, but their sales would probably plummet, as men ran the other way to escape any recollection of the image in the ad.
There is more. Men's clothes are even modeled by women in fashion spreads.
The August issue of Seventeen features its back-to-school fashion coverage, where they tell us that the new trend is "athletic gear mixed with anything you want, guaranteeing that your style will be unstudied this fall (unlike your books)." Then we see modeled not only a number of female items (along with tips on how to mix them with non-athletic clothes), but also some male ones from B. U. M. Equipment. On page 187 one young woman models a boys' hooded sweatshirt and a boys' navy sweatshirt. On page 190 another models a tony boys' sweatshirt in a maroon stripe. Then on page 191 yet another model sports a boys' plaid top.
This fashion spread is meant for teenage girls. But it would be hard to imagine a magazine recommending to teenage boys that they wear girls' pink sweatshirts. In any case, the boys wouldn't wear them because they would see it as degrading to wear girls' clothes. Degrading, because they think they are superior to any girl.
The August Mademoiselle also features models wearing articles of male clothing. In fact there is one right on the cover: a "men's melton pea coat" available from Schott Bros. But that's not all. White shirts for women are a big thing right now, and Mademoiselle gives us several pages of them. And on page 154 there is a model wearing a men's tuxedo shirt available from Alfred Dunhill.
I mentioned earlier that a man would not want to wear his girlfriend's blouse because men think women are inferior to them. Women will wear men's shirts, but men will not wear women's blouses. Nor will men wear women's coats, although women wear men's coats, even on the covers of fashion magazines.
The reason for this discrepancy is the contempt that men have for women, either consciously or unconsciously. Now do you guys get the point? Contempt.