My husband asked me a perfectly innocent question earlier this evening:
"Do you have any old pantyhose?"
And I found myself answering, "Of course, I'll give my old hosiery to any cause. They are a torture-device of the patriarchy aimed at 'normalizing' the appearance of women's legs. I categorically reject them and consider the women who support their usage traitors to feminism."
This response shocked me. I had no idea I felt so seriously about pantyhose, but I suppose I do. My husband meant merely to find a cheaper solution for trapping the lint from our washing machine than the chain-mail condoms one ordinarily purchases for such a task. But his innocent question touched a nerve with me regarding pantyhose. Recall, if you will, what they are--
(Remember the Kathleen Turner movie "Peggy Sue Got Married" and how she demonstrated what an innovation pantyhose were? Compared to the garter-belts or whatever--yeah, an innovation.)
A super-thin nylon stocking cunningly arranged as a type of leggings. The sizes are very random, and they really aren't meant, generally, for folks like me--
Curvy folks. I'm a Queen, or something. I stand 5'7" and am in the 200lb area. I'm a big old gal. And I....hate.....stretching out the nylons, rolling the little fuckers up, trying to make the crotch actually ride up to where my crotch is, and then wear these awful things when I know the following will happen--
They will run. Because they always run.
They will try to ride down. And the crotch of my nylons will at some point need to be tastefully rearranged in the ladies' room and sorted back up against my lady-bits. But before I get to the ladies' room, I'll be walking bow-legged a little bit like John Wayne playing King Lear, and looking for a horse, a horse! My Queen-sizedom for a horse!
They will hurt my mid-section--especially if they are the evil control tops--which can't, naturally, control everything. Why does any big girl ever think these are a good idea? They make for the middle-pudge, just sending the fat to roll up at a higher place. Ew. And if you are bottom-curvy, with a bottom-tummy pooch, they cause pink-belly. Itchy, sad, lines of bitter, miserable pink-belly. This is so hurtful and wrong. Instead of making one's bodily "lines" smooth under one's clothing, the control-top pantyhose really just rearranges the lumps and makes the wearer self-conscious and pained. (Sometimes there is a sound like Velcro being separated when one removes one's control-top pantyhose from one's midsection. And no, it doesn't feel good to hear that sound, although it is relief to get that machinery of women-hatred off! Off I say! Sound of triumphant albeit slightly mad laughter, here!)
Anyway, my actual legs in winter look a tiny bit like Roquefort cheese, being white with blue veins shooting throughout, and they are somewhat soft. In summer they are a little better, with a golden tan, and blue veins and a degree of Roquefort cheesiness all the same. But I prefer showing my natural gams, flawed as they are, to ever wearing those nasty nylons ever again. This is my manifesto: I have legs, and I know how to use them. They don't beg, and won't beg or suffer under the unnatural fiber yoke of itchy fabrics designed to hide the alledged imperfections of my walking apparati in future. This I vow.
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