Problems with Butt-Enhancing Underwear

I don't think I'm much of a prude when it comes to sex and, say, the economy of sex, and the coexisting complexity and baseness of human desire—I did after all study a lot of Foucault and Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler and for a period of my life read every single 19th- and early 20th century novel as an exercise in coded homoerotic behavior—but I do often suffer from a massive ignorance when it comes to the mechanics of how people get laid. My sexual history is probably very uninteresting, and the fact that I've been in a relationship for a while seems sometimes to be a weird fluke. Being a single person in the world, in the event that you would rather not be, isn't easy, and neither is cracking the code of gay mating calls, and my experience at gay bars and other gay social functions continues to be more confusion than connection: how to talk to strangers, the pointlessness of loud music and dim lights, the forthrightness, the disconnect between what's "normal" inside versus outside these places, ie, the satiating of primal instincts being at odds with how one otherwise leads one's life. . .

Which takes us to the subject at hand:


If you can't make it out, that is a model wearing “butt-enhancing,” D-cup underwear.

If you are wearing butt-enhancing underwear, you are probably wearing them in front of someone who has not seen your unenhanced butt before. And the butt enhancing probably serves as a means to an end, the end being getting laid, probably. Granted, maybe people don't want to get laid; maybe the goal is to maintain a mystifying notion of one's butt. Those people don't apply, and I have doubts about them. Here's the crux: Isn't the prospect of going home with someone and having to peel off the D-cups in front of a stranger who wasn’t expecting it worse than the prospect of having to show off your real, flatter, slightly less supple but probably still very admirable butt? How do you explain yourself? Wouldn't it be embarrassing? Sure, there are lots of variables—one night stand, too drunk to tell, too dark to tell, it's a costume, the possibly brilliant revelation that both or all parties are wearing butt-enhancing underwear, and, of course, since this is my first run-in with the product, maybe no one actually wears it. But butt-enhancing underwear certainly doesn’t improve our lot. In fact, this kind of thing probably makes us hate ourselves more than we might already, in addition to encouraging more flagrant consumerism and perpetuating ridiculous and unachievable beauty standards, etc, etc, etc. Who to blame? The Wonderbra? Ourselves? The corporate-consumer-media-monolith that is to blame for everything?