EVERY SUMMER, I come upon the same discovery. Hot weather makes women more beautiful and men more ugly. The former discard layers to reveal a natural loveliness of soft, interconnected curves, while the latter do the same to reveal their top-heavy bodies teetering on grotesquely disproportionate legs. And blame for male summertime ugliness, as I conclude year after year, lies largely with shorts. No item of clothing is so disfiguring to the male form as shorts–although properly understood, shorts are actually an interruption or an abridgement of clothing. Whereas pants (nice ones anyway) introduce a softly graded line between the midsection and the feet, shorts dismiss the line to bare unseemly hair, untanned skin, underused desk-jockey muscles, and the uncertain, buckled structure of kneecaps. Visually, unpantsed male (and some female) legs are to pantsed legs as a plucked chicken is to its living and squawking formerly-feathered self.
One hesitates to say anything nearing agreement with such clothing-as-cover fanatics as the Islamo-fascists who consider our wonderful country a scourge upon the earth, but when it comes to men’s legs, my only thought is, please, show some modesty! Sons, fathers, grandfathers, one generation as knobby and shameless as the next–they ride with me on the Metro, they march in and out of the roadstop restrooms on I-95, barely pausing to wash their hands, tacky tourists in their comical sunglasses and cheesy 3-for-$10 T-shirts. And, of course, their hideous, hide-revealing shorts. Except for the fanny pack, no clothing article or accessory so offends my eyes.
