I’m not really sure how to preface this post. I suppose I could state that I am a straight male who is attracted to most women, but all that would really
communicate is the obvious fact that I am a human being who has his own personal preferences, just like anyone else. There are some things I like, and others that I don’t.
The article that I’m responding to, “What Guys Really Think About Your High Waisted-Shorts”, was written by Ashley Hesseltine, and I think it’s safe to say that she makes her opinion about particular fashion trends starkly apparent from the start. The people wearing the item of clothing she’s railing against are described as:
“Girls of all ages, body types, booty types, and textual orientations have been rocking these denim doozies with crop tops, fake flower crowns, and leather boots in 3,000-degree weather because fashion.”
Which, as I mentioned from the beginning, is more or less okay. We can have our own opinions about a number of things, and if one of those things is what Vanessa Anne Hudgens of High School Musical Fame [I wasn’t a huge fan of Bandslam, sorry] chooses to encase the lower half of her body then more power to you. Hesseltine admits outright in her second paragraph that she ” couldn’t care less which unflattering clothing items from Urban Outfitters females choose to wear in their attempts to be trendy-“. Then that sentences continues and fulfills the promise of the title:
“-but I was made aware that my male friends were NOT on board with this look. So I asked for their input, and as always…priceless.”
At this point I can only assume that her hypothetical audience is sitting on the edge of their seats, just dying to know “What do guys really think about my high-waisted shorts?” It would be nice to get some sort of common consensus about almost anything, and the male perspective on this item of clothing isn’t a bad place to start.
I’m going to admit to every one of you how much of a struggle it was not to copy and paste every single one of the dozen comments into this post, making unkind remarks about every one. As it stands I’ve forced myself to pick only four. I will also admit that I chose what I personally find the worst of the bunch.
First off is Aaron who, at 25-years-old, is the youngest of the bunch. I particularly enjoyed his comment because of the comparison he makes:
“Very rarely have I seen a girl in high-waisted shorts and been into it at all. For the most part, I think they make girls look like misshapen science experiments that’d you find in Sid from Toy Story’s bedroom. But hey, if they make you feel pretty, keep on wearing those diaper shorts.”
I place this gif here without an ounce of sarcasm.
Now I should probably address that little factoid about Aaron and how the rest of these guys are on average at least five years up on him. This is pretty odd given the fact that most of the women wearing high-waisted shorts typically fall more into the music-festival-attending crowd, which I would classify as late teens to mid-twenties. To be perfectly fair, if Hesseltine’s male friends don’t fall into that age range then they don’t, but it does create a situation where men in their thirties are looking down their noses at women a decade younger than themselves.
With that out of the way let’s reiterate that Aaron doesn’t like high-waisted shorts because they make their wearers look like little plaything Frankenstein monsters, which I again think is great because I haven’t thought about that movie in years. His comment has absolutely nothing on Nick, 36, who shares that they are:
“-boner killers. They are the granny panties of pants. Literally nobody can pull them off. They look as off-balanced as an uncircumcised penis. Girls that wear them literally look like they smell bad. I always just assume that girls who wear high-waisted shorts are rocking the old-school, nude-colored, belly button-touching granny panties underneath.”
I’ll do my best not to take the comment about uncircumcised penises personally [now there’s a place I didn’t think this blog post was going to go] and instead concentrate on the aspersions this guy is throwing out there, namely that these young women are “boner killers”.
That’s really the crux of almost every one of these comments: this item of clothing does nothing for me as far as attraction/arousal. If we want to boil that down even further we arrive yet again back at at that simple truth of “people like things and don’t like other things.” Hoo boy, let me tell you, these are some guys that really do not like high-waisted shorts. Here are Jon, 32, and Nick, 29, to end us off:
“High-waisted shorts. In what level of hell is this look attractive? What goes through a woman’s mind when she puts on these Cellulite Showcasers: ‘Yoga pants make my ass look phenomenal, so I’ll throw on these Denim Disasters to give myself a nice cigarette smoker’s butt.’ There was a time when these Fart Filters were contained only to the hipster community, but much like the Ebola virus, its spreading fast and we’re all fucked. Ladies, do yourselves (and every guy you walk past) a solid and get a second mirror. Take a peek at your backside in these shorts; if you skipped the gym even once, these shorts will tell on you.”
“I really see them as fat hiders. Never seen them on a girl in great shape.”
Really it’s more of the same, though Nick does very indirectly communicate that he doesn’t like it when larger women try to “hide” their fat, which I really don’t want to get into. At this point I think we’ve had enough of what these guys think [outlier and co-writer Trey appears to enjoy them], so let’s circle back to Hesseltine and her conclusion:
“So there you have it. Real talk from real dudes on a real trend. [. . .] As for my take, I do think models (and Kelly Kapowski in 1992) can pull off high-waisted shorts and look ok (I mean, their asses still look dumb), but for regular people, it’s unflattering. It’s just physics. I understand that (in theory), they should mask that six-pack of Natty Light you just chugged or hide a food fetus, but I find them to actually enhance midsection imperfections. I say go with the flowy tank instead of shorts that come up to your bra top, but whatever, wear what makes you feel comfortable. [. . .]
And like I always say, you should never dress/act a certain way to please men, but just know if you’re walking into a room rocking denim at your true waist, you may be turning heads, but you’re also killing boners.”
This is the point where we would normally cue up some outrage, but I did a little bit of research before deciding to turn my dial past “Mildly Displeased”. See, Ashley Hesseltine is not only the writer of this article but also the founder of the website it’s hosted on, Witty + Pretty. Its name hints at the tone of what might be found on there, but the About page more explicitly states that the site was started [emphasis added] “out of an obsession with beauty stuff, passion for funny, and general distaste for cheesy female-based blogs that take themselves too seriously.”
With that in mind the article can be viewed from a vastly different perspective. Through this lens 31-year-old Jake “[hating] them more than cancer” isn’t so much him admitting that he’s the world’s smallest man but utilizing overexaggeration to create a [debatably] humorous effect. There’s also the very clickbaity headline which is sure to draw in viewers with the answer it promises. Given that I’ve chosen not to bring the full brunt of my hatred against this article [unlike the last one I responded to] what I find myself left to do is judge its effectiveness.
Humour is vastly subjective, so just because it isn’t very funny to me isn’t a huge slight against it [I think Zoolander can join Bandslam as a movie I did not care for]. That aside, does she manage to communicate what she really believes once everything has been said and done? Her concluding sentence is such a mishmash of intentions that it’s hard to tell-
“And like I always say, you should never dress/act a certain way to please men, but just know if you’re walking into a room rocking denim at your true waist, you may be turning heads, but you’re also killing boners.”
Maybe if the messages were presented the other way around it would be more clear, that your style may not appeal to the opposite sex but so what? As it is, it doesn’t surprise me even a little bit that the article as a whole has been met with far more than its share of both attention [which I am of course adding to] and disdain.
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