No One Told Me About the Trauma Pants

There’s an invisible epidemic going on—fat women all across America are being held hostage from inside their pants. I found out the hard way, but perhaps my experience can save other women the same horror and agony.

Help! Let Me Out!

Buying clothes on eBay requires extreme vigilance, nay, suspicion. I thought I was aware enough, and adequately suspicious. But no.

Here’s what I ordered: one pair of new, winter white (ivory) polyester pants, sized 14WP. (That translates into “short and fat woman” for those unfamiliar with U.S. women’s clothing.)

Here’s what I got: a pair of polyester winter white (ivory) pants, an innocent-looking item that housed a pantaloon powernet/girdle monstrosity--surely the spawn of a drunk pant lining mating with some rough-trade pantaloons. 

My first thought: Dare I stick my legs in there? Would I be safe climbing into this curious, unlovely endoskeleton? Would my sturdy limbs return to me whole and sound?

The stretchy net structure first appeared as a curtain descending from the waistband, and behind the zipper. Then it cascaded down the thighs, terminating in elastic cuffs that hit mid-knee (lovely sensation, that; dried tripe rubbing ever so familiarly right behind the kneecap. Not sexy. Not fun). After only a few minutes my lower body was hot, very hot, and not in a good way.

I re-read the description of the pants and saw these two words: CONTROL FIT. I admit I blew right by them when I first read the description. I had the vague idea the phrase referred to the garment's material. Never would I have envisioned this reality, this hidden fabric sand trap. Then again, those two words could have been instructions for women like me: Having a fit? Control fit, please.

As I freed my body from this synthetic hell, I wondered how many women are going about their day, pulling the levers of power, all while wearing such a contraption? How, I thought, could they do it? Did their friends know? Did they scream out in their sleep?  They surely should wear a special insignia so the rest of us would treat them with ancillary kindness (to mitigate our pity, if nothing else). I wouldn’t want to be in your sling backs, sister--or those pants.

Perhaps they’re Spanx veterans—a choice, if you will, not a lifestyle. But what about the rest of us, the innocents who never knew? Wasn’t this a kind of forced enrollment into an army of the unwilling?

And are there such garments for Man Fat? I doubt it. Sure, there are now foundational garments for men (just as there have long been jock straps and hernia belts) but those are items one chooses; one is not ambushed into wearing them. I can just see the Joe Sixpacks of America climbing into their workaday pants, still groggy from sleep, still dreading the dawning of the workday, and sticking their spindly, unsuspecting legs into the writhing, grasping maw. Across America, a million voices braying, “What the—?!?”

No, this is for Woman Fat, to hold us in, down, together, all the above, to be other than who we are. Men get to scratch their bellies and balls, promenade their stomachs with pride. Women? We get Control Fit.