I Don't Cotton to Spandex

I thought I would celebrate my return to a regular column with a timely complaint—a beyond timely complaint even: I intensely dislike spandex.

Who exactly thought we needed this impertinent fabric? I recall we survived the '70s perfectly fine with only denim and polyester; the next day it's the 1980s, and suddenly we're immersed in a spandex society. Oh, I'm a 1980s fitness nut—I can't work out in burlap. Gingham is too good for me. I will not rest until I've found the perfect sycophantic fabric to kiss my ass all through my squat thrusts.

As if the world was sitting up at night, wondering what your particular camel toe looks like. And if you're the type of man who prefers to see as much of the female anatomy as possible, consider this: before the advent of spandex leggings, you could see the legs themselves. That's right, bare skin. How exactly is this an advantage for you men? I call "rip-off!" I sincerely hope you boys will join me in that call.

I submit, daring though my suggestion may be, spandex has brought nothing to this world. Sure, Batman could frighten the hell out of the cowardly superstitious criminal kind with his well-toned physique, but how did spandex help Robin? Or the rest of us, for that matter? Now any time we are dependent on focusing our minds on man-business, we run the risk of sexual thoughts pervading us at any given moment with a feminine physique perfectly outlined in lime green materials. Thoughts of baseball can't be conjured fast enough. Good people, I say it's a genuine threat.

I find the womanly shapes as appealing as any man, I admit that freely. But it doesn't mean I want my eyes popping in and out of their sockets like some Tex Avery character while I'm trying to peruse the stock market. I have a lot of money invested in things in the world, and none of them have to do with stunningly curvaceous asses of a hot pink hue. One of these days the law will change and you teasing harlots will be financially responsible for every time you distract me and cause me to accidentally invest my money in ludditesonline.com.

Tell me, what happened to the good old days? I remember well a time a man could walk down the street and only find himself fixated on thoughts of sex a mere five to six times in the course of a minute. All this, of course, without any visual stimulation—unless you were one of those men who found wide-brimmed bonnets exciting. And many of us did. No, in those glory days you had to don a raincoat and purposely stumble into a theater of indecent movies completely by accident. Things were much more discreet in those days, and we all preferred it that way. If you ran into an associate in the line, you had to pretend you were looking for that new John Ford movie that had just hit the theaters, and you had pocketed a half-roll of pennies in case they sold candy. We all knew it was pretense to stimulate the manly function of a solo reproductive act, and we all kept quiet about it. It was just polite society.

Those were the halcyon days when gyms were strictly reserved for tubby joes sweating off the fat in a steam cabinet, or wiggling them off with a giant rubber band that would shake them violently. Certainly not the place for stimulating thoughts—you were lucky if you could eat again afterwards. Then they let the women in and, surprise, surprise, everyone's obese now. We should all know why—with spandex around to remind us of the existence of the opposite sex, there's only one muscle that's getting a workout these days. That's right. Your dirty mind.

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