Ladies, how come you have to wear so many damn contraptions? As if bras weren’t complicated enough, there’s all kinds of “tops” (in my world, they’re shirts, but women don’t wear shirts. They wear tops) that are either delicate or zip up or contain any number of sashes or ruffles or other gadgetry that makes it incredibly puzzling to solve the best route of attack…
And god forbid she wears pantyhose or some other such covering undergarment that requires a friggin’ specialized technician to remove.
It usually makes me end up just pointing and saying “Take that off”. But it’s so much more suave and passionate when you remove each other’s clothes, don’t you think?
It’s such a production and I feel so triumphant by the time I finally get all her damn clothes off that it’s like I don’t even need to have sex any more. I’ve already won.
Is there a class on this somewhere I can take to improve my skills? I really do want to learn.
The best form of defence…trousers with an extra button as well as a catch, cufflinks which have to be removed to take the shirt off, it’s possible to fight back on their own terms
To play devil’s advocate, on the plus side, they’re much more difficult to remove when drunk, and so can halt what you’d realise to be a mistake in the morning.
My problem isn’t with the removal phase, but with the laundry phase. See, properly chosen clothes look great on the woman, but when you’re married to one you’re expected to help do the laundry without fucking it up. And therein lies the real trap. See, you can’t just do a simple sort like with most guys’ clothes. We have the categories “suits and other formalwear” that goes to the drycleaners, “whites” that you wash in hot water, “colors” that you wash in cold water, and “reds” that for some damn reason insist on bleeding all over everything else and therefore must be kept separate from the other colors, but otherwise are treated the same.
When washing my wife’s clothes, I actually have to scrutinize the damn labels. This sweater might be fine to machine wash and dry with everything else, this other fairly similar looking sweater might be fine to machine wash but needs to be dried on a rack, and this other other sweater with no particular distinguishing characteristics from the others might need to be hand washed.
And then there’s the bras. Look, I appreciate bras, they perform several important structural and aesthetic functions, but goddamn what a pain they are in the maintenance department. You have to put them in the lingerie bag securely but not too tightly packed for the wash phase, then you have to perform the extraction without losing a hook or tearing the reusable bag, then you have to hang the damn things to dry. Apparently the dryer’s heat is somewhat unfriendly to oddly delicate components of the bra. On the other hand, hanging them is rather space and time intensive. (Hmm, I wonder if enough bras hanging together could cause a spacetime discontinuity?)
I think we should get to work on this problem immediately. Fuck going to Mars, fuck solving the impending oil crisis, fuck putting Iraq back together, we need to get all our best minds together to make bras self cleaning, indestructible, and user friendly.
And don’t even get me started on ironing her tops. (I was sorely disappointed to learn “I don’t wear shirts.” didn’t mean what I thought it meant.) My shirts are easy. Set the iron on hot/steam, and iron the collar, cuffs, sleeves, back, then front. I can iron one of my shirts in five minutes.
Her [redline]shirts[/redline] tops, on the other hand, have all these little darts and stitches in odd places which require all sorts of maneuvers to prevent pressed wrinkles from showing up on potentially embarrassing places. And are they all cotton? No. They’re all sorts of cotton/polystyrene blends, each one requiring a different setting on the iron.
Don’t get me started on which should go to the dry cleaners, and which need to be hand-washed.
And don’t even get me started on ironing her tops. (I was sorely disappointed to learn “I don’t wear shirts.” didn’t mean what I thought it meant.) My shirts are easy. Set the iron on hot/steam, and iron the collar, cuffs, sleeves, back, then front. I can iron one of my shirts in five minutes.
Her shirts^wtops, on the other hand, have all these little darts and stitches in odd places which require all sorts of maneuvers to prevent pressed wrinkles from showing up on potentially embarrassing places. And are they all cotton? No. They’re all sorts of cotton/polystyrene blends, each one requiring a different setting on the iron.
Don’t get me started on which should go to the dry cleaners, and which need to be hand-washed.
As a woman, I have discarded all complicated clothing.
I don’t wear pantyhose-- if need be, I wear stockings (they have rubber at the tops, so they don’t slip down. My bras are all the sports-bra type without any metal underwires or clasps. My underwear are all boxer-brief style.
Since I’m the one who ends up doing laundry and I’m incompetent at it, I check lables before I buy clothing. If it can’t be washed and dried normally, I don’t buy it. Too much bother. I use wrinkle-release spray if something becomes crumpled, or throw it back in the dryer with a wet towel.
Unless I have to “dress up” my clothes are always very simple-- pull-over shirts, single-button loose pants and slip-on shoes. My pajamas are very simple, too. A pair of jersey-knit pants and a t-shirt is my usual attire.
Life is too short to wear uncomfortable, complicated clothing. I may not be fashionable, but I don’t care.
Eh, I never found laundry all that complicated. Anything which says ‘lay flat to dry’ or ‘hand wash’ I treat as ‘hang to dry’. Everything either goes in the dryer, or upstairs to my closet.
Okay, folks, I know it’s traditionally considered cute when less-experienced young men complain about not knowing how to remove female clothing. But now that the Edwardian era is over, is this still honestly a problem for anyone who isn’t blind drunk or terminally clumsy?
Bras have hook-and-eye closures either in the front or the back. Hooks and eyes are probably the least familiar form of fastener that modern males are likely to encounter, and the principle on which they work can be easily figured out by any reasonably intelligent primate in a few seconds.
Pantyhose operate on exactly the same principle as men’s long underwear (except for not having a fly in the front). They need to be removed slowly and gently in order to avoid getting runs in them, but there is absolutely nothing about the operation that requires a “specialized technician”. If having to proceed slowly and gently in such a situation is enough to get you irritated, you obviously have a lot left to learn about other issues besides clothing.
Other garments may have some buttons, zippers, Velcro, or laces in unexpected places, but this should not faze anybody of normal manual competence. You know how buttons, zippers, Velcro, and laces work.
Any guy who is seriously bewildered or frustrated by the challenges posed by removing any modern item of female attire (short of a formal wedding gown or elaborate bondage gear, at least) is probably either too stoned, too clumsy, or too impatient to be worth having sex with in the first place.
Now, as far as the laundry and ironing issues go, y’all have got a legitimate beef there. Either you just take everything to the dry cleaner’s, which is bad for the environment and costs a fortune, or you have to figure out how to wash/iron everything in the proper way to avoid ruining it. Or just buy her easy-care cottons from Land’s End or someplace and keep telling her how great she looks in them.
Ah, but when women remove them, they move the hook around back to front, and then use two hands. During the throes of passion, there is no suave way for a man to do this. Trying to do this either one-handed or with one’s teeth becomes an engineering nightmare.
But if we’re going to talk about laundry difficulties, can we first solve the socks problem? Is that not vexing enough?
Hmm. Sounds like someone finished before he started. If you can’t muster up the poise to get the clothing off without collapsing in a puddle of your own frustrated issue, how do you handle something slightly more demanding like foreplay?
They do? I don’t. And I’m just wondering why a woman who plans on having sex that evening would wear pantyhose. That’s the anti-hot.
I’ve got cold hard cash for anyone who can figure out the sock thing, though. I put 6 pairs in, I get 5 pairs and a spare out. I buy socks at least once a month.
Place your left hand around her back, and hold the right half (her left) of the bra just beyond the clasp steady against her back with your fingers. Slide the thumb against the material on the near side (her right) of the clasp in sort of a slow motion snap. The idea is to gather some slack in the elastic and slide one half of the clasp over the other while the hook and eyes release. With a four hook industrial model, you sometimes have to do it once near the top and once near the bottom to get them all.
On the rare occasions you can’t get the material to slide with just your thumb, you can re-adjust so the only your pinky and ring finger keep the right half steady and use two fingers and a thumb to actually pick up the other half and slide it.
For dry-cleaning, I highly recommend the home dry-cleaning kits for anything that doesn’t need pressing. I only send a few items to the cleaner; the rest we clean at home in our dryer. Works great.
I’m lucky that my hubby reads labels carefully when he does my laundry. In fact, he’s often kinder to my clothes than I am; I tend to toss “dry flat” stuff into the dryer periodically just to see what will happen to it. If it survives, that’s the end of drying it flat! And “han\d wash” to me translates as “wash on gentle cycle.” I’ve never had a problem with any of it.
But I wish they’d not make so many articles of women’s clothing that require complicated cleaning instructions, too. Laundering men’s stuff is infinitely easier. Including shirts – that’s what 99¢ at the discount cleaners is for, plus they’ll do “medium starch,” which is good since I refuse to press a shirt, let alone starch it the way hubby wants his dress shirts done. It’s ludicrous how much women’s clothing can’t be just tossed in with everything else. I guess we’re still assumed by the manufacturers to all be Suzy Homemaker with endless amounts of time to take care of all that stuff. Which is a crock.
Um, what? I can unhook my (double or triple hook/eye) bras with one hand, without shifting anything around to the front (which is seriously a pain). If we can do it one-handed and blind, you should be able to learn just fine.
