You straight guys crack me up. You see a little bulge (and I do mean little), and you’re running amok through the streets, screaming “Penis ensues!!!”
Take a deep breath and get a grip. Men have penises and balls. And asses. This is what we (usually) cover up with our underwear. If you’re freaked out by it, perhaps you’re saying something about yourself. And if you think those guys are big (or hard), you’re saying even more about yourself.
Seriously. That’s what I’m thinking. It’s like saying you don’t want to buy a bra if the model actually has boobs to put in the bra.
Hard-on? I’ve never, ever seen a package of men’s underwear with a guy sporting a hard-on and if that’s what you think a hard-on looks like, uh… yeah, see a doctor. They’ve got pills for that these days.
What puzzles me about underwear-when I was a kid-underwear came in one color (white). Now there are all kinds of colors/patterns, etc. What’s the point?
Proposed thread title: Packaging for package packaging
Of course there is a marketing reason. They have done it and it appears to work. That is, sales are noticably higher with than without that marketing.
Me, I’d like to know what the undies look like before I put them on. I make the appropriate correction for the fact that I don’t have six-pack abs and a “package” that will attract the attention of a photo shoot producer for men’s underwear ads. 
Kids (and their parents) like color. A good deal of men’s underwear is in color, too, these days, which does have a practical point: you don’t have to wash it with whites separately.
I have to agree my husband has NEVER bought a pair of underwear in all the years I’ve been married. He would wear them till they disintegrate, then go commando rather than buy new drawers. I have to buy him underwear, as a matter of fact if it weren’t for me he’d be wearing the same pair of blue jeans from high school
I like the models of course my husband doesn’t look anywhere like that 
I’ve bought enough men’s underwear to, well, always have underwear on. It never once crossed my mind that the pictures of men wearing underwear on the package was strange. What else would they put on the package? Tire tracks? In fact, I’m a little suspicious of your motives for asking this question, which seems to have such an obvious answer. Are you conducting some sort of weird experiment?
I think I buy underwear more often because I’m too lazy to do my own laundry and take it to a fluff n fold; that sets a minimum threshold below which I start culling the herd.
The marketing hope is that on some level you WON’T make the correction and will unconsciously believe that the underwear will make you appear to spend 6 hours a day in the gym and be hung like a horse.
I thought this was going to be a rant about what pissed me off last time I bought underwear: I had a hell of a time getting all the goddamn tape off them. They were seriously affixed to those little cardboard inserts that give them the right shape in the package. And not just the front pair, either: each of the six pair had its own little piece of cardboard and its own fourteen pieces of tape holding it on there.
I am TRYING to wean my boyfriend off his high school underwear. It doesn’t even perform the basic functions of underwear! It does not keep the balls in! He has this one pair (boxers) that’s completely ripped up the back, and he walks around in his underwear all the time presumably feeling somewhat safe - I hope to god the neighbors never look in the windows.