It's an age-old question: does taking action to mitigate a problem cause more of that problem? Conservative doctrine would say yes, that you don't offer a cure for a deadly sexually transmitted disease because it will cause people to have more sex, just for example, or that you allow the poor the dignity of starvation so that they'll be inspired to forage on their own.
What we're talking about here is more dire, however, than simple, awful death by disease or starvation: the problem of the American affinity for icky clothing at shopping malls. The question is, do you solve the whole problem by somehow convincing the nylon-and-stretch-fabric-clad masses that they could improve their lot in life simply by ordering everything a size bigger or maybe not wearing their jammies out in public, or do you do something to make whatever it is they're wearing less appalling without actually requiring that they stop wearing it?
On this issue I have historically taken a conservative stand. That is, I'm an optimist about human nature and believe that big change is possible. I've assumed that inappropriate attire and unintentionally-bared midriffs and butt cracks are unconscious mistakes, artifacts of the difference between standing still in front of a mirror and wearing clothing while in motion, however lumbering that motion might me. I've believed that with social opprobrium pushing on one end and fine role models like myself pulling from the other, we can move the lethargic masses into a more enlightened way of life.
But there's a company that makes the case that the clothing choices of the typical food court denizen are deliberate and worthy of respect in the same way that some liberals think that Ebonics is a language that should be taught in schools. It's a company that proudly proclaims that it provides "apparel solutions" and uses the phrase "crotch area" on its website more often than I, personally, am comfortable with.
The company is Product Masters, and the product they're mastering is called "NoRiders." NoRiders are stiff cloth pads that can be ironed-on into the insides of the the thighs of problem shorts to keep them from "riding-up," which will also eliminate the most horrible of public displays, "tweezing." If you're brave, you can watch the demonstration video here.
NoRiders, like most inventions good or bad, is the product of a single visionary -- in this case, Catherine "Cas" Chetelat, a mother of eight from Baltimore. Here's some background from a press release:
It all began when Cas became fed up with the annoyance and embarrassment she experienced as her favorite shorts kept riding up her inner thighs, and she decided to do something about it.
The thing that most people would do about that particular problem would be to wear different shorts. But Cas isn't most people, and she started instead to sew various patches and stays into her "favorite" shorts to try to keep them in order. Eventually, she hit on a solution, and her enterprising son took it to market and the rest, as they say, is history.
According to Product Masters, there are 150 million Americans -- fully half the population -- who experience the horror of shorts that scrunch upward in defiance of gravity, confronting their wearers with a terrible dilemma: to tweeze or not to tweeze. (This number sounds about right to me, by the way, based on unintentional research at malls around the country.) That's their target market.
Still, we're left with a basic, moral conundrum: do we enable the wearing of terrible shorts by solving only one of the many problems associated with those shorts? Or do we leave the symptoms of the problem to fester in hopes that mall walkers will be motivated to depart their swishing nylon clothing in favor of something more civilized? Or, perhaps, do we go so far as to make the horrible clothing worse (perhaps requiring that it be made out of highly flammable material so that it will burst into flames after repeated thigh-to-thigh contact) to speed the process of change?
As I've said before, ordinarily I would come down on the side of letting things be and hoping that the market will provide the pressure to inspire change. I can shop somewhere else. But last week I wandered unthinkingly into a mall and saw something so horrible that I think maybe I'm going to get on the NoRiders bandwagon. There was this woman...no. No, I can't talk about it yet. It was too...too...well, you're going to have to take my word for it.
