An Irishman's Diary

KEVIN MYERS: This is delicate. So delicate that I hardly know where to begin

KEVIN MYERS: This is delicate. So delicate that I hardly know where to begin. But begin I must, for at the particular request of a female reader, I today am going to touch upon the sensitive matter of the thong.

Yes, yes, yes, I am aware of the side-splitting punning possibilities - the Castlebar Thong Contest, et cetera - but we're trying to be serious here. What is the thong about? Thong shops are opening up everywhere. For €50, you can get a couple of feet of beribboned dental floss attached to a cloth postage stamp, and your lingerie drawer is complete - which confirms, yet again, that men are from Mars and women are from Bonkersville.

And because a Martian is writing this, I have to be careful. Can't stray into that category of expression which feminists created at the very moment they were saying men and women were equal in all regards. This category is a precise refutation of the feminist equality claim, and it is known as "Offensive To Women". There is of course no such category as OTM.

Girls, you might be from Bonkersville, but you're still human. Well, some of the time, anyway. I'm trying my damnedest not to be OTW, but let's be frank: the thong is designed to cling to the primary outlets of the human body. I mean really cling, with adhesive attention to detail, in areas where one would have thought loads of fresh air was preferable.

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But in addition to the needs of the human body: what about the needs of the thong? How does it feel about a life trapped down there, with no room to move, no sunlight, no air, and maybe just the occasional gust of wind?

We'll take a break here, I think, to talk about Mrs Pateman and her underwear. Mrs Pateman lived across the road from us when I was a youngster, and I had ample opportunity to get to know her underwear from her washing line. Ah, you see, I too have lived. And I freely admit to gazing in horrified awe at her huge pink bloomers. They must have reached from her waist to her knees, and were elasticated at each end. They weren't so much an item of lingerie as a fabric garage. You could have rented them out for weddings. They were quite unspeakable.

But they weren't as unspeakable as the thong. In fact, they were infinitely superior to the thong, because - as I recognise now - they were, for all their aesthetic shortcomings, essentially hygienic items. The thong is the opposite. The thong is hygiene's equivalent of the Red Cow Roundabout. Everything converges there, but nothing manages to escape. The result is your very own personalised germ factory on a string.

So what do you do with a thong at the end of the day? Put it out of its misery with a humane killer? Do you just burn it? Or does one attempt to wash it? And is that even possible, in any meaningful sense? Let us take another break here, because I think we all probably need one.

My German dictionary, second-hand, dated 1958, tells me that the German for thong is die Peitschen-schnur, a satisfyingly Germanic name. Since in 1958 our modern thong was about as imaginable as talking cats, the good old Peitschen-schnur couldn't have had a clue what future lay ahead of it, the poor bastard.

Peitsche means whip. Schnur means string or cord, but - interestingly - can also mean daughter-in-law. In German, this could imply that your daughter-in-law is wearing a German daughter-in-law as underwear - which is just

about as bad as it gets.

What is the thong's name? Heidi? And how does Heidi feel about her current life? Would she like a posting elsewhere, or is she content being a Red Cow Roundabout in the moistest nooks and crannies of a stranger's groin? And as Heidi might say: warum? Why do women want to wear Heidi in such numbers that Heidi shops have opened up all over the place? For this is definitely a thing for people from Bonkersville. Yes, I know, we men aren't in touch with our feelings, we don't know the difference between taupe and beige, we don't ring one another on our mobile phones when we're sitting next to land-lines. And so on.

But these are not the primary difference between the sexes. Heidi is. David Beckham aside, you could never get a man to wear a thong. Not a thong thong, with the back-strap passing up between the buttocks, with all that is delightful residing there, to connect with the waist-strap. We chaps simply wouldn't do it. Yet quite clearly many of you girls have no qualms about slipping into a Heidi, and setting off on your day.

Yet why would anyone want to house a bacteria-farm close to your nearest and dearest from dawn to dusk? Surely going commando is better than having your own e-coli Montessori down there, with budding young microbes learning how to resist antibiotics, yeasts hitherto unknown to science devising hideously personal ailments and various funguses swapping jokes at the office water-warmer.

Women wear thongs, it seems, because they don't want a visible panty-line. But if you girls don't want a VPL, and still insist on underwear of some kind, why don't you all follow Mrs Pateman's splendid example, and opt for vast pink bloomers? Go on. Put Heidi out of her misery. You'll feel better for it. And she certainly will.