A Fetish for Stealing Undies

Just a couple of months ago, an hilarious news story was reported in which a Chinese man, having stolen and stashed hundreds of pieces of women’s lingerie, was exposed when a ceiling collapsed under the weight of his hidden stash.

Located in the southeast Chinese city of Yulin, the man, aged in his thirties, who later admitted to psychiatric issues and a lifelong obsession with women’s lingerie, had been stealing and hiding the underwear in a ceiling above an emergency exit in his building. After the ceiling collapse, police found more than two thousand items, including bras and panties hidden in the roof.

The underwear had, seemingly, been stolen from other residents in the offender’s housing complex – they had been complaining of missing and vanishing underwear for some time. The offender had accessed a master key and entered the other residents’ apartments during their absence with the sole aim of stealing and hoarding their underwear.

He stored his stolen items in his own ceiling, until he ran out of room there; at this point he accessed the ceiling cavities in communal fire escapes.

This is not the only underwear burglar to make his way to infamy in the news recently. A Singaporean man who had been stealing lingerie from women’s indoor washing lines was caught in the act – and was publicly shamed into wearing one of the stolen bras as he was paraded around the block.

Why do men steal women’s underwear?

·        Some men want a kinky keepsake of their sexual encounters with a specific woman.

·        Some men get off on the risk of pinching something intimate.

·        Some men get off on the thrill of stealing – full stop – and getting away with it.

·        Some men have a fetish for worn underwear. There is even an industry for selling and buying worn (and unwashed) panties. Japan even sells used panties in vending machines, alongside tobacco products and beer, so extreme is this fetish in that country.

·        What causes a man to have an underwear fetish? A Japanese study used MRI scanning technology to look at the brains of men with self-confessed panty fetishes, and found that decreased blood flow to the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain was a factor in all subjects.  Whether this is a cause or just a correlation is unknown. Like all fetishes, it begins in early life and is usually triggered by an event.

A Brief History of Women’s Undies

Pantaloons, bloomers, drawers, knickers, panties, briefs: call them what you will. Women’s undies have a long and somewhat interesting story – though their use is a very new thing compared with men’s underwear...

Underwear for a woman’s nether regions was unheard of in centuries past, except for in ancient Rome: Roman women sometimes wore a garment called a subligaculum. This was either a kind of pair of shorts, or an item similar to a loincloth which wrapped around the lower body and could sometimes be tied at the hips with strings.

 

After the Roman Empire fell, women did not again wear undies (for want of a better word) until the eighteenth century, wearing only a long linen shift or chemise under their dresses.

Women began wearing drawers during the French Revolution. Catherine de Medici first introduced them, so she could ride her horse with one leg folded across the horse in front of her and without displaying her nether regions to her army and the general public. These garments came to below the knee. Soon after, during the English Regency Era, women’s fashions changed dramatically, from heavy corseted dresses  to lighter Empire style dresses made of sheer fabrics such as muslin. This new fashion required the wearing of undergarments to offer warmth (as well as some modesty) as the heavier clothing of the past had done. Pantaloons were worn by women for this purpose: loose pants which almost reached the ankle. 

Women’s drawers in the early nineteenth century were actually a pair of garments: one worn over each leg and attached to each other at the waist. This open crotch style was considered to be not only convenient for toileting, but hygienic; free airflow over the genital region was deemed to keep a woman fresh – despite rare underwear changes and few, if any, baths.

Parisian can-can dancers soon put an end to open-crotch drawers: their high kicks and lifted skirts resulted in a scandalous and pornographic show every time the dance was performed. Even in permissive Paris of the time this was a bit much. So women stitched their drawers together and shortened them to at or just above the knee – thus knickers were born.

Early drawers and knickers were invariably white and made from linen, but by the 1860s some women began to wear coloured drawers, sometimes decorated with lace or embellishments such as embroidery. These were also soon to be made from cotton, or wool for winter. In time, knickers were made to be loose, even more like the underwear men wore,  and were referred to as bloomers.

Stay tuned for the conclusion to this story next week...