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In response to a news story about a family putting out an oven fire with the mother's "big pants"—that's Brit-speak for granny panties—comes this column from the Times Online's Caitlin Moran on the scourge of "pantorexia." To be honest, I'm not really sure what's going on in this overlong column — Moran basically starts off encouraging women to stop strangling their asses with "sexy pants" and creating the dreaded quad-buttock effect with ill-fitting unmentionables, but then she goes on to bemoan the state of big pants as well. (Apparently the deprtment stores in Old Blighty are overrun with underpants in the hue of an "uncooked pork chop.")

Furthermore, she suggests, women are wasting their time dressing (presumably) for men, who are simple creatures and don't need the fancy pants to begin with.

On how many occasions in the past year have you needed to wear sexy pants? In other words, to break this right down, how many times this year have you suddenly, unexpectedly, had sex in a brightly lit room, with a hard-to-please erotic connoisseur? Exactly. On those kind of odds, you might just as well be keeping a backgammon board down there, to entertain a group of elderly ladies in the event of emergencies. It’s more likely to happen.

Okay, I laughed. But man, I'm getting bored with this kind of femininnyism — which I define as "employing gender essentialism and stereotyping in order to add heft to a lightweight argument or mount an ostentatiously pro-woman rallying cry." (This column is guilty of both, by the way. Quoth Caitlin: "All the good that women getting the vote has done has been undone by their constant struggle against their tiny, uncomfortable pants." Oh, come on.) Some women like to wear fancy undies, and some don't, and not everyone who does bust a ruffle under their clothing is doing so because they're anticpating some (hetero) love later on. Sheesh.

I took this too seriously, didn't I?