Introducing Jameltoe

Don’t get me wrong; cameltoe hasn’t gone anywhere. That particular phenomenon—achieved when women of a certain girth gamely don ill-fitting jeans, hot pants, or shorts—continues to inspire fear in public squares, meeting places, and halls of commerce all across our great nation, and it won’t peter out anytime soon. Guiding the kids through amusement parks or picking up groceries at Wegman’s or waiting on line to vote, you will gasp and gawp and muffle horse laughter with your hand in reaction to a fortysomething in mom jeans so blood-circulation constipation that the lips of her labia are visibly plain to everyone in the immediate vicinity with eyes and a pulse. That’s life, as real people live it.

For the last several years, fashion trends have whittled away at the lengths of girls’ and women’s shorts, nibbling invisibly until there was nothing left to lose and not much left to the imagination. The logical next step, of course, was fabric shrinkage.

Ergo, constriction. Ergo, what I’ve come to refer to as “jameltoe.” Jameltoe takes that leap. Jameltoe puts it all out there, right in your face. Jameltoe knocks down the paperboard barrier between propriety and impropriety, between taste and abject tastelessness, between day-to-day living and a blithe, sartorial pornography. (A close friend, who lives near India and finds short skirts grossly unsanitary, will probably have a rough time assimilating when she relocates to the West, where jameltoe is unabashedly everywhere.) Jameltoe invites passerby to cop a visual feel, to take a mental picture for a quick wank behind closed doors. Jameltoe enfeebles the imagination, because jameltoe allows the mental eye to simply change the color of whatever fabric those abbreviated, tight shorts are made of to a matching flesh tone. Jameltoe is the ultimate in diminished self-respect, or desperation, or herd chasing, or all of the above.

Stalking boutiques, wandering boulevards, shaded by long, immaculately shaven legs during professional pedicures, jameltoe is out there—and it’s coming for you.