7 Questions About Camel-Toe Underwear

Hey! Do you suffer from “camel toe”? Me neither. But nonetheless, there is a solution for you, which is underwear that is guaranteed to obscure camel toe. Mashable reports on this new, potentially not-life-altering innovation, brought to us by entrepreneur Maggie Han. The undies are dubbed “Camel No” and cost about $28. But hang on, before you go all Amazon Prime on that shit, I have a few questions.

1. Who actually has camel-toe? The article says camel toe “plagues” women who wear, say, yoga pants. Every woman I know wears yoga pants. They’re practically issued to us in the hospital when we become mothers, and I have never once had to whisper, “psst, camel toe,” to another mom at the playground. Literally the only place I have ever seen a real camel toe was on a German phys ed teacher wearing cotton jersey gym pants that were high-waisted, cropped and flared. And she had clearly yanked them up there. C’mon, this is not a real problem. Camel toe could only theoretically result from hiking your damn pants up to your pits and then really stuffing that crotch fabric in there, kind of like how I have to push my sofa slipcovers back into place with a wooden spatula.

2. Do we really want to introduce the idea of a stiff panty liner? The secret to these magical camel-toe-obscuring skivvies is a medical-grade silicone panty liner. That sounds a lot like sticking a metal shoe horn in your underpants. When you walk, is it going to rub back and forth on either side of your upper thigh/vulva area, eventually drawing blood? Are you willing to risk friction wounds for the sake of avoiding camel toe? Are we all going to be in the ladies’ room, squatting and dabbing bacitracin on our nether regions, ruefully nodding to each other like, totally worth it for no camel toe.

3. When you sit down are you going to be like, what is that, a Frisbee?

4. Won’t anyone think of the poor Midwestern men? According to the article, Midwestern men really like camel toe and don’t want a solution to it. Midwestern men are evidently totally into camel toe. So, let’s review our goals: Are we trying to inflame the men from Providence, but the fellas from Champaign are SOL? How do West Coast men feel about camel toe: pro, con or agnostic? In today’s global economy, where you may find yourself in a meeting with a VP from Schenectady and a CFO from Santa Cruz, is it possible to turn on all the men with each and every representation of your vagina? Can you whip the silicone pad in and out depending on the hometown of the man you are talking to?

5. How hot is your vag going to be with a silicone shoe horn pressed up against it all day?

6. How tall do you have to be for camel toe to really be a problem? The founder of Camel No, Maggie Han, reports that she is 5’11”, which is the precise height to bring her camel toe to her colleagues’ eye level when she walks into a meeting. I am only 5’4″ and my colleagues are smallish too. Can I get away with ordinary underwear? Can I just arrive at the meeting a little early and hide my distracting vag under the conference table?

7. What on God’s green earth does anyone’s godmother have to do with anything? The article reports that “the idea finally came together one day when Han says she was visiting her godmother at a speech she was making in New England. ‘I didn’t hear what she said,’ recalls Han. ‘I was staring at her camel toe in these beautiful white capris.’ It was then that she had her eureka moment when she decided she needed to embark on the journey to free women everywhere.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that women as a group do face a lot of struggles—low wages, domestic violence, actual prison—but that camel toe is not one of them. If something isn’t sitting right, so to speak, go change your damn pants.