OK, so this isn't my standard 'thing'.

When a person has to come up with 100 hubs in 30 days, that person might just get a little punchy now and then. If you must know, 'nylon panties' is one of the keywords listed in Hub Pages Premium Ideabank, so cheezy as the topic may be, somebody at Hub Pages thinks it's a pretty hot topic. In fact, Sweetie Pie already wrote a cute little hub about nylon panties.

So I'm not even the first.

So there.

If you Google nylon panties, you get lots of online retailers, fetish sites, and photos of panties big enough to raise chickens in and thin enough so that the chickens will still get all their vitamin D from natural sunlight. There's something about a pair of sheer panties as big as pup tent that's more than a little bit disturbing, but apparently it's an attractive image for lots of perfectly nice folks. Hats off to you. God bless your sartorial quirkiness.

I'll tell you what nylon panties do for me though: They remind me of riding the bus to Chicago with my best friend Kathy when I was a tween, and sneaking into Fredericks of Hollywood to look at all the nipple-less bullet bras and fake butts. (Fredericks used to manufacture fake foam butts attached to girdles for women with flat asses. Maybe they still do.)

When I was a kid, Fredericks of Hollywood mailed out catalogs to lots of happy little homesteads, and nothing was more interesting, I mean nothing. Certainly you could buy all the nylon panties you wanted from those catalogs, as well as many things most of you twittering youngsters probably have never even imagined. Strange, dirty things.Things that probably smelled funny. Or would. Soon.

That was back in the bad old days when sex was still dirty. Today, pin up posters from that era are enjoying a renaissance among persons (mostly male) of a certain age. An original Vargas or Elvgren fetches a pretty penny these days, so if you've got a stack of them somewhere, make sure it isn't in a damp basement because there's money in them panties!

Paradoxically, now that sex is talked about more openly and porn is available at the touch of a few computer keys for free (you'd better have some good antivirus software though), sex seems significantly more unreal than it did back in the days when a glimpse of panty or garter was the height of titilation. Today's porn star is a space creature, not a woman: A twelve year old boy with fake boobs surgically attached to an anorexic body that comes with pink wigs and a shaving fetish.

I mean it's fine I guess, but it's weird. It's almost as though, the closer sex gets to being OK, the more we have to push it away and make it look alien and strange. Back when sex wasn't OK, back when Dick and Laura Petrie slept in twin beds in tailored pajamas, sexy women looked like, well, women. What was titilating back then wasn't the alien nature of the acts and the bizarre physiques of the particpants, but rather the fact that sex looked possible in these images--not just possible, imminent. The women seemed so real you could smell their Ambush cologne and smear their coral lipstick on your collar. Even though they were cartoons.

So what about nylon panties?

Oh I don't know. You can buy them. In fact, you can buy them in any size or color for any gender and some genders we haven't even imagined yet. In the United States of America today we have the freedom and the resources to manufacture and sell nylon panties for everyone.

That's what makes our nation great.

Me, I like cotton.

I'm old.

But I still have my imagination.