Men's Panties or Women's Panties?
This is a question and point of contention for men who like to wear lingerie, their partners and other people who have a passing interest in the topic. I myself often argue that panties are panties are panties, regardless of who is wearing them. However in reality, there is a difference between 'men's panties' and 'women's panties', if only because 'women's panties' tend to be fairly high quality garments made by multinational corporations and modeled by lanky Brazilian lasses with more money than sense, whereas 'men's panties' tend to be produced by smaller companies that cater to a very different aesthetic.
Now there are some very good small manufacturers of men's panties. Panties For Men is one such online retailer, and there are others too. However one cannot get away from the fact that when panties are made 'for men who wear panties' they tend to emerge from the process of creation looking like they were thrown up by a seamstress who'd accidentally consumed Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In other words, they are puffy, quite often pink or baby blue, festooned with ribbons and generally look, if I am to be frank, like baby clothes.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of men who like lingerie therefore simply buy what the lingerie stores call 'women's panties'. This is because mainstream women's underwear isn't a juvenile parody of lingerie, but is actual lingerie with style, feminine sophistication, and, something that much of the 'men's panties' makers seem to have forgotten, understatement. You don't need six yards of lace to make a garment look feminine. Most men who like lingerie want to look stylish when they wear their lingerie, they want to feel good about themselves.
I am not so naive as to claim that there is no market for the puffy girly panties that don't resemble anything any grown woman has ever worn, obviously there is, but it does not represent the bulk of men who want to wear lingerie and thus they are forced back into the 'women's' departments.
Ideally we'd just call the whole thing unisex, but I imagine that would disappoint not women as much as the men who like to wear lingerie because it is a feminine thing to do. For a relatively small section of the population, lingerie wearing men show remarkable diversity within their group. Some just like well made lingerie and don't want to be seen as feminine, others don't care about the lingerie as long as it makes them look feminine and others, well, others are in it for reasons we can't get into on a family friendly website.
I don't know much, but I do know that the longer we designate lingerie as being 'women's lingerie' , it's going to be a point of contention when men wear it. Labels mean nothing at all and yet they are some of the most powerful things in the world.