Rosemary McLeod: Pants shaming backfires

Old-fashioned pants would never reveal anything embarrassing, even on windy days. Photo/Getty

It's been ages since I thought about my grandmother's underpants. I never pondered their deep significance at the time, but thanks to the past week's online controversy, the pants-shaming of an Australian TV presenter, the memory snapped back. She definitely wore them. That much is certain. She'd never have gone without them.

My grandmother wouldn't thank me for mentioning this, because she was a modest woman, but in fairness to Samantha Armytage, accused of wearing "giant granny panties," I'll spill the beans. My grandmother's undies were white, knee-length, elasticated top and bottom, and made from some thickish, soft cloth a bit like the stuff men's wife-beater singlets are still made of today.

They weren't actually baggy, let alone "giant", nor were they sleek. She wore the same style from the 1920s onward, and still wore her stockings rolled over a fancy elastic garter at the top, just above her knee, discreetly covered by those underpants, until she died.

Guess what? Nobody cared.

Since she never wore trousers, or shorts, or miniskirts, they worked just fine. And they were always white. That is the colour of granny panties, surely, as it should be with a grandmother, as much as lavender water in her dressing-table drawer, along with cakes of expensive soaps, decades old, which remain too good to ever use until all perfume is lost, her own proud gladioli in vases, and lemon honey in jars.

There was a lot to be said for those underpants, heroes of the underpants world. They would never reveal anything embarrassing, even on windy days. A glimpse of them, I'm fairly sure, never gave rise to untoward, lustful thoughts in anyone's mind. My grandmother's generation weren't expected to look as if they were always gagging for it anyway - which is where Armytage was entirely wrong according to an Australian newspaper.

Armytage was out shopping for groceries in Sydney, an errand registering nil on the scale of women's major life events and excitements. She wore, as far as I can gather, underpants that are now known as full briefs, and she was snapped by a paparazzi.

"Armytage dares to bare with giant granny panties showing a visible line", the subsequent headline read. You could hear the delighted sniggering in the office when they came up with that. Luckily she didn't have packets of tampons in her trolley.

As all women are now expected to know, a visible panty line suggests that you are not naked under your trousers, and if you're not naked under your trousers you are ridiculous. The g-string, the dental floss variety of underpants, is compulsory.

Armytage was not impressed at the public shaming. My mother would not have been either. She wore white underpants like her mother before her. They were called cottontails, and were woven with many small holes, with which to ventilate the private parts. They were full briefs, needless to say, with no actual legs to them. Bikini pants, as she rightly observed, get lost under the folds of flesh on your tummy. She gave me some once. They were red nylon and hideous.

Oh, life was simpler then. Milk didn't come in cardboard cartons, it was delivered in glass bottles, and women had their hair set once a week at the hairdresser's, with a comb-up midweek.

They also wore corsets, the enemy of instant lust that made a woman reflect, before succumbing, on the possibility that a man would see their floppy bits pour out of their corsets creased and tucked and unruly, and putting the things on again would be worrisomely difficult while trying to maintain a degree of glamour.

They prevented, then, many tears at bedtime, and a woman maintained mystery and allure.

The happy part of the very odd affair of Armytage and her knickers is that women protested, and the paper that shamed her backed down when her lawyers accused it of a "gross breach of privacy".

So "celebrity" women can maybe relax, hoping the paparazzi won't stalk their washing lines to discover their bra size, or patrol the contents of their rubbish bins to check up on their pizza consumption. But well-known women's waistlines and panty lines will remain a subject of fascination as long as there are moronic editors who buy such images from photographers, and call personal shaming of other people's bodies "news".

There are other things happening in the world, for goodness' sake, but I swore not to say his name for a week.