The Fascination of Tights

by Geraden

Tights. Pantyhose. Some people hate them; others love them. If you are one of the haters, you have probably just made a big mistake by coming here. But read on, anyway!

You can line up all the reasons for hating tights – I have written already elsewhere about what I call 'unreasons'. On the other side you can line up all the reasons for wearing them: warmth, comfort, health benefits or just because they feel nice to wear.

The reason that makes a man or a woman into a lover of tights is something else. Sometimes it is jokingly referred to as having the 'nylon gene'. Well, maybe. Another way of looking at it is saying men who love tights do so because they are fascinated by them.

Men have told their 'nylon histories' – some of them on this site and others elsewhere. Reading these stories I am left with the impression that there are three main ages at which men typically start wearing – in childhood (often around age 6), at puberty, and at middle age or later in life.

Those in the first category, who gained their love of nylon in childhood, often had mothers or older sisters who wore tights. Maybe they themselves were allowed to wear in early childhood, and resented the withdrawal of the 'privilege' as they advanced into their school years.

Skipping to the the third category, this includes many men who started wearing for warmth – often at the suggestion of a wife or girlfriend – or because tights enabled them to stand or sit for longer periods without leg fatigue. In middle age and later men have started wearing for medical reasons – to combat or prevent varicose veins, oedema etc. Of course some of these were already lifelong admirers of tights on women's legs before they thought of wearing for themselves.

The second category is where I fit in. I developed my love for tights in puberty: about the same time as I started to understand why there were such things as girls. (I did not have the benefit – if that is what it is – of having sisters.) So my fascination for tights was closely connected with growing fascination for the fair sex.

So we can ask where this fascination with tights comes from? What follows is what I think. Maybe you will agree, and maybe you will disagree – that is what comments are for! Let us not beat about the bush. If men are fascinated by tights it is because women wear them.

The first thing about tights is that they are like a second skin. Sometimes they have been called a 'super skin' or a 'magic skin'.

The skin is the most sensuous part of the body. It is where the organ of touch, that most intimate of senses, is situated. Our other four senses are localised. Sight, hearing, taste and smell are all in the head. Touch, on the other hand, is an all-over sense – from the top of the head to the tips of the toes. From an epistemological point of view, the most fundamental division of the world is that between the 'me' and the 'not-me'. So in one sense the skin, with its sense of touch, defines (in the literal sense of 'traces the limits of') who and what I am. Therefore by extension the second skin also defines the form, and especially in the male consciousness, the female form.

As a skin, tights do two very important things. In defining the delectable female shape, they reveal its contours. At the same time they place a barrier between that form and the rest of the world. They conceal as well as reveal. They say, yes you can look, but that is all. I think a woman wearing tights not only makes herself more attractive, she also makes herself less vulnerable – in a psychological if not in a physical sense.

I well remember once, when I was at boarding school, the girls were discussing whether it was all right to go on the climbing frame in a skirt. After all, there were boys around. One of them said 'It's all right – I have got tights on.' And that seemed to be the general opinion. Girls who would never have hung upside down from a bar by their knees with only a skirt to cover their knickers were quite happy to do so if they were also wearing tights.

Even without such visual demonstrations, tights are fascinating in a way stockings can never be, because they go all the way up, and the fertile male imagination follows them all the way. But it is ok, because they preserve modesty by concealing the content as much as they excite the imagination by revealing the form.

So tights become a metaphor for both the desirability and the unattainability of the female.

A discarded pair of tights looks in many ways like a sloughed-off animal skin. Tights can therefore be regarded as a kind of woman-skin. For a man to put them on is an admission that on his own, for all his masculinity, he is incomplete.

Here is the clue to the well attested, but nevertheless largely unacknowledged, fact that heterosexual males are more likely to wear and be fascinated by tights than homosexual males.

I do not think it is often that a man wearing tights really wants to be a woman (he is probably having far too much fun being a man) but the tights complement his masculinity with something softer and more sensuous.

That is my take on the origin of the fascination that tights have for some men. I am not saying this is the whole story, or that this fascination exists in all case, or that where it exists it never undergoes a transformation over time.

This article is about where the fascination comes from, not about where it goes to.

Postscript
If men are fascinated by tights, it must be because they have a fetish for them – Right? Well, it depends on what you call a fetish.

In the strict meaning of the word, a fetish is something, (other than the sex act itself) that is necessary for an individual to achieve a climax. Note the word 'necessary'. Fetish objects can be anything: for example external objects (such as an item of clothing) or body parts (such as feet).

In a moderate sense, a fetish is something that an individual uses or focuses on in order to get aroused sexually.

In the weakest usage of the word, it is simply something that fascinates in an erotic sense. If I were going to use the term in this article, that is the sense I would use it in. But I much prefer not to use a word that has so many shades of meaning and is so open to misunderstanding, not to mention prejudice.