When I first started wearing men’s thong underwear, I genuinely thought people would be able to tell.
Not just if they saw something obvious, like a whaletale high above my jeans, but I had this strange belief that it would somehow be obvious anyway. Like there was no real hiding it. At the time, I honestly felt like people had some kind of awareness I didn’t understand, like x-ray vision, as if they’d just know something was different about me.
The first time I properly tested that fear was at a Halloween party.
I had owned the thong for a while but had been too scared to wear it outside my flat. It stayed hidden, something I would try on briefly at home and then overthink afterwards. But I eventually decided that if I was ever going to wear it out, Halloween was the easiest excuse. If anyone somehow noticed, I could just say it was a hidden part of the costume, a surprise.
Even so, I was terrified.
At the start of the evening, I was extremely self-conscious. I remember constantly thinking about what I was wearing and imagining worst-case scenarios where someone somehow detected it, judged me, or asked a question I wouldn’t be able to answer comfortably.
But something interesting happened as the night went on.
We were playing games, moving around a lot, and eventually heading out to a club. It was on the walk there that I realised something had shifted. I’d stopped actively thinking about it. Not because I’d decided to be brave, but because my attention had just moved onto everything else.
And this really surprised me.
Because I also realised something else at the same time: during all that movement, all that physical activity, nobody had reacted differently to me. Nobody had said anything. Nobody had looked at me in a way that suggested anything was wrong or different.
That created a strange internal conflict.
Part of me still expected that I had been “found out” and people just hadn’t said anything yet. But another part of me started to form a completely new thought:
Maybe nobody could actually tell.
That thought came with a wave of fear at first. If someone had seen, what would they think? What would it say about me? I had all the usual assumptions in my head about judgement, masculinity, sexuality—things I now realise had very little to do with the actual reality of underwear and everything to do with social conditioning.
But then something else happened. That fear quickly softened into acceptance.
Nothing in the external world had changed. People were still behaving the same. Conversations were the same. The night continued exactly as normal. And that created a very simple but powerful realisation:
Even if someone had noticed, it didn’t seem to matter.
That experience didn’t just reduce my anxiety in that moment, it changed how I approached everything afterwards.
The next shift came later, in a much more mundane situation.
I was doing the washing in my flat. I’d been hiding my underwear out of habit, putting it away discreetly, overthinking even the act of drying it by hanging thongs up to dry in my cupboard. But one day I came back and my flatmate had already hung everything up to dry for me. Including the thongs.
I remember the immediate spike of embarrassment. That instant thought of: this is it, she’s seen it, she’s told everyone else in the flat. I assumed she would think something about me—maybe that I was gay, or into something sexual or unusual, or that it meant something about my personality.
But nothing happened.
No reaction. No comment. No change in behaviour. Just normal life continuing.
Instead of reinforcing my fear, it actually did the opposite. I started to realise that most people are not analysing your underwear, or building narratives about your life based on it. They’re just too busy living their own lives.
That experience made it easier to stop worrying about strangers as well.
Over time, there were other moments too—bending down in shops, going through airport security pat-downs—situations where I was absolutely convinced someone must have seen something. But even then, nothing ever came of it. No reactions. No shifts in behaviour. No consequences.
And gradually, that changed the way I interpreted everything.
I stopped looking for “evidence” that people had noticed, because there never really was any. Instead, I became more curious than anxious. If someone did see, what actually would happen? And over time, that curiosity replaced most of the fear.
What I’ve realised is that most of the anxiety came from imagined judgement rather than actual experience. The reality was far more neutral than I expected.
But there’s still one area where that shift isn’t completely finished.
With strangers, it’s easy. There’s no context, no relationship, no ongoing meaning attached to a moment. But with people close to me, it still feels different.
The hardest part wouldn’t be someone seeing. It would be their reaction in the moment, and what they might think about me afterwards. I know logically it’s just underwear. I could explain it clearly in terms of comfort, design, and practicality. But I also recognise that social assumptions around men’s underwear choices still exist, and those are harder to control than facts.
So for me, that’s the remaining tension: not the being noticed, but the interpretation.
Because once you realise nobody notices in everyday life, the real question stops being “can people tell?” and becomes “what does it mean if they do?”
And slowly, over time, even that question starts to matter less than you think.
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