Based on the available evidence, it seems that those who design clothing intended to be marketed to women think women live in doll houses: We have tiny wallets and tiny wads of cash, tiny sunglasses, tiny pocketknives, tiny car keys for our little pink plastic Jeeps, tiny chapsticks and cute, tiny phones. And of course, to match all this tiny stuff, we’re tiny, too, and we love to stick our tiny little hands in our tiny little jeans pockets.
Yet not only is women’s stuff tiny—women just have less of it! While it’s true that pockets in women’s clothes are overwhelmingly smaller, it’s also true that there are almost invariably fewer of them. Has it not occurred to anyone designing clothing that women have to carry all the same stuff as men, plus all the stuff their male companions ask them to carry, plus tampons?
This is an extremely frustrating and prevalent problem in outdoor clothing. One could say that those who design women’s street and business clothes assume women carry purses so do not need pockets—as if carrying a purse is as standard a part of being a woman as not having a penis. (Never mind that most women’s pants still have a front zip-fly closure designed as such for whipping their non-existent penises out). However, when thinking about clothing design for outdoor recreation, the gender purse-carrying playing field should be considered truly level, and I can absolutely not fathom why companies design men’s and women’s clothing with different pocket sizes and arrangements. Why do men so often get a double breast pocket while women tend to only get a single? (This question is for you, Patagonia!) We all need all the pockets, folks—plus a place to put tampons. For huck’s fake!
Okay, so why don’t some more people working for top clothing companies take a moment to really think about a great design for a women’s jeans. What are the actual differences between the female sex and the male sex from the waist down? Females don’t have penises they need to pull out while peeing, and females typically sit to pee. So a women’s pant does not need penis consideration, but it does need pants-pull-down consideration. Therefore, do what ever you want with the pant closure—put it in back, on the side, or not at all, zip it, tie it, button it—but remember that women are typically pulling their pants down to their ankles all day, and edit the pockets so that cell phones, when women pull their pants down to pee, don’t slip out of the tiny back pockets into which they’ve had to haphazardly stuff them and fall into the toilet or onto the floor.
Why not a good-sized side pocket just above the knee? Some athletic leggings are now designed this way, with a cell phone pocket on the pants’ sides. And some men’s pants, like those designed by Kuhl (which I wear simply because of the practical pocket design despite the fact they don’t rock my body type well), have a super handy, safe and comfortable cell phone and/or wallet pocket along the outer thigh area.
As for body type—which I don’t intend to get much into here, as I don’t think it has anything to do with pockets—some women are narrow hipped and wide-waisted and straight-legged, and some men are bodaciously curvy. Maybe we would be better off designing clothes based on body type and personal preference rather than gender so that none of us feel like there’s something wrong with the way we were born and the things we like if we don’t fit comfortably into “men’s” clothes or “women’s” clothes.
Maybe it’s time all clothes have good-sized, logically-placed pockets that take our big pocket-computers into account, featuring pants that are easy to pull down—because some dudes with penises also like to sit a chill minute in a stall and take a load off (or have to sit in a stall to drop a load off)—and come cut for various body shapes and include a range of personal preferences, like high-waist or low-waist, zip fly or pull-on, narrow- or wide-leg, all of the colors and the rest. And same with jackets and shirts and whatever else we wear. Maybe it’s time we forget gender. We’re all different in different ways, we’re all just people and we’re all just people trying to comfortably carry all our snit. And very little of this—perhaps none of it—has to do with whether we have a dink or a cooch.