“I’ll have to buy a bra for the lingerie shower the morning of.”
“That sounds risky,” said my boyfriend. “What if it doesn’t fit?”
“Fit? It doesn’t have to fit me. It has to fit the bride. And she sent us her sizes.”
“The bride? Then which bra are you going to wear?”
“Which bra? Why would that mat— Wait,” I paused. “Are you imagining that everyone attending this lingerie shower will be wearing lingerie?”
“Well, yeah. Like a theme.”
“Like a pajama party, but bras and underwear?”
“Exactly,” he said, satisfied that I understood.
Imagining this scenario, in which fifteen women wander around an Atlanta backyard in broad daylight wearing lingerie, was an understandable mistake. A lingerie shower is not a universal concept, so I tried to explain it. I realized I didn’t really know. Why would female friends of the bride gather, eat tacos, drink champagne, and give their friend exclusively underclothes before her wedding?
In a lingerie shower, I told my boyfriend, friends pick out great pajama sets, cute panties, and bras for you so that, for a little while at least, you avoid climbing into your marriage bed wearing a t-shirt that says “Beach Week 2010.” It doesn't always replace a bachelorette party, but it's a great way to celebrate marital sex if you'd rather avoid penis-shaped balloons.
I associate it with the old-fashioned idea of a trousseau, the wardrobe a bride assembled to prepare for a new life outside her parents’ home. A new life that included her (brand-new! Never before seen!) identity as a sexual being, or at least a being who had sex. A trousseau presumed that you had only ever worn white cotton panties, or their 19th century equivalent. The lingerie shower is the modern update: it supplies you with the black lace push-up thing, or the sexy nightgown with the panels that reveal the thong, maybe? What lingerie tone would the other guests take? How sexual would their items be, on a scale from one to HBO? I considered a solid two and a half: long-sleeved silk pajamas.
My gift-selection qualms (and eleventh-hour shopping) aside, what is the lingerie shower for? The trousseau is redundant. People often already live with their partners. People get married later and later nowadays; women have time and money of their own to spend on whatever underwear they want, bridal status notwithstanding.
A wedding doesn’t often mean as cataclysmic a shift in housing as it once did, but it means some kind of change. A lingerie shower at least aims to get one’s underwear drawer on message. The drawer will now proclaim, “This woman enjoys married sex,” instead of some premarital drawer that shrugs, “this woman enjoys a few sexy pieces but mostly roomy cottons.”
I value friends’ help with interview outfits. Maybe for some, lingerie is like an interview with yourself about how amorous and attractive you’re feeling before another person even enters the picture. In the spirit of dressing for the job you want, I guess lingerie shower gifts also say, “You’ve made partner.” This explanation makes the lingerie shower sound practical and supportive. Your women friends come to your sartorial rescue with a life-sized, three-dimensional Pinterest board of outfits designed for the bedroom, a stage where suddenly you (the bride) are about to acquire an audience for life. Even if she’s been living already with a fiancé, the bride can experience the lingerie shower as the festive equivalent of a stage mom grasping her shoulders to say, “You’re going to do great out there, honey.”
But this image of gussying up the underwear drawer, gussying up the bridal body, hints that marital sex is a performance. There is no lingerie shower for men. There’s no lingerie for men, just boxers, briefs, and boxer briefs in various stages of new, fine, or disgraceful. Imagine hosting a party to marvel at Fruit of the Loom 3-packs. Don't bother to compare them to the feats of structural engineering that achieve a woman’s bra.
Perhaps we also assume, as a culture, that men do not need to be advised or consoled or reminded that the marriage bed is different from other beds. To position the bride to receive the support of this new underwear supposes that she knows less about what she is doing, but is still responsible for the costumes. Lingerie for women, confirmed in the absence of lingerie for men, supposes that the bride / the woman is there to be looked at. She is there to receive attention, and the man is the aggressor, the pursuer, who has no insecurities, who does not need to be affirmed, and who needs no pep talk over champagne. Special underwear or no, he can come to the marriage bed as he is.
Nevertheless, there I sat at the shower itself, fully clothed, exclaiming over lovely new pajama sets and fun bras. But reality did appear. The sister of the groom had refused to buy the bride “sexy underwear,” because, she said, there was little point. Her pajama set featured a collar and pinstripes. She insisted to the bride, “Men just want all this stuff off.”
The pleasant reality that sex, in the marriage bed or otherwise, often takes place without any clothes at all, cropped up a few times amid all the frothy undergarments. The commentary around each gift either acknowledged this reality or shored up the fantasy that lingerie is a key, rather than an obstacle: “You’ll actually wear this,” one of us said about a camisole. “Is that for him or for you?” another asked about a classic pajama set. Hovering in the air was the assumption that if a piece was really “sexy,” it was probably uncomfortable and ultimately doomed to languish in the drawer. We were all buying into the idea of sexy underwear. We were grasping at a symbol of how the bride’s sexual life was about to change by her getting married. But we also implied again and again a contrasting reality, that few of us wanted to be lingerie-sexy all the time. Living to be looked at is probably pretty uncomfortable. Maybe we exclaimed over a lace confection, but we wrote down the designer of the soft-looking pajama set.
And maybe that was the thing I couldn’t decide — was all the new stuff suggesting to the bride she wasn’t good enough as she was to come to the marriage bed? That she needed a glow-up first? I don’t think so. We array ourselves when we’re marking a special place, a special occasion, a special person.
That is generally true, but in that Atlanta backyard, we gave away the game with our commentary: life is better when you’re comfortable. New marriage bed or not, you get tired of performing. Soon you’ll be naked anyway, and you’ll probably want your partner, not an audience. A few of us gift wrapped earnest balconettes and cheeky bottoms; the mother of six gave the bride a book.
A few years ago, my mother befriended a graduate school classmate who had grown up abroad in a family of missionaries, and who was now engaged. Hearing my mother mention her own daughters (confirming she'd had sex at least twice), this very sweet, very Christian bride felt safe enough to say the word "lingerie" to her, and to ask her to host a shower. To decorate, my mother strung together cotton thongs for a whimsical bunting. In some contexts, a bride is having a lingerie shower because she has truly never been invited to acknowledge her sexuality, let alone shop for it. A shower in this case can be a form of permission to celebrate sex, a way of treating this formerly forbidden thing as fun, and a way of making a big change less terrifying.
All that underwear, whether leopard printed, tastefully corseted, or long sleeved, signals a transition. At my friend's party, we spent an afternoon in the gap between fantasy and reality, in a liminal space between the premarital and the marital states of being. Amid bites of carnitas and sips of champagne, her life was about to change dramatically. We were laughing about underwear because she would soon enter into a legally and spiritually binding contract with another human being until she dies. Her bed was acquiring a permanent partner; more importantly, her life was acquiring a permanent partner. I don't worry so much about whether every piece fits; I just hope she feels held by her people. New underwear, new reality: may she wear them well.