The Men Who Wear the Same Underwear For an Entire Week

“Surely, only hostages do that?” says my dad, in a state of total shock, when I tell him I’m on the hunt for men who don’t change their underwear for days on end. I don’t blame him. Even as a self-confessed goblin girl who crawls to her “desk” (dining room table) having thrown on yesterday’s clothes from the clothes-pile-chair without showering, I was pretty horrified at the idea of guys wearing the same pair of undies for a week straight.

But I’m afraid it’s not just hostages or first-year students who model their hygiene habits on 00s gross-out comedies. According to a new study, 20 percent of men wear the same underwear for a week. One in five. That’s like two guys on every bus sitting on a seat you might drop your ass onto in boxers that really put the why into y-fronts.

Of course, as soon as I heard this stat, I set out to find some of these men – which proved more challenging than the numbers would suggest. It seems not many guys want to admit that they let their tackle fester for days at a time. But, slowly, a few came out the woodwork.

“I actually wear my underwear once a day,” says 39-year-old Tommy. “But during the weekend I may wear the same underwear for a few days due to my hectic schedule being a father of three young boys, and always on the move.”

As excuses go it’s undeniably a good one. Basically, Tommy is too busy looking after the little fellas to look after himself. But look, I’m an understanding girlie. I despise doing laundry and try to put it off for as long as possible, too. Personally, dangerously low pant stocks are a red alert, but maybe for others that’s simply an amber, early warning sign – laundry last orders, if you will.

“I do agree it saves from doing excess laundry,” Tommy admits. “Plus, I like saving the nicer pairs for the work week.” And you know what, fair fucks mate, anything that gets you through the morning meetings.

If other fellas are actually keeping one pair of boxers on for over five days, wearing the same set on the weekend because your toddlers are leaving you sleep deprived seems almost fair. I needed to find some full week-ers though, so I kept digging, and soon enough other excuses and lifestyle habits came to the surface.

Ravi (whose name has been changed for privacy reasons, like others in this piece) lives in a country with a much hotter and more humid climate than the god forsaken British Isles. You might think this would lead to more frequent underwear swapping but, in Ravi’s case, you’d be wrong.

“Mostly I wear the same underwear for two to four days,” he tells VICE. “When I’ve sweated a lot in the underwear then I change it, which could be after just one day of use. But generally, I’m not in my underwear for more than five hours a day and only when I am going out.” How can this be? Well, at home he doesn’t wear any underwear at all.

It’s not just hot climates that leads guys to adapt their underpants routines, either. Casey lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, one of the coldest places in the U.S. “Right now, the temperature has been minus 20 [fahrenheit] or colder, so taking my clothes off really is kinda the last thing I wanna do,” he says, noting that this affects the number of showers he takes, too. “When you take a shower here in the winter, you’re instantly freezing your ass off while tripping over your pants trying to get dressed. It’s terrible.”

The intense cold isn’t the only reason Casey keeps his pants close to his ass for up to a week at a stretch. “I also don’t really have much of a choice. I used to go through a pair of boxers a day when my life was more stable and I had more than a backpack of belongings,” he explains. “When I have a stable environment, I keep up on my personal hygiene a lot more regularly, and changing my boxers is included in that whole process. But I don’t have a steady spot to stay at the moment, and taking a shower is also a hard thing to come by for me as well.” There’s also a basic numbers issue at play. “I have three pairs of underwear right now,  so it doesn’t come from me being lazy, or not caring, it’s really just from the lack of ability to get them changed,” he adds. “Also I’m not sleeping with anyone right now, so I don’t have to clean up for someone.”

I’ll admit this combination of factors – freezing temperatures, living out of a bag, and only sharing your gonads with yourself – makes a pretty solid case for fresh underwear not being all that important in the grand scheme of things. After all, in any discussion of personal hygiene, it can’t go unmentioned that access to clean clothes and cleaning facilities is far from universal. When you don’t have a stable or secure living arrangement, daily laundry is probably not at the very top of your to-do list. In Casey’s case, though, there might also be an element of the ol’ “out of sight out of mind”, too.

“Now that I’ve sat here and thought about it,” he says, finally, “I’m probably going to go change my boxers!” From a health perspective, he definitely should.

“Only changing your underwear every four to six days doesn’t just have social ramifications, it can have medical ones too,” says Ian Budd, clinical lead for Chemist4U. “Wearing dirty underwear can lead to a build-up of bacteria or fungi on your skin. As sweat, dirt, faeces, and oils from your skin accumulate in your boxers, this creates a perfect environment for the growth of these microbes.” This unpleasant concoction can lead to infections and rashes, with Budd listing urinary tract infections, balanitis, penile thrush, and the evocatively named “jock itch” as some of the potential consequences lurking in your four-day-old boxers. Given this litany of groin issues, it’s not surprising that Budd recommends changing your underwear every day, and “sometimes more than once if you’ve been to the gym or engaged in other strenuous activities”.

All sound advice, of course. But as with many professional medical warnings, sometimes life just gets in the way. People will smoke and vape and shove their house keys up their nose against all medical advice, and people will also risk penile thrush if they run out of boxers. It might seem pretty gross, but at the end of the day, can we really blame guys who lose track of their pant stocks from time to time? It’s not like they’re doing it for kicks – though you know what they say, there’s a fetish for everything.

“If I’m caught between wash cycles and have slightly fucked it, I can sometimes find myself wearing the same pair for three days max,” Ben, 30, confesses. “But I don’t enjoy it and wouldn’t recommend it as a lifestyle choice.” Sometimes life gets in the way, in other words, and you realise too late that the pair you’re wearing are your final pre-wash pair. “If there’s none going and you put them in the wash then you’ve got no pants and you’re forced to go straight cock on denim,” he adds.

You’d think the fear of this chafing might be enough to force his hand towards the washing machine immediately, but apparently not. “After two days, maybe three, some of the underwear material starts to lose its spring, and the pants get loose which isn’t ideal,” Ben muses. “I know that if I stick my nose down there, it’s gonna smell crazy, so I grit my teeth and think, ‘We just gotta power through.’”

This, I imagine, is the tipping point where underwear becomes “more skid mark than pant”, as one friend put it, when I told him about my grand dirty underwear quest. But Ben is at pains to protest that this is not a habit of his. “It’s rare,” he insists, “very rare. I only do it, like, a couple of times a month.”

Personally, this is not my definition of rare, but I’ll just make sure to never ask Ben to cook me a steak. Or to engage in any activity that might involve my nose being near his rear end (Go Ape is off the table, darn). Really, if one in five guys are potentially packing jock itch, this might be the best policy in general – at least until they learn the magical, feminine art of rinsing your pants out in the sink and leaving them to dry overnight.

@eloisehendy