Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

It may well be that this is just a hoax, but it’s a good one, and on a funky Friday afternoon it’s just too good to pass up:

Escambia County Court (Florida) Judge Patricia Kinsey (yes, Kinsey) seems to have released a judgment last week in a case in which Albert Freed sued the Hanes underwear company for damages when “his dream trip to Hawaii was ruined as a result of a manufacturing defect in the new underpants his wife had bought him for the trip.   It seems that Freed, an admittedly heavy-set fellow, could not fit his entire manly estate into the undies, and the briefs “gaped open and acted like a sandbelt on his privates,” causing him actionable discomfort.

Above the Law broke the story this morning, and I’m half inclined to think that the entire thing is a hoax, but it’s pretty funny.  Freed won the trip to Hawaii, the story goes, after winning a competition to sell diet products.  This part seems to be true, if you watch the video of him pitching diet chocolate cookies on Myspace, where he is pitching diet chocolate cookies to “the ladies” as part of the competition.

The poor guy popped out of his briefs, suffered terrible discomfort as a result, seems to suffer from what David Sedaris calls “Dick-Do” disease (his gut sticks out farther than his dick do) and thus couldn’t see his own injured member.

The whole thing is a total ouch – and you have to read the entire opinion written in the seeming absence of irony by Judge Kinsey, including a wonderful footnote (#4) in which she describes the evidence at trial describing how he puts his underpants on in such a way that implicates is own “misuse” of the undies.

I’ll forgo my usual attempts to offer pithy insights about the connections between the case and, let’s see: gender and underwires/girdles/corsets, or just how masculinity makes you stupid.  You ought to just read the “opinion” for yourself and have a great chuckle about the fact that this case actually went to trial: