PAIN PANTIES

"Pain Numbing Panties" are sold in this vending machine.

Huh? My mind races. Why? What for?

For pre-menstrual pains? Down there? But cramps don't happen down there do they? Pain from peeing? For Pre-Sex -- for Post-Sex discomfort?

Who would need it? Honeymooners?

Is there something new going on that I never heard about or experienced? In a flash I'm remembering when my sisters told twelve-year-old me about "the curse" -- how stunned I was -- did this sort of thing happen to ALL FEMALES? Why didn't somebody warn me? Were there other awful, unendurable, shocking, .revelations ahead for me when I reached 16, or the old age of 21?

Last week, reading about "Pain Panties," it didn't occur to me that it was related to grown up females and bikini waxing. Okay, I've seen "Sex In The City." Yes, I've read about women getting shaved regularly down there for various purposes -- I read graphic details about it in Rona Jaffe's best seller novels. I wore "French-cut" trunks, leotards with the leg openings cut up very, very high -- they made your legs look longer. French-cut panties are sold in the panty department, along with bikini strings and thongs.

Well, GOOGLE educated me.

Anesthesiologist Dr. Edna Ma has developed an underwear and numbing cream set for women who know how brutal bikini waxing can be. The kit keeps the area down there numb for 30 minutes to an hour and costs $25.

Bare Ease uses a 4% Lidocaine cream. (It’s used in hospitals for numbing skin before inserting IV’s, in dermatologists' offices, before laser procedures, and in tattoo parlors.) You smear the contents of the single-use tube of cream over the area 30 minutes prior to your treatment, don the pink disposable undies -- the anesthetic effect lasts 30 minutes to one hour.

Hmm. It's sort of like a new fact of life that may live in my mind for maybe 22-and-a-half minutes that's already anesthetizing away as I pass on this semi-silly-shock to you females or males who might find it useful.