Apparently This Matters: Meggings

Editor’s Note: Each week in “Apparently This Matters,” CNN’s Jarrett Bellini applies his warped sensibilities to trending topics in social media and random items of interest on the interwebs.

GQ summed it up with one word: “No.”

But, yes, the Internet has been buzzing about a new movement in men’s fashion. A movement so horrible it sort of makes me want to have a “movement” of my own. Though, that might just be bad tilapia.

Here, we’re talking about leggings. For men. Also known as meggings. With an M.

And that’s how you know something might possibly be a bad idea – when you have to gender-specify the word with a different first letter. Like a “murse.”

There’s actually a lot of gray area when it comes to the man purse. It’s practical as hell. But it’s also … well … a man-purse. And some guys have a problem calling it that. George Carlin once said, “If you can’t handle the word, don’t even carry the bag. It’s a purse. I got one. What’s the big deal?”

Then he went into a delightfully raunchy joke about somebody’s mother. I miss George. A lot.

Nevertheless, in regards to meggings, GQ isn’t buying what Drunk Fashion God is selling. And, mind you, there really is a Drunk Fashion God. He’s the same guy who, 20 years ago, gave us Zubaz. And his most recent project is outfitting Justin Bieber.

Drunk Fashion God also happens to be good friends with Simply Can’t Be Bothered Fashion God, who I pray to every time I put on another worn-out plaid flannel shirt. He always responds back with, “That’ll do.”

So, I’m certainly not one to judge. I pretty much look like a homeless man, and when I go to a nice function, I step it up to homeless man who happened to find a navy blazer on the sidewalk. Inevitably, somebody will say, “Oh, you clean up nicely!”

And then I spend 30 minutes stuffing my face and growling at people in the buffet line.

But, how could I know if meggings were for me unless I actually tried them on? I may not be very trendy, but I do have an open mind. And for the sake of quality investigative journalism I was originally going to don them for an entire day in public and report back on the experience.

However, when it came time to actually pull the trigger, I figured there’s no way I could, in good conscience, buy, wear, and subsequently return something that spent more than three hours tightly hugging my gonads.

“Sir, was there anything wrong with these?”

“WAS there? No.”

So, instead I just sat around the house watching SportsCenter in a pair of old long johns. And you know what? I’m in.

Seriously. This is pure quality. Maybe not as a fashion statement that I’d proudly wear out to a symphony or even, say, the VD clinic, but I simply couldn’t be more comfortable than I was in a T-shirt and tights.

Of course, these long johns also had the absolutely, positively, no-questions-asked requisite “escape hatch.” So, you couldn’t really bust them out in public anyway. Thus, I’m not sure they officially qualifying as meggings. Still, though. I get it.

And so do a lot of other people. But meggings aren’t just about pure comfort. Otherwise, society would simply give them the sweatpants treatment: You’d see a guy, long past the age of maturity, walking around town in a pair of tights and you’d say, “Yup. That man loves Arena Football.”

But that’s not the case. The reason everyone online is talking about these things is because meggings have recently become a legitimate fashion trend. And that’s where we have to agree to disagree. This can’t happen.

It all just seems a little too Euro-weird, and any mildly-rugged dude knows he’s engaging in questionable taste if he does something that makes Christiano Ronaldo say, “Yes. This I like.”

But, sadly, meggings may have actually started right here in America.

Tom Teodorczuk of The Telegraph in the U.K. wrote, “The bad news is they are on their way to Britain: Uniqlo is already selling them on its British website, and their success in New York is seen as an indication they will also prove popular here.”

So, perhaps we’ll never really understand where it all started. But from skinny jeans to meggings, the only thing we know for sure (but not really) is that the world’s collective sperm count is slowly being compromised in the name of men’s fashion. And as these sexy hipsters ultimately fail to multiply, future generations will arise from the great cradle of loose-fitting sweatpants.

The only real winner will be Arena Football.