A glimpse of pure white fabric from under the school gym wear. A shorts with no colour, pattern, or ornament, just white, works as a stronger sign than any excess of decoration. As a representation of innocence, inexperience, and the everyday, it has been drawn repeatedly as a fixed form in erotic expression.

Shiropan (white panties) is the colloquial term for the taste for white panties and for their sign-value in sexual expression. This article covers the tie to a pure, innocent image, the linkage with uniforms and gym wear, the standardisation in erotic manga, and the psychological structure.

Overview

The core elements of shiropan are a pure-white fabric, a plain design stripping out ornament, pattern, and lace, and the connotation of the wearer’s freshness, inexperience, and ordinariness. In colour psychology white draws connotations of cleanliness, purity, and innocence, and when used as the colour of underwear this converts into a sign of the wearer’s mental state. It links with adjacent genres such as panchira, uniform fetish, bloomers, and school swimsuits, and frequently appears as the sign of “under the uniform”: under gym wear, under a skirt, under a nurse’s outfit.

Tie to innocence

White panties tie to the pure-innocent image for three reasons: choosing no showy design reads as a code of low awareness of sexual experience; the cultural connotations of white (bridal dress, first-communion garments, symbols of the unbroached); and the connotation of a colour worn casually in everyday life. The opposite pole is the coloured-underwear taste for black, red, or “battle underwear.” Within a cultural frame where the choice of colour is read as a sign of the wearer’s mental state and degree of sexual engagement, white carries the pole of “no stance” and “the everyday.”

Linkage with uniforms

Combined with sailor uniforms, blazers, and gym wear, the white panties work strongly as “a sexual sign cast into everyday space.” In erotic manga, drawing pure-white shorts in a heroine’s panchira scene stages a triple structure: that she is not yet sexually opened, the embarrassment of having the colour she wears every day seen, and a secret only the reader knows.

Derivations and variations

From the white base derive variations such as white underwear with a garter (the doubleness of innocence and provocation), stains or see-through (the tension of soiling against pure white), and the layering of gym wear or bloomers with white underwear. These are dramatic applications that lay another meaning over the original simplicity of white, the deviation from pure white casting the meaning of white back into relief.

Psychological structure

The core of how white panties function for the receiver is the double structure of “a fantasy of the first time or inexperience” and “an intrusion into the everyday.” Under the folk belief that sexually experienced women choose “a more calculated outfit,” the simplicity of white is read as an index of an “unguarded state.” On top of this, the narrative of discovery, that “I (the viewer, the reader) alone sexually discover an unguarded everyday,” forms the core motive of the shiropan representation. This shares a root with the story structures of accidental, voyeuristic, and happenstance scenarios.

See also

• Panchira
• Uniform Fetish
• Bloomers
• School Swimsuit
• Seijun (Pure-Innocent)
• Underwear Fetish