The other day I was at Costco and it was very crowded, and the weather was quite warm as it is summer after all. Therefore, a lot of people had their legs out (as did I) in shorts. There's this one picture that I had seen of Peter Sarsgaard wearing quite short swimming trunks (I think they were) and of course the scene in that documentary where he was running and wearing short running shorts (my [women's] athletic shorts are that length!). So I had the length of shorts on my mind, and what better place to observe such a thing than a crowded store?
I focused on men, not to ogle their legs in a lascivious manner, but to observe the trends in men's shorts lengths in the area where I live. I wonder if any of them caught me looking. I don't think I was too obvious, but who knows. I think the crowdedness maybe helped, in that there were so many people that it'd be hard to notice some girl staring at your legs, if you're a man wearing shorts. And it's not like I stared for particularly long at each person. Just long enough to register the length of their shorts.
Anyways, by far and large, and not surprisingly, the most common length was knee length with slight variations in exact amount of knee covered. Some shorts were pretty much exactly mid-knee, others covered the entire knee, and so on. Let's say a knee is about 2 or 3 inches long, so that's how much variation in knee length shorts there can be. Depending on the angle I saw them from, some men I saw the front of their knee and others I saw (or didn't see, as it was covered by their shorts) the back bend of their knee, whatever the name of that thing is (if it has a name). Some men were wearing longer shorts that definitely came below the knee. A small amount of men wore noticeably shorter shorts, in that they came above the knee, leaving it fully exposed. I would estimate that the shortest shorts on men I saw were about 4 inches above the top of the knee, so, safely in the mid thigh area. I did not see any shorts on men short enough to rival the ones in that picture or documentary scene of Peter Sarsgaard*.
I did happen to see women, of course, and unsurprisingly they were more likely to have their knees exposed and their shorts/skirts hit around mid/low thigh level. I myself was wearing my short shorts that come to upper thigh level. I personally don't wear shorts that are longer than mid thigh. Anyways, while we're at it, I'd like to lament the unavailability of women's athletic shorts with full sized pockets and without built in underwear. I would love to have more than 1 pair of those, which took me months to come across. It's not like there aren't other women who would like to wear shorts like that for activities (walking, just being out and about) where things won't
* I am all for men wearing what they want to wear, which may, for some people (Peter Sarsgaard) mean very short shorts. But I also can't help laughing a little bit (endearingly, not in a mean way) when I look at pictures of Peter in those short shorts.
Curiosity got the better of me so I'm now online window shopping for (men's) running shorts. I'm not sure of the exact length of a certain pair of shorts that I have in mind, as they are somewhere in the laundry and I don't feel like digging through all of it to find them and measure them. However, 2" to 3" is the usual inseam length, probably, on women's shorts. It looks like Nike sells them with the shortest inseam length available being 2" to 3". There are only 4 different styles that short (the most common inseam lengths are 7 inches or longer). Some of them cost $80, which I don't really understand - why are they that expensive? Are you just paying for the brand? These $80 shorts kind of look like they're modeled on a woman's body, since the legs are slim and hairless. Upon second thought, I guess the hairlessness makes sense for professional runners. That guy's legs have less hair than mine, at the moment. I would be more diligent about shaving, but I consider the number of times I've looked at other women's legs and noticed they were hairy, which is zero, so I think I can safely assume that the general public are not closely scrutinizing my legs to see if they're hairy or not. I don't think I have particularly obvious leg hair compared to some people.
Wikipedia has a short little article about running shorts which mentions that longer shorts are less ideal for running because the larger amount of fabric gets in the way. I guess that makes sense. I don't really do running so I can't say for myself.
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