Underpants Rule

Ragen Chastain of Dances with Fat has what she calls the Underpants Rule:

The Underpants Rule is simple: everyone is the boss of their own underpants so you get to choose for you and other people get to choose from them and it’s not your job to tell other people what to do and it’s not their job to tell you what to do.

So if someone starts a sentence with, "People should," it probably means they're about to violate the Underpants Rule.

Yes, telling you to follow the Underpants Rule violates the Underpants Rule. So this is only a suggestion.

She goes on to say:

The war on obesity is an underpants rule breakdown on a massive scale. A group of government, public and private interests (with various profit and political motivations) has chosen a group of people who are identifiable by sight and is now trying to tell us everything from how we have to prioritize health, to the path we have to take to become healthy, to how our bodies have to look. Who died and made them Underpants Overlord? Nobody.

Then watch out for this mental image:

My metaphorical underpants and my actual underpants have something in common: if I want somebody else in them, that person will be among the very first to know. I have definitely not invited the executives at HBO, Kaiser Permanente, the government, or the diet industry into my underpants.

Though Chastain doesn't stray from a discussion of weight I see other places where the Underpants Rule is routinely violated. At the top of the list are abortion and gay rights. I've been hearing another scary area that violates the Underpants Rule: GOP lawmakers telling people on public assistance what they can and cannot spend that assistance money on.