Dear Austin, Texas: Stop With Hoochie Daddy Shorts Pls Thx

A love letter, a warning, and a cry for longer inseams

I didn’t come to Texas expecting to find a progressive utopia. But I did come to Austin last week (job offer, y’all!) hoping for a fresh start, some creativity, some kindness, and a few decent food trucks. And you know what? I’ve found all that.

What I didn’t expect was to be visually assaulted by what I can only describe as upper-thigh activism from the manosphere.

Let me be specific: I’m talking about shorts with inseams the length of a stick of gum. Shorts that start as ambition and end in regret. Shorts that whisper, “I own crypto and I’m not afraid to show you my soul patch.”

And listen, it’s not just one guy. It’s an epidemic. They travel in packs, like manly gazelles. Hoochie herds. You see them jogging around Lady Bird Lake at dusk, spindly legs glinting in the golden light, Pokémon socks pulled high, thighs performing Shakespearean tragedies. It's like a bachelorette party met a co-op kombucha brewery and said, “Let’s give those thighs range.”

I know I sound ancient, but this isn’t generational disdain. This is visual self-defense. Because unlike Gen Z, I have seen some things. I remember the Seventies. I was there. And I am still recovering.

Flashback: 1978

Picture a grad school potluck in Albuquerque. Warm beer. My dad’s Cuban album collection. Sunflower seeds. My mom in something made of gauze. A slightly feral dog named Cur El Marx. I’m nine years old, sitting cross-legged on a beanbag that smells like weed before weed smelled good. A man with a ponytail and a PhD in cultural anthropology bends over to adjust the stereo.

His name is probably Guillermo. He is a cross between Alan Alda and a drain clog.

Guillermo is wearing the shorts.

And I see it.

I see Guillermo’s ghostly, gravity-defiant left testicle peeking out like it’s a newborn hamster trying to file for tenure.

You can’t unsee that.

You don’t forget.

You grow up to beg your son’s generation not to repeat the sins of your fathers’.

The Cultural Confusion

What makes it worse is that these modern-day Austin Hoochie Boys are earnest. They’re sweet. They believe in therapy and compost. They’re emotionally available and wearing pastel 4-inch inseams like it’s a moral imperative. And maybe it is?

I don’t know anymore. All I know is that I have eyeballs, and they are tired.

I want to root for them. I really do. They’re trying to smash the patriarchy one hamstring at a time. But somewhere in the middle of my walk by the river—gorgeous water, sunshine, birdsong—I suddenly thought:

If one more man with a quinoa bowl and a vaguely erotic yet plausibly vaudevillian mustache jogs by me in a garment last seen on Caitlin Jenner at the '76 Olympics, I will walk directly into the river and never return.

Please, Gen Z.
Hem those shorts. Not out of shame—but out of solidarity. Out of respect for the elders who lived through Guillermo.

Let Austin be weird. Let men be soft. Let shorts breathe.

But let them also cover the damn goods.

Call to Action:
If you or someone you love is suffering from Hoochie Boy Short Syndrome, know you are not alone. There is help. There is hope. And there are longer inseams. Together, we can restore balance—one tragic thigh at a time.