Review: Locking Your Belt Closed With a Padlock (Then Forgetting Its Combination)

Your belt prevents your pants from falling down, but what prevents your belt from falling down? That’s the idea behind UChicago’s latest new trend: locking your belt closed with a padlock. 

Before you ask, and I know you’re thinking it already, no this isn’t a sex thing. Not everything has to be about sex — get your mind out of the gutter. Some people just feel more secure with a two-pound weight dangling near their crotch. I mean, it’s about keeping your pants on, so it’s more like the opposite of a sex thing.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, as the Chicago Shady Dealer‘s resident menswear reporter, I was recently commissioned to write a review to address the eternal question: should you lock your belt closed with a padlock? My procedure was simple — I went to the hardware store, bought a combination lock, and went right to work.

I have to say, having an additional layer of security keeping you from showing your underwear to the entire world goes a long way towards putting your nagging fears to rest. It used to be that I constantly worried about my pants suddenly falling down like a 1950s cartoon character, but now I’m only worried about that 75% of the time. Sure, the padlock’s a little heavy at times, but that confident feeling is unmatched.

Far and away the biggest downside of locking your belt closed with a padlock is that any time you want to take your pants off, you have to remember the combination. You’re tired, you want to lie down, and boom — your crotch assigns you a math problem. A really hard one, too, because you forgot the combination. It’s not supposed to be mentally challenging to wear pants!

Forgetting the combination isn’t just inconvenient, it’s humiliating. You can never take off your padlock. It becomes your shame. You are forced to broadcast to the world that your brain isn’t big enough for three puny little numbers. Something you did to prevent your belt from falling down went disastrously wrong, and you only have yourself to blame.

Wait a minute — the padlock prevents the belt from falling down… but what prevents the padlock from falling down? Shit. I never thought of that. But if the padlock doesn’t keep your pants up, then… then what? Where’s the certainty?

This thing, it’s gonna be stuck to me for the rest of my life, and it… it doesn’t even work? Who the fuck came up with this?

Okay, fine, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the Dealer didn’t ask me to review locking my belt closed with a padlock. Really, nobody did. I made that part up. It was my idea the whole time. I pitched it. I’m the idiot. 

I did this to myself.