Welcome to this installment of context clues, where we give you excerpts from previous episodes

to help make the new topic at hand just a little bit richer.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Thongs.

Thong, thong, thong, thong, thong, thongs.

Yes, dear listeners, this is the next humble offering to you from your team at American

Hysteria.

I feel confident that our millennial and Gen X audience will remember the massive craze

of the early 2000s when women and girls were hiking their thongs up above the waist of their

low-rise pants, their mid-drift revealing spaghetti-strap tank tops, allowing the underwear to really take center stage.

The trend, known as the whale tail, worried parents, pissed off principles, and led to constant media

commentary about just what this meant about our increasingly skankified, wayward young women. Next week,

we will begin by reliving the uncomfortable landscape of popular culture at the turn of the

millennium, where a handful of landmark moments made a generation of girls long for a thong of their own.

Though we may have been the first teens to embrace the whale tail look, we were far from the

first to embrace the thong itself. In fact, it seems like every decade had some controversy

that was kicked up around the thong,

and of course, the ass of it all. We've got some true whale tales coming up for you next week,

going all the way back to the 1920s when the G-string became the most popular item of the emerging burlesque and striptease culture.

Then we'll see how, throughout the 20th century, this tiny little scrap of fabric caused

moral panics, legal dramas, police raids, and public protests, and come to the realization that perhaps more than any other piece

of clothing, the thong has been imbued with a mythic power, sometimes a halo of protection,

...