I've been frustrated for the last several years because it's gotten so hard to buy plain ordinary jeans for women. They're all full of fashionable features: superfluous zippers, patches, gussets, grommets, decorative stitching, little drifts of glued-on rhinestones. But at the same time, they're lacking some obvious things: belt loops, or a pocket big enough to actually hold your keys and some change. They don't come in regular blue or black; they all have weird faded patches which have been applied in special factories at enormous expense. And nearly all of them are unflatteringly, ankle-chillingly, hideously, four inches or so too short. I began to wonder if perhaps there might be some sort of vast international trouser conspiracy, run by sadistic clothing designers who sit in dimly-lit rooms waving swatches of fabric and cackling maniacally.

It finally occurred to me to try the obvious, and check out the men's department instead. I'm overjoyed to discover that men's standard Levi's 501s fit me just fine, and look the way I expect jeans to look. They have pockets, and belt loops big enough to fit a normal belt, and legs that reach all the way down to my shoes. Hooray.