There is a folk tale for most of the things humans experience in their lives, as a way to explain why and how they happen. This is no different, except it was written by a 19 year old on a MacBook in 2017. But this is the story of what happened to women's pockets.
Long ago, on a particular hot and fiery day in Hell, Lucifer was thinking up new ways to torture the women of Earth. He had grown rather bored with watching the daily torments that women already went through, and he needed some new entertainment to drag him through until the invention of the internet. Plus, he was behind on his misery quota for the decade. His assistant, a squat little demon, with stubby arms and a fat nose, was trying to help him brainstorm.
“What about making them have to experience terrible pain once a month as a reward for not being pregnant, sir?” asked the assistant.
Satan sighed. “I suppose we could, but it feels just a little too similar to the excruciating pain of childbirth. I need something fresh, a completely new method of torment. But that one is good, add it to the list.”
The assistant dutifully added menstrual cramps to the list of torments to put women through. His list had already grown so long it wrapped around Lucifer’s throne of skulls and out the door, where some other demons were preparing to set them in action as soon as the boss gave the word.
“We could make men think they always know something better than women and talk over them condescendingly! Ooh, we could call it ‘mansplaining.’ Catchy, right boss?” asked the assistant eagerly. This idea was unconventional and original, and he certainly hoped it would be the winner. He had not been Satan’s assistant very long, and he did not want to risk disappointing him in any way, lest he should suffer the same punishments as the last few assistants.
Lucifer scratched his head. “Well, at least this one is original. But I want something that is going to torture women, every moment of every day, not just when they happen to be in certain circumstances. Add that one to the list, but keep thinking.”
The assistant wrote down his latest idea, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. What would affect women of every day of their lives? He didn’t know that much about earth, or the way humans lived. In fact, he realized, he didn’t know much about anything at all. However, he had heard that humans, well most of them, wore clothes. “Poor saps” he thought.
Tentatively, the assistant said “Hey boss, what if we did something with clothes? Don’t they wear them everyday? We could make all of them itchy, or, or see-through or….” He trailed off because Lucifer had risen from his throne.
With an excited glint in his eyes, Lucifer shouted so loud that a decorative skull candle-holder fell from the wall.
“I’ve got it!” He strode around the room, excited by his own genius. “I will make women’s clothing have no pockets!” After this exclamation, he began to laugh so maniacally that he fell down and a few tears escaped his eye. Underlings rushed around, trying as fast as possible to get the boss’s big plan started.
When the excitement had died down, his assistant quietly asked “Sir, I don’t understand. How will having no pockets be a daily torment for women?”
Still chuckling to himself in anticipation of the misery to come, Lucifer replied, “Of course you are too stupid to really understand my full genius, but I shall explain it to you anyways. Humans are always needing to carry something around with them. But they cannot hold all these things constantly in their hands, or how would they do anything? So they invented pockets to put all this stuff in.
"If women’s clothes don’t have pockets, they will have to carry bags with them at all times, just to keep a set of keys and a wallet in! And men will mock women for having these bags, and society will dictate that very specific and expensive bags that break easily are used. Even better, I plan to make some of the clothing have fake pockets! Women will think something has pockets, go to put something in them, and be sorely disappointed! I am a genius! And whatever pockets remain in women’s clothes I will make sure that they are teeny tiny, so women could barely fit a chapstick in them, let alone keys or a phone!”
With that answer, the assistant nodded, rolled up the idea parchment and went to ensure that the genius idea was being orchestrated properly so as to inflict as much torment as possible on women.
