Whatever happened to garters for men?

• 
  I guess the success of the recent film on Bettie Page (pictured here) indicates there is some sort of interest in that early form of celluloid naughtiness known as the 'stag film'.
  
  At an earlier time, before the Internet offered images of every sexual behavior and kink known to humankind since the beginning of time, ranging from the cutely erotic to the ghastliest behaviors imaginable, there was a certain rite-of-passage for young males known as the stag film. Bettie acted in a few of those films, as well as posing for the (today very innocent, you can see more near nudity in a junior high schoolyard) 'provocative' calendar offerings that hung in gas stations, the old man's workshop, and other bastions claimed by males.
  
  But, aside from cute girls like Bettie, stags were populated by the most ludicrous and distasteful looking guys imaginable. Usually a skinny dude clad in singlet undershirt, boxer shorts, and socks always with garters. While the girls would be running around in charming dishabille the men looked always like a combination pimp and bookie, and offered nothing one would have thought would have appealed to any sweetie-pie girl, even the ones who sort-of 'acted' in these terrible short films of the 1940s and 1950s.
  
  The other name for stags was the 'blue movie', and they were ultimately killed by mainstream motion pictures that would have staggered the sensibilities of even the most avid 8-mm smut fan of an earlier time. Some of the mainstream 'dirty' movies have been good, others have been as terrible and exploitive and sexist as the earlier stags.
  
  So, for those who grew up in more contemporary times, what were stags like? Well, in the film the central male character, dressed like our aforementioned friend. His hair was always slicked back with a tube and a half of Brylcreem so that it looked like patent leather. And, he usually sported a pencil-thin mustache. And, of course, the socks and garters.
  
  The plots -- if you cold call them that -- concerned variations on a central theme common to all the films: Seduction via circumstance.
  Lovely young thing calls the plumber; bountiful miss is visited by the postman with a registered letter; gorgeous young thing invites in a vacuum-cleaner salesman wearing a dreadful suit; bountiful miss goes into store manager's office to register a complaint about something or other.
  
  A complication would arise. If the central character was the plumber, then the lady had somehow got herself stuck in the bathtub and he was called to get her out. How she managed to call him from the tub was never explained.
  
  If he was the vacuum cleaner salesman then her skirt would get caught in the suction of the hose during the demonstration, and then she would get to flash her own stockings and garters, not to mention her undies.
  
  And then things would really take off, and he would strip down to his BVDs and underneath his garb would be, yep, those socks and garters. They would never be removed even at the most intimate moments -- which were never shown, by the way, merely suggested. Cleavage and undies was by-and-large all the red-blooded lad of yore got to see. There were, of course, genuine pornographic films in those day, but they did not qualify as stag films, and we only heard about them by rumor, we didn't actually see any of those ones that, according to legend, not only included pubic hair, but also couples actually doing 'it'! The mind reeled at such a thought.
  
  So, just some thoughts on socks and garters. After my father died about a decade ago, my brother and I were going through his stuff, and we actually found some old 'man' garters. So, Dad wore socks with garters. Was dear old Dad in stag films? Not to our knowledge, though he did sport a pencil-thin mustache for a few years.
  
  Sock garters actually died out around World War Two (except in stag films) with the advent of elastic as we know it, so the vogue died out. But, prior to that, for young males, was getting one's first pair of garters sort of a rite of manhood? Boys were in short pants for a long time in those days, with high kneesocks held up by elastic bands. Then they graduated to knickerbockers (of the kind worn by the tough kids in the Our Gang films), and finally at about 16 or 17 they got their first pair of long trousers, and probably their first garters.
  
  "Son, do you know what these are?" asks father, holding out to bits of elastic with metal clips on them. He is holding them at arm's length much in the way a contemporary father might hold out a condom. "You needn't be embarrassed, for soon you are to be a man and will have to go off and fight and die for your country."
  
  "Wizard, Father. My very own garters. I shall take great care with them and always treat them with respect, much as I do with Polly-Jo next door."
  
  And so, replete with new tweed suit, and sure in the knowledge that his socks were appropriately gartered, our young man stepped forth into the world. Actually, he was going to visit his chum, Spud, next door, who had secured a stag film for the lads to view while his parents were at the church social.