Does any adult man still seriously wear boxer shorts anymore? I mean those horrible shapeless bloomers, shame of the underwear drawer, baggy and billowing a mile around your thighs.

I know better than to look to the movies for examples of plausible real-world behaviour, but one curiosity of on-screen living that’s always struck me as non-representative is how many movie men seem to wear boxers.

Does any adult man still seriously wear boxer shorts anymore? I mean those horrible shapeless bloomers on the discount racks of Gap stores, shame of the underwear drawer, baggy and billowing a mile around your thighs.

Surely most men purge their dressers of these ghastly things around the time of their sixteenth birthday, when the prospect of disrobing in front of another person only to reveal a pair of thigh-length parachute pants is enough to frighten them into a more sensible pair of boxerbriefs for all eternity.

Hideous, dreadful things, these boxers. And yet here are Hollywood’s leading men, prancing about as if stretch-cotton and elastics had never been invented. Madness. Though perhaps it’s mere decorum that keeps our matinee idols loosely dressed: you don’t want fabrics hugging a man’s sensitive areas so snuggly that … well, so snuggly that one might discern any sort of outline. This is mostly family- friendly entertainment, after all, and it won’t do to have stars walking around looking like shrink-wrapped meat.

But it does give us all a rather funny idea of what sort of garment the average man tends to sport beneath his chinos nowadays – and funny ideas, when borne by the motion-picture business, can prove very tenacious indeed.

We seem to hold the collective conviction that at a certain point in his development every man makes his choice among the three common alternatives – the boxer, the brief, and the innovative combination boxerbrief – and that every man among us, chatted up at work or passed idly in the street, may well be donning at that moment any one of the three.

But no. Resist the lie. Any man possessed of sense and reason will live the word of the boxer-brief gospel. The only ones in boxer shorts are movie stars and teens.