I like a girl in pants. You know, trousers, which Wikipedia says “are an item of clothing worn on the lower part of the body from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth stretching across both as in skirts and dresses).” Those pants.

There’s a deeper meaning — physically and figuratively — to girls with pants. They have something to hide, an unwillingness to provide a public record of their personalities, habits, transgressions and successes. A girl wearing pants has something mysterious about her.

And a girl in pants gives a man’s imagination the freedom to examine the glory of the girl without pants.

What if no one had pants? A woman with visible ass as part of visible leg would reduce the worth of ass. A woman with visible thigh as part of visible calf would reduce the value of a fine thigh. And so on, and so forth (I’m not really into feet).

Without pants, men would fail to have any sense of paranoia, sense of fear, sense of imagination — if there’s nothing left to see, there’s nothing to strike us once the pants are off.

We want to ask, “What’s beyond the pants?” Unlike other animals, humans have an intrigue that drives us forward. Pants are progressive.

Without pants, we couldn’t dream of not having pants. Without pants, a pants-less woman would simply be just another woman. “On to the next one,” as Jay-Z would say. But the next one wouldn’t have pants either. And neither would the next.

Not wearing pants would be like handing the physicist an encyclopedia of all the physics in the known universe without the thrill of research, the thrill of discovery. It’s finding immortality. After the thrill of death — the adrenaline and the fear — is gone, what’s left to excite? Perhaps philosophy.

But once philosophical truth is discovered, what’s left to philosophize about? Nothing.

Pants, especially when taken off, lead to surprise in form of exuberance or disgust. They make us diagnose beauty without dissection, or they help us understand the risk of ill observation or misunderstanding. They make us frequently ask questions.

And that creates discussion. Discussion creates opinion. Opinion creates humanness.

I like pants. Because without them, we’d all know what every piece of ass looked like before putting forth the work to find out the truth. The truth is, that’s what we’re after. Isn’t discovering the truth half the fun in life?

Without pants, finding the truth would be lame.

Without pants, the world would be, well, stripped naked.

—Kevin Zimmerman is the Sports editor. He can be reached at sports@wildcat.arizona.edu.