Underwear and the Eucharist

I'll phrase this hypothetically since the real party I was invited to I was later uninvited to.

Consider the concept of an underwear party. It could be a race with a skimpy cause thrown in for legitimacy, or a birthday party at which people are only allowed to wear underwear. The idea fascinates me because underwear is a socially constructed taboo. There's nothing inherently sexual about that fabric in that shape. In fact, now that I've taken up swimming, I see (very tan, attractive) people every day wearing less clothes to swim than they would as underwear. I myself am only hardcore enough for "Jammers," which are like Speedos with three inches appended for your legs.

So logically, going to an underwear party is just another fun theme-based party, like a "wear your prom clothes" party or a "50s-wear" party. And yet. I don't think I'd be able to go to an underwear party lust-free, and I admit that for most people that's the whole point. But I should be able to look at things from an objective perspective. If I could do that, it would give me the freedom to go to an underwear party or not.

That would be fun. Flirtatious, obviously, but in a pseudo-serious way, as if the whole house was in on the Emperor's new clothes. Pretending like nothing's unusual but snickering after every sentence from the titillating atmosphere.

It reminds me of a passage from Joyce. Stephen Dedalus has grown up in the Catholic church but recently decided that he doesn't actually believe it. His mom pleads with him to go to the Easter mass and take communion, but as he talks over the matter with his friend, he comes to the conclusion that he's too attached to the Catholic idea of communion as a sacred act to partake when he doesn't believe. The symbolism behind underwear and the Eucharist is too great to become immune to.

--Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?
--The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action which would be set upin my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.