Men regard themselves as being beyond the reach of seductive advertising. Women may be lured on to the rocks of profligacy by whispered entreaties to buy but males remain deaf to such enticements. Such is the self-delusion in which we indulge. The reality is that we are as susceptible as females to these siren calls, calls which guided me on this day through the women's cosmetics and up and on to menswear.

The urge was upon me. It was my first visit to the new shopping mall and it would not have been proper to depart without leaving a credit card imprint, but what to buy? The washing machine has developed a voracious appetite for socks in recent months, a rapacity which has left me with 20 black socks, each one of which is different from the other. So I went looking for socks and, in so doing, found myself surrounded by men in underpants.

This was not a bad thing as apart from one prized pair received as a birthday gift, things have become rather desperate underdak-wise. This lamentable state is due in part to the buying habits of a distant relative, a parsimonious soul who each Christmas can be relied upon to send me a jumbo-sized pack of budget-priced jocks.

These come in a variety of shades, being the liquorice allsorts of the underwear industry - grey, green and purple being the least attractive among them and I defy any man to look good in purple undies. These undoubtedly represent impressive value and I'm certain that for a few hundred dollars you could buy sufficient jumbo-sized packs of economy undies to clad the loins of every male in Tasmania. (I merely chose Tasmania as an example. I'm not suggesting for a moment that at present their loins are undie-less.)

There is, as you may suspect, a less endearing facet to budget jocks and it relates to their longevity. If you are unfortunate enough to have just been diagnosed with a terminal disease, then budget jocks are most assuredly the way to go. If, however, you feel reasonably confident of being around in three months time, I would counsel caution.

The elastic is the first to fail, retaining sufficient bounce for them to cling to your hips until mid-morning. About this time, they will surrender to the forces of gravity and slide inexorably southwards. Unless you can come up with a plausible and non-incriminatory reason for having one hand more or less permanently stuck inside your pants as you go about your day's work - and I have not been able to - this poses a problem.

Quality is what I sought. Life, I told myself, was too short to wear saggy underdaks, so I found the appropriate counter where I was confronted by serried ranks of incredibly well-muscled male models adorning packets of $25 undies. Their prices varied by a few dollars but they shared a common feature for each model boasted a large bulge in the groin that suggested a genetic mutation of disturbing proportions.

Furthermore, some of these models appeared to be enjoying their work more than accepted standards of decency would normally allow, some seeming to have become quite excited at the thought of appearing on a packet of underwear. To whom, I wondered, was this advertising pitched? Did the makers of designer brand underdaks seriously think that the average heterosexual male in any way identified with these sleek, buffed, groin-bulging males on the packets? If I took a pair up to the woman at the counter, would she wonder at my sexual preference?

Perhaps the advertising was aimed at women who would buy them in the fervent but unfulfilled hope that in donning them, their partners - or a part of him - would suddenly be transformed into a rampant Adonis? Maybe the assumption was that only gay guys would be interested in paying $25 for a pair of underdaks and that the rest of us were content to trudge around in the sagging bummed variety, one hand inserted inside our pants as we tried to arrest our underwear's downward slide.

It took half an hour but eventually I found a packet adorned by a male who didn't appear to have overdosed on Viagra, took them to the counter and watched as the shop assistant reached inside the packet and removed the security tag hidden inside.

   "Do men come in here and steal underwear?" I asked naively.
   "Absolutely," she said.
   "Probably because they are too embarrassed to pay for them," I thought to myself.
   "And we've got security cameras everywhere," bubbled the assistant.

Somewhere on last weekend's David Jones' security footage, there's a 30-minute tape of me walking up and down the underwear aisles peering at packets, putting on my reading glasses, taking them off and cleaning them, putting them back on, shaking my head in disbelief and then looking furtively over my shoulder to see if anyone I knew was watching.