Adolescent boys spend an inordinate amount amount of time during puberty trying to unlock the mystery of the Vagina.
It's a highly mysterious but bogglingly attractive thing to think about. From what I read over and over, many women they feel like their vagina is a meat-flappy, funky-smelling, discharging pit of weirdness or even hideous shame.
For a young man who is experiencing the full-grip of testosterone and male attractions, the vagina is a temple, a beautiful orchid, told to waft perfumes and rumored to be a source of sacred nectar and honey.
There is really no real good way to describe how and why a certain part of a body can elicit these feelings, a tightening in the pit of the stomach, an anxiousness and excitement that replaces anything we ever felt as boy being taken to a toy store by a hundred fold.
It makes as little sense to me as it probably does to most women when I really think about it, but those several million years of deep programming are not easy to ignore nor define.
This means that almost anything related to the vagina is also part of this beautiful mystery. Panties are physical accessory to it, a concept we can fully relate to, as a fellow underwear clad creature ourselves, but there is something wholly different about women's underwear, as if made to be attractive. Men's underwear is utilitarian and rarely meant to be seen, much less enjoyed in any way. But a woman's underwear, even its most basic form, almost always has some kind of superfluous design or accessory that makes it cute. Lace trim, pink coloration, soft or whimsical patterns...
some kind of twisted taunt that it's covering such a mysterious organ that inspires such dirty thoughts. Panty fetishism is easy to develop, and most guys at least have an appreciation for that article of clothing, if for no other reason than the panty in the enviable position of being in close physical contact with the vagina, the last barrier.
And also something needs to be said about the smell of a vagina. It's part of the mystery from the day we realize that boys and girls have different parts that look, feel and smell differently.
It's a scent fundamentally different than anything we as men experience in life, it's electric at times, odd or funky in this strange way that causes all those instant, uncontrollable responses to well up. There are exceptions always, but most men are wired to respond to this smell and are rewarded with little shots of some kind of pleasure-chemical in the brain. Combine that with the whole idea that women's bodies are idealized as these clean, pure and sacred things, that the idea of a dirty, nasty panty can be alluring to some guys, like a glimpse into the secret world of female sexuality. A substitute for intimacy almost.