MacGougan at Large

Notes from Hawaii (Redux) - 5

Bathing Suits

While we were in Hawaii, we went to one beach or another pretty much every day and saw a lot of people wearing bathing suits. We saw people in thousands of combinations of ages, shapes, sizes, and colors and we saw them wearing maybe a few dozen bathing suit styles. Men in particular have an almost uniform consensus that their bathing suit should be shaped like long, loose-fitting shorts, ending a bit above the knee. It doesn’t matter if you’re tall or short, if you have a six-pack or a beer belly, that’s the suit we men all wear. In two weeks of beach visits, I saw one man wearing a small Speedo-style suit, and it was such a surprising sight that I did a double-take. Did I just see that?

Women, on the other hand, are blessed and cursed with some options. One-piece or two-piece, utilitarian or peek-a-boo. While suits for men have actually grown a bit during my lifetime, suits for women have been subject to a slow but steady erosion. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? As a man, it’s hard for me to parse out female empowerment from female objectification. I think it’s good for women to be able to wear what they want on the beach. I think it’s bad if social pressure or style marketing pushes women to wear things they aren’t completely comfortable in.

The latest erosion to suits for women is around their bottoms. The traditional bikini bottom has a triangular shape, but that design appears to be under pressure from the rise of the thong style. If the point of the thong bottom is to increase sexiness, I’m not sure that it achieves its goal. While sexiness generally accompanies increased exposure, there is a countervailing reduction in sexiness from the fact that the suit appears to be uncomfortable. Specifically, the wearer appears to be somehow giving herself a wedgie.

Not that I want to judge anyone for what bathing suit they wear. I’m just grateful that we’re all welcome at the beach, and I’m particularly grateful to be a man with an easy and comfortable bathing suit option that requires no thought or body-image angst.