via The Extender: bikini livin, today’s dose of truth:
[…]the story itself, validates a really frustrating cultural conceit: You have to earn your right to wear certain pieces of clothing.
I’m in the mood to find this exasperating idea exasperating, even if it’s so pervasive it’s in the molecules in the air. (Growing up as a chubby teenager I thought a bikini would be allowable only by presidential dispensation or maybe by fantastical time travel or magic body-switching.) So I am going to hand some of this shit back:
- A bikini is not the Maltese Falcon, an Olympic medal, the Heisman Trophy, or 1600 on your SATs. Another way of saying this: wearing a bikini is not news. A bikini is a piece (or two) of clothing. It’s not a badge of honor, it’s not a key you receive to enter an exclusive club, it’s not something you earn the right to wear once you’re thin enough to allowed to be naked enough to wear one.
- If you want to wear one, whatever your body size, wear one! If you follow People magazine thinking, it is the most daring thing you will ever do, but honestly it’s not very important, ultimately. That is galling, and rather humbling–our bodies are supposed to be earth-shattering, but they aren’t. Go on and put one on and swim.
- Depending on your body type, you actually may be more securely and completely clothed in a bikini than in a one-piece, which has its own sartorial demands. Two-piece suits keep things nicely in place with large bodies.
- If the word “bikini” carries too much Gidget-Annette-Funicello-Sports-Illustrated-Hawaiian Tropic-Maxim–FHM connotation, just call it a two-piece! I think that sounds very neutral.
- Sunlight is very good for you, and can help in small doses with mood disorders, bone density, and skin problems. The more of your skin exposed to the sun, the better! Just don’t forget sunscreen.
- Being in a bikini is not the same thing as having the cameras of the world upon you. Just because people make post weight-loss-debuts in the media in a bikini as proof of their new selves, this does not mean that in order to wear one you have to bear the scrutiny of a dermatologist’s magnifying lens upon your self.
- Go to Europe. Watch the 70-year-old women in two-piece bathing suits. See how that works.
- On a larger level: Who wants to wait to be told when it’s okay to do something? I understand why it happens–I understand why some women don’t go swimming in public, period, given all the pressures about women’s bodies–but it makes me bristle.
Growing up, right when I hit puberty, I went from a very very thin (I was always sick and suffered from anemia growing up and spent extended periods of my early childhood in and out of medical treatments), to a chubby teen. Not necessarily fat, but certainly not the beauty mag ideal. Well, I wasn’t allowed to wear a bikini. It was deemed to be for the slim. Several decades have passed and it makes me sad to remember that I lost that opportunity. Because I really wanted to wear one! All the cool kids had a bikini!
Alas, I wish I had read something like the points above because honestly, of all the absurd notions that were thrusted upon me, the fact that “I wasn’t pretty enough” to wear certain clothes is probably the one that hurt the most.
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