It’s years away, but I’m already dreading the question: “Mom, can I wear a bikini?”
The last time I wore a two-piece bathing suit, I was age 6 and racing a boy at day camp to the other side of the pool. The wardrobe malfunction that hit about halfway across not only cost me the race, it made me swear off bikinis.
Looking around our public pool in Westchester recently, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t even be able to tell whether one of these suits had malfunctioned. The scene ranges from mothers whose bottom pieces seem to end only an inch above where the sun don’t shine to 16-year-olds whose tops my own mother might refer to as “unsupportive.”
And you know your daughter will want to wear one.
A New Jersey father of teenage girls recently told me the issue gave him a modicum of sympathy for the Taliban. Is it really that bad?
Megan, a mom in Washington, DC, says she only let her now 18-year-old wear a tankini (a two-piece that mostly covers the midriff) until recently. “My thinking was — and is — that girls are only girls for a little while and deserve not to be sexualized; also that the sight of the smooth female stomach and the way bikinis fit is very tempting for boys and men — making it hard for them not to think sexually.”
Amy, a mom of two teen boys in Westchester, couldn’t agree more. She says some of the girls are walking around with just the tiniest pieces of cloth covering them — “like something out of the fevered dreams of Nabokov.” A co-ed pool party her older son attended recently looked like an MTV reality show, with some of the girls “comporting themselves like high-class prostitutes.”
It’s not just the incongruity between the girls who’ve matured earlier and the boys who “barely know how to tie their shoes,” says Amy. “I fear for my boys,” she tells me. “If they look at one of these girls the wrong way, charges could be filed.”
But the girls are under pressure too. Megan’s younger daughters explained they would be “shamed at parties” if they couldn’t wear bikinis. They told her, “We’re not Amish.”
Meanwhile, her husband, who grew up in a warm climate, doesn’t find bikinis to be in any way remarkable. So the girls won — with the understanding there would be no tassles, no sequins, no strings and everything would be “navy blue.”
But maybe Megan gave in too soon. The one-piece could make a comeback.
In a YouTube video that’s gone viral, Jessica Rey, the actress who played the White Power Ranger in the TV series, offers a history of the bikini at Q Ideas (a sort of TED conference for hip evangelicals).
When Louis Réard, a French designer, first debuted the bikini in 1946, he couldn’t find a single French actress to model it; he had to hire a stripper instead.
He called it the Bikini Atoll, after the site of the nuclear test, because he expected the swimsuit could have a similar impact. He wasn’t far off: Last year spending on bikinis totaled $8 billion, according to Rey.
And for all the talk of how this is supposed to signal some kind of female empowerment — “We’re not Amish!” — it just leads to more of the sexual objectification that feminists (rightly) bemoan.
“Who says it has to be itsy-bitsy?” is the tag line for the new line of attractive but modest swimsuits Rey has launched, sold online-only. Inspired, she says, by the style of Audrey Hepburn, the line has now completely sold out. And the Rey Swimwear Facebook page has 43,000 likes in the past couple of weeks.
No, the bikini market won’t implode anytime soon. But having some alternatives might remind parents that our daughters could use a little more support.