Naked Under Your Swimsuit

One of the dumbest inventions of modern man is the swimsuit. It does not keep you dry, it's uncomfortable, and it really does not hide anything. In fact, it's more titillating to wear a bathing suit than to wear nothing at all. Kirsty Gunn has written a thoughtful essay on the role of the beach in adolescent development, and how life is "laid bare" under the hot sun.

All the time, of course, when you're adolescent, what's going on is that you're experimenting, you're learning to feel at home in your body, with who you are. Working on an article about bikinis recently, I took a random poll of a bunch of teenage girls I know, asking them why they chose to wear bikinis. The answer came back from the leader of the pack: "Because they show so much more . . . um . . . skin?" Skin being the polite girl's way of acknowledging display, confidence, a certain kind of lovely vanity and a way of saying "the body" without saying "the body". None of the girls talked about breasts or bottoms or crotches and groins - those places it's the bikini's job (not extending its job description by one millimetre, though) - to cover. Wasn't it that old '70s anthropologist Desmond Morris who first suggested that it was the bikini's exact shape that so precisely highlighted the sexual areas of the body - while (only just) covering them? His argument, in The Naked Ape, was that the titillation of this particular little swimsuit came from the fact that it highlighted and hid sexual availability. Well, that pretty much sums up the sheer theatricality of the beach, right there. For what, short of a strip show, could be more of a performance of the private and the public, the available and the not available, as a bunch of teenage girls sunning themselves in bikinis in front of a bunch of teenage boys?

This is what nudists and naturists have been saying all along, that the fully exposed human body is less sexual than one that is adorned with suggestive garments. It's the bikini itself that becomes a means of inviting sexual attraction, and not the body parts that it covers. Everyone should swim in the nude, it's natural, normal, and feels wonderful.

Tags: nudism, naturism, nudist, nudists, naturist, naturists, nudity, nudes, bare, au naturel, nude, naked