Why Are You Still Wearing That?
The absurdity of swimwear, and why I’ve officially dropped the Nylon and Spandex!
I have tucked a nipple back into a swimsuit top in a parking lot. Not a private parking lot. A busy one. With a Tim Hortons across the street and people staring out the main windows.
This is the life the swimsuit has given me.
I’ve also done it at the beach, in a change room doorway, and once… memorably… while trying to look casual in front of people I’d just met. The top shifted. The physics were what they were. My hand moved faster than my dignity could keep up. We all pretended nothing happened and went back to talking about the potato salad.
And before you ask… yes, I was wearing the right size. I was wearing the allegedly supportive kind with the adjustable straps and the price tag that suggested it had been engineered by people with advanced degrees. It still moved. They always move. Because you’re in water, and water doesn’t care about your pride.
The Post-Lake Re-rack (And Other Waterborne Dignity Violations)
Water sees your carefully positioned swimsuit and immediately decides to test its fastening system. Every large wave becomes a public experiment in textile engineering. Coming out of the lake is its own choreography. There’s the initial surface check, did anything shift during that last wave? Then the tug at the back because the bottoms have made a decision to tuck up into your butt cheeks that you did not authorize. Then the front check. Then the sides. Then the moment you realize there’s a piece of lake weed somewhere it absolutely should not be and you have to make a choice about whether to deal with it now or walk the full length of the beach first.
If you choose to walk, you have to adopt a specific, slightly wide-legged stride to minimize friction against the stowaway lily pad. You try to look like a breezy, carefree person enjoying a summer afternoon, while internally calculating the exact radius of the damp green ecosystem currently unfolding in your lower hemisphere. If you choose to fix it on the spot, you have to execute the “blind hook”, that subtle, casual-looking finger scoop that you pray looks like you’re just adjusting a waistband, but everyone on the beach knows exactly what you’re fishing for. There is no dignified way to evict seaweed from a swimsuit. None.
Everyone does this. Every single person climbing out of any body of water anywhere is running the same inventory. It happens so fast and so automatically that we’ve stopped noticing it’s completely absurd.
Sand also gets in but it never gets out. Bathing suits somehow collect sand in locations where sand had no reasonable path of entry. You can rinse the suit repeatedly, wash it twice, and wear it again three months later, only to discover that you apparently brought half the beach home in the crotch lining.
We have created a garment specifically designed for water. And the first thing we do every time we exit the water is spend thirty seconds fixing and flushing what the water did to it. You put the bottom on your hips. Five minutes later, half of it has relocated somewhere you absolutely did not invite it. Then you must perform the discreet public adjustment everyone notices precisely because you are trying to make it discreet.
I want you to think about that for a moment.
The Fluorescent Torture Chamber (Or: Why Does Lycra Hate Us?)
The swimwear industry would like you to believe the solution is a better suit. More supportive. Better constructed. Tummy control. Underwire. Thick straps. Strategic ruching over the parts you’re supposed to be insecure about, and the industry has a very specific list of those parts, which it will helpfully remind you of every March in preparation for what it calls, without irony, swimsuit season.
The media treats “swimsuit season” like an impending natural disaster we need to brace for. “Is your body ready?” the magazines ask, as if the lake is going to reject me if my thighs touch. We are spoken to like front-line infantry soldiers preparing for a difficult campaign. We need strategic ruching to camouflage the midsection; we need architectural underwire to repel the gaze; we need high-octane tummy control to compress our internal organs into a shape that pleases the local wildlife.
Bathing-suit sizing is openly hostile. You can wear one size in ordinary clothing and suddenly require a bathing suit labelled four sizes larger, apparently because swimsuit manufacturers believe confidence should be punished. The tag does not tell you what size the suit is. It tells you how emotionally resilient you need to be before trying it on.
It’s exhausting. I just wanted to float on a giant yellow inflatable banana, not negotiate a peace treaty between my hip bones and a piece of Lycra.
Does this give me a muffin top? Will it create rolls? Is there enough padding that my nipples won’t show through wet fabric to a beach full of strangers?
These are thoughts I have had. These are thoughts most women I know have had. We have accepted them as a normal part of getting dressed to go swimming, which is an activity that is supposed to be fun and is supposed to involve moving your body through water, not conducting a structural assessment of your own torso in a department store change room under fluorescent lighting.
You know the exact dance. You have to perform a series of high-level athletic maneuvers in a space the size of an airplane bathroom to test the fabric against gravity. You do a deep squat to see if the bottoms are going to migrate into your ass crack or pop sideways and expose my bits to junior while picking up a seashell. You do a sudden, aggressive jumping jack to test the shelf bra. You twist around to look at your own reflection from an angle that requires a cervical adjustment, all while trying not to touch the walls because change room floors are a lawless wasteland. And those mirrors are aggressively honest. They don’t just show you the suit; they reveal every poor life choice you’ve made since 2012, illuminated by a light bulb that was clearly selected by someone who hates women.
The swimsuit doesn’t cover insecurity. It manufactures it. It takes your body and turns it into a fit problem requiring a solution. Too much here. Not enough there. Wrong shape for this cut. The suit becomes the standard and your body becomes the variable that either measures up or doesn’t.
Equal Opportunity Suffering (And the Infamous Mesh Citrus Bag)
And then there’s the men.
Kevin has described the liner situation to me in terms I won’t fully repeat here, but the summary is: built-in underwear inside your wet underwear, which bunches, which requires its own adjustment choreography, which in the mesh variety apparently makes your scrotum feel like it’s tucked into an orange bag.
He told me it’s essentially like wearing fine-grit sandpaper designed by a sadist. By hour three, you aren’t walking anymore; you’re doing a cowboy stride because the synthetic netting has effectively exfoliated skin that was never meant to see the light of day, let alone a coarse plastic weave. It’s an entire gender collectively suffering in silence because some manufacturer in 1984 decided men couldn’t be trusted with normal fabric.
I have no firsthand experience of this. I believe him completely.
Nobody asked for the liner. Nobody defends the liner. It exists because at some point someone decided the outer layer of wet fabric wasn’t sufficient and a second inner layer of wet fabric was the answer. To what question, exactly, remains unclear. Men like Kevin cut them out with scissors when they get home and yet the industry keeps sewing them in.
The Economy of the ‘Oops Moment’
There are entire social media accounts… popular ones, algorithmically rewarded ones… dedicated to swimsuit failures. Waves, water slides, diving boards. The premise is simple: the suit slips, the camera captures it, the clip gets shared ten thousand times.
Every woman who has ever gone down a public water slide knows the specific terror of the bottom of the drop. You don’t hit the splash pool thinking about how fun the ride was; you hit the water with both hands desperately clamping down on your breasts and crotch like you’re trying to stop a leak in a dam. You emerge from the spray immediately doing a frantic inventory check while trying to look like you aren’t currently wrestling a piece of nylon out of your soul.
The people in those clips did not consent to being content. They were just trying to enjoy a long weekend. The suit that was supposed to protect their dignity became the mechanism for removing it, publicly, permanently, in a way that can be searched and saved and sent. We are all just one rogue wave or one aggressive dive away from becoming a permanent meme on someone’s feed, all because we trusted two flimsy strings to hold back physics.
Nobody films oops moments at a naturist beach. The genre does not exist there. When there’s nothing to slip, there’s nothing to capture. The entire economy of accidental exposure collapses because the exposure is just a person swimming, which is not interesting to anyone. There is no forbidden fruit to glimpse, no boundary line to cross, and absolutely no algorithmic value in a video of a nipple just existing in the sunshine.
The “Is It Thread or Is It a Suit?” Conundrum
Then we have the micro-bikinis. The dental floss styles, the Wicked Weasels, and the sheer mesh suits that require a degree of precision grooming usually reserved for topiary gardens.
Now, I have to be completely honest here: I actually own a few of these. As much as I prefer to just be nude, I’ve fallen down that online shopping rabbit hole. Have I ever worn them in public? Nope. Only for photography. My courage has limits, and those limits end well before the property line. They sit in my drawer nonetheless… a private collection of textile contradictions.
Because when you look at them, we have collectively agreed as a society that if a woman wears a strip of fabric the exact width of a standard shoelace over her bits, she is “dressed” and can walk past a family eating ice cream without anyone calling the authorities. But if she removes that single, solitary piece of string? Absolute scandal. Total anarchy.
These suits aren’t designed for swimming. They are designed for a high-stakes game of legalistic hide-and-seek. The sheer mesh variety is my favorite example of human delusion: a fabric specifically engineered to be transparent, covering an area we insist must be hidden, fulfilling a rule that says you must wear clothing, while actively ensuring the clothing does nothing.
It is a performance of coverage. It proves that the swimwear mandate isn’t about modesty at all… it’s about compliance. We are terrified of the naked body just existing naturally, so we accept a microscopic piece of dental floss as a compromise, purely so we can pretend the taboo is still intact.
So What Is The Purpose?
Bathing suits provide very selective modesty. Apparently, showing a breast is scandalous, but crushing that same breast into a tiny triangle and displaying everything except the nipple is completely respectable. A swimsuit can reveal almost your entire body while still receiving credit for hiding it.
Then we have the cover-up contradiction. You put on a bathing suit because being nude is supposedly inappropriate. Then you put a cover-up over the bathing suit because the bathing suit is apparently also inappropriate.
And after all this… they create tan lines that resemble unfinished coloring pages. After spending a day in the sun, you remove your suit and discover your body has been divided into differently shaded geographical regions. Some areas are golden. Others look as though they have been protected from sunlight since birth.
They are really terrible at their only job. Clothing is supposed to keep us warm, dry, protected, or comfortable. They turn into a cold, portable swamp. A bathing suit may feel tolerable while you are swimming. The moment you leave the water, it becomes a refrigerated compress attached to your most sensitive areas. It is the only garment designed specifically to remain soaking wet long after the activity requiring it has ended and provide almost no protection.
Its main purpose appears to be reassuring strangers that we possess genitals but have placed a small piece of fabric over them. At some point, it becomes reasonable to ask… what problem we are solving.
Breaking the Nylon and Spandex Matrix
Taking one off is the best part of wearing one. No one removes a bathing suit and thinks, “Oh no, I wish I could keep wearing that.” Taking it off produces the same relief as removing tight shoes, undoing a bra, and finally getting home after a long social event. That may be the strongest evidence that the garment itself was a mistake.
You know what I have learned?
Nudity removes the suit from the equation entirely. Your body isn’t a fit problem anymore. It’s just your body. It doesn’t need to measure up to anything because there’s nothing to measure it against.
I know how that sounds to someone who hasn’t experienced it. I know because I used to be that person. The idea that being completely naked in front of strangers would feel less vulnerable than wearing a swimsuit seemed genuinely insane to me. And then I tried it. And the specific low-grade anxiety that lives in every swimsuit experience… the coverage audit, the adjustment reflex, the parking lot nipple situation… just wasn’t there. Now before you say “I could never do that…”, you can read all about “My Mixed Feelings Before Trying Naturism“.
So… I keep coming back to this.
We are genuinely terrified of what happens if we admit that a naked body by a lake is just a person being comfortable. Because if that’s true, if skin doesn’t automatically equal sex… then a very old and very profitable illusion shatters. The swimsuit exists to keep that illusion intact. It’s not modest because it respects the body. It’s modest because it satisfies the legal minimum required to maintain the taboo. It checks the boxes. It keeps the framework running.
Total nudity removes the taboo entirely. And that is what makes people genuinely uncomfortable. Not the nudity. The loss of the charge that the nudity is supposed to carry.
The swimsuit isn’t modest. It’s just the minimum required to keep the game going.
Whenever possible… I’ve stopped playing.
Corin
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