Bane of Bathers

It’s only February, and already thousands of women across the nation are scrambling to get into shape and hit the tanning beds. Why? So that we can look fantastic in our sexy bathing suits.

Okay, you may begin laughing now.

We all know the reality of this. Miss Suzie Q wakes up in the morning, skips breakfast, goes to class and/or work, then spends the evening working out and laying in a tanning bed (aka Coffin o’ Cancer). Her enthusiasim lasts only as long as the results readily show and her schedule doesn’t wear her down. Sadly, it usually does. Her hopes are crushed and she settles for a tankini top, shorts, and probably a very large straw hat. She will either sit on the beach, miserable and bored, or she will avoid the beach all together.

The reverse of this, of course, is Miss Suzie Q’s sad twin sister, Miss Suzie K. Miss Suzie K goes overboard in her beach season prep and, unlike her sister, is either lured into false confidence or really has lost an unhealthy amount of weight. Unfortunately for her, she looks terrible either way; odds are that she’s so skinny people from the homeless shelter offer to buy her a sandwich, and her bathing suit looks like it’s made of less material than a washcloth.

So where is the happy medium here? Does it exist? First of all, I think we need to look for the origin of this dilemma.

When you were an adorable little girl, did you pay much attention to your bathing suit? I’m willing to bed that so long as it was the right colors, you didn’t give a damn. You probably didn’t even care about attaining the mythical “beach body” until you reach the age where boys and girls realize that neither party actually has cooties. Now I can’t profess to knowing what men think (I doubt that men can, either), but I’m sure they find a size 0 as disturbing as a size 20. Not only that, but any man who wants a woman to scorch the earth in order to look good in a shoelace disguised as a bikini bottom doesn’t deserve a woman anyway. Trimming the hedges is one thing (and even some guys should do it or risk grossing out a majority of the non-blind female population), but honestly, what is so appealing about a woman who looks like a nine-year-old with boobs? It’s just weird.

So what have we learned? 1) The most important attribute of a bathing suit is its color(s). It always has been and always will be. 2) Freakishly skinny girls are… freaky. And they look terrible in a bikini. 3) Trim, don’t scorch.

Given what we know, this means that your average girl in an average bikini should look just fine. “Average girl”, by definition, means that there are a lot of us out there with relatively the same proportions. More of us are average than we believe, in fact. This, I’m sure, has much to do with the biggest problem of all:

We may know that we look fine, or even damn good, but knowing and feeling are two totally different things. I’ll have to use myself as an example here. I’m 5’8″, roughly 120 lbs, with a slender/athletic build. Topping it off is my ten-minutes-in-the-sun-and-I’m-tanned complexion, bright blonde hair, and bold blue eyes. Do I look good in a bathing suit? Yes. I look at myself in the mirror and know that I look good. People (with trustable opinions) say I look fantastic. However, I don’t feel as though I look good, and that’s what makes the difference. I would rather hide behind a pair of board shorts and a tank top than show off what I have.

Bottom line, whether you look good or not, if you don’t feel that you look attractive, you probably won’t. You’ll be unhappy and always wishing something about your body was different. So listen up, ladies. We need to get over this bathing suit obsession. All of us (myself included!) need to go back to the happy days when all that mattered was the color of our suits. If we can do that, summers at the beach will always be a blast.