HE SAID, SHE SAID: There's No Hiding In A Swimsuit

He Said/She Said

A version of this appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on July 2, 1995.

KERRY SAYS:

I hate July. It isn't the heat that gets me, Dave. And it ain't the humidity.

It's bathing-suit weather. Ten years back, when I was in my early 30s, I loved July because I looked lean in a bathing suit. Boy, those were the days.

Now, two children later, I need to troll the beach in one of those suits with a high neck and a knee-length skirt.

It's the swimwear equivalent of the station wagon. You know how you vow you'll never drive one of those suburbo-boxes, then the next thing you know you're saying things like, “It's great for carpools, lots of leg room?”

Last week my daughter and I went on the dreaded bathing suit shopping ordeal.

”Hey, Mom, try on a bikini,” she yelled, holding up a little gold lame thong, size 4. “It'd be cute on you.”

Right.

My bikini days ended with her conception.

Nowadays I shop for suits to hide in.

There's lots of camouflage to choose from. You've got suits with strategic padding. Suits with girdles. Suits with jungle prints that remove those pesky 10 pounds through optical illusion. Suits with so many vertical stripes they strobe in the sun.

But they don't work.

You can pass time on the beach by guessing just what a woman is trying to conceal by staring at the placement of her stripes - it's like one of those Magic Eye things with the picture within a picture. (Horizontals on the top, verticals on the torso: trying to maximize her bust, minimize her hips, etc.)

I once tugged on a suit with a “tummy tamer.” It was so snug I couldn't catch my breath. Then a scary thing happened: all the excess stomach poundage came creeping out the legholes.

The only good thing that's happened to swimwear is the great new coverups. A savvy sunbather can actually go to the beach, plead a painful sunburn and never remove her knee-length tent. I have a friend who claims she goes naked - under her coverup, of course - because wearing a suit just makes her sweaty.

Guys are lucky, Dave. No skirts, straps, strings or strategic padding to interfere with snagging a cold one out of the cooler.

DAVE SAYS:

Don't be so glum about that flouncy little accessory on your bathing-suit bottoms, Kerry. Count your blessings. Designers, physicists and structural engineers are working overtime to find ways to make women look better in swimsuits.

Guys don't have that kind of support. We have two choices in bathing suits: over and under.

That is, you can hike the thing up over your stomach, or you can wear it lower and let your stomach hang out over the waistband.

A guy who chooses the “over” approach looks much like one of those retirees in Sansabelt slacks who thinks he'll look slimmer if he moves his waistline up to his armpits.

A guy who chooses the “under” style . . . well, we all know what that looks like. Think harpoons, and Herman Melville.

There is a third option that's popular among middle-aged guys on the beaches of Italy, Greece and France: the dreaded slingshot Speedo, that little band of Lycra that pretty much disappears under the folds of all that leathery-tanned flesh, leaving the guy looking like he had a boo-boo in a bad place and was down to his last Band-Aid.

Women have all kinds of suits to choose from. If you want a little attention topside you can strap on one of those Wonderbras that leaves you looking like you could tread water from here to Madagascar without a life jacket.

If you're too wide on the sides or a little heavy in the keel, there are suits that can cinch, straddle and corral all that cellulite into looking like it belongs to a whole 'nother part of your body.

If life was fair, Kerry, guys would have a few choices besides “over” and “under.” Men's swimsuits would have tailfins on the waistbands, which would shove those love handles back down where they belong and leave us looking mean and streamlined, like a '58 Chrysler.

Our suits would have 8-inch-wide industrial-strength elastic waistbands, like the one on George Foreman's boxing trunks. I could hide half of me behind the mere patch of his trunks that says “Everlast.”

And we'd have some male equivalent of the Wonderbra, though that could make actual swimming something of a challenge.

Come to think of it, Kerry, cancel all those recommendations. Maybe “over” and “under” are better alternatives than all that tugging and stretching and binding that y'all have to go through.

I just can't think of any part of my anatomy that I'd care to have Wonder-crunched for the sake of a little beach-going vanity.