From The Archive: Fuck Nora Ephron's Bikini

And all the other swimsuits!

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Years ago I went on a date with a man whose insecurity about women took the form of pretentious date questions. He fired them at me with his eyes half-closed and his body slumped down in his chair, as if he were on the verge of dozing off. The only one of his questions I remember was, What is your favorite body of water? My answer shocked him back to life: Anywhere I can swim naked.

Look, I haven’t ever swum naked. But I have dreamt about it endlessly, because the alternative is ghastly. The “rules” around swimsuits are bullshit. This is Patriarchal conditioning in its most unalloyed form. Especially if you don’t fit the conventional/Patriarchal body standard, appearing in public in your swimsuit is fucking heroic. We should be giving each other medals for this shit. 

There are no guard rails around swimsuits. We have to navigate them for ourselves. Nora Ephron once said that a woman can wear a bikini until she’s 34, but that’s just another random and impossible beauty standard (for the record: I love Nora, but come on!!). But even if you’re the very ideal of conventional beauty standards, standing there in your bikini like Barbie on the patio of her Malibu Beach House, you know those days are numbered. 

I don’t want to kvetch about it anymore. Here in middle age, I just wanna swim naked. I almost did it on my honeymoon a few years back, paddling out into the Maui waves at 7am, when the sea was glassy calm and the sun was still sleepy. I could feel the ocean moving across my body, and the urge to be skin-to-skin with it was overwhelming. I looked around, trying to figure out if I could remove my swimsuit furtively and free-float for a minute, but the beach was crowded and I didn’t want to risk it. 

I was in a funk about all this, as I am every summer when it’s warm enough to go swimming. But recently a GenZ friend drew my attention to something interesting that’s been happening in the culture for the past few years. It’s called the “Body-Neutral” movement. You’ve heard of “body positivity”? This might actually be better. Basically, if we walk back ALL judgments of our appearance, positive or negative, we could start to recognize that our body is just a small part of our total being. Imagine how much we could flourish if we stopped obsessing about it. How much energy would we would get back, and how many ways could we apply it in the world? Would the societal rules about public nudity change? Would we finally be able to swim naked?

A culture-wide paradigm shift to Body Neutrality is probably not possible in our lifetime. But at the very least it’s a compelling intellectual exercise, one that I’ve taken with me into the dressing rooms as I’ve been shopping for a new swimsuit. I’ll go on dreaming of naked swims, but until then I’ll be out here floatin’ around in my JCrew long-torso one-piece. 

Got a favorite swimsuit, or more importantly, a favorite place to swim naked?