The Bikini: blessing or curse?
Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 7:06 pm
I would agree that a lot of women judge/punish themselves harshly over this sort of thing. It's sad to see women starving themselves and going anorexic just to fit into some ridiculously small piece of clothing.Dental work, or new bikini: Most women would choose pain
By Misty Harris
They say time heals all wounds. But 60 years after the bikini made its debut on a Paris runway, the female psyche still hasn't recovered from the horrors of itsy-bitsy swimwear. And with bikini-shopping season officially upon us, the emotional injuries are only going to get worse.
"On the list of fun things to do, shopping for a bathing suit is about a zero," says Kelli Nykoluk, manager of Swimwear Etc. in West Edmonton Mall. "But when you're running around in public in the least amount of clothing possible without getting yourself thrown in jail, it's important to get the right fit. You have to be open-minded."
Nykoluk, a 10-year veteran of the swimwear industry, says getting women to accept help in the fitting room is challenging. Typically, her customers will go through a number of ill-fitting suits of their own choosing before allowing themselves to be helped by a sales associate. "Nine times out of 10, (swimsuit shoppers) are all hairy because they're waiting to get waxed. Everybody's either pasty white or burned because they just started in a tanning bed," she says. "But you know what? We're not judging you on all that. We just want to see that your suit fits properly."
In a 2005 Impulse Research survey of 1,662 women, more than half said they'd rather endure dental work than shop for a swimsuit.
Cynthia Lewis, co-author of the new book Bikini is a State of Mind, says women's ambivalence about their bodies -- not the swimwear itself -- is the true culprit behind this cycle of self-consciousness. "When you put on a bikini, there's nowhere to hide," says Lewis, a professor of English at North Carolina's Davidson College. "Whether or not somebody else sees them, every flaw you could imagine about yourself is right out in the open. So it takes a lot of guts to look past that and say, 'I look good.'"
According to a report released this week by research firm StrategyOne, nearly one in three Canadian women will ultimately avoid the beach or swimming pool because they're unhappy with their appearance. Lewis and her baby-boomer friends have undertaken a grass-roots effort to fight such attitudes, reclaiming swimwear as an instrument of empowerment through the creation of their own "bikini team." Whether going swimming or talking politics, every woman in the group sports a two-piece bathing suit. "Socially, we shouldn't be wearing bikinis in our '50s - at least, a lot of people would say that - so it's a form of freeing ourselves from what other people think and doing what makes us happy," explains Lewis. "We don't care that we don't look perfect because almost nobody does."
Lewis's outlook is far from typical. Given the average North American woman's body woes, it's nothing short of a sartorial miracle that the bikini - arguably the world's single most-hated piece of apparel - has prospered through six decades of fashion evolution.
Sass Brown, a professor at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, explains the feat as a triumph of vanity over psychological baggage. "People's fixation with looking healthy and bronzed is quite powerful," says Brown. "Otherwise, one-pieces would have overtaken bikinis (in sales), and they never will. Those suits don't get your tummy tanned, do they?"
Maybe if your viewpoint mattered... 
