Swimwear for All!

You gotta love the Internet that delivers such treasures to us - like the email I woke up to with “Swimwear for the Whole Family” in its subject line. I opened it just for fun and sure enough: Bathing suits for all.Most of course are designed for woman with figures like celery stalks - like these bathing suit bottoms, from what we might call the My Pants Are Falling Down Collection for the Hipless.But, lucky for us all, nowadays they do also show swimwear for the more upholstered ladies, cut more generously and often  with a special clinch of Super Elastic around the waist. I myself have such a suit that makes me feel like Captain America, Iron Man, and the Incredible Hulk  are squeezing me, hard, around your middle.

This isn't me obviously but you get the idea.

They had to make roomier swimwear, with 30% of the adult population obese and another 30% overweight. I mean they had to do something. Even the Disney parks had to rip out the seats for the It's-a-Small-World ride and make them bigger. Seems it's not such a small world after all!What’s odd is that the ideal of feminine beauty hasn’t changed. We're still mostly seeing fashion models who look like celery stalks. In fact I can’t even remember back to a time when the unwritten rule wasn’t that a woman should look as much as possible like a 12-year-old boy.I remember reading a film critic saying he sat through a movie in which the beautiful Isabella Rossellini appears largely unclothed. He said he could hear people around him literally gasp at the sight of her soft untoned body.I remember noting her body too when I saw that movie, though I can't tell you now what movie it was. I looked at the screen and thought, "Huh! So maybe every successful women really doesn't have look like Jane Fonda in one of her workout tapes!"(That dates it: this must have been in the 80s when Jane, even in early 40s, looked so sleek and fit slicing into the waters of Golden Pond.I remember watching On Golden Pond when it first came out and thinking Why God? Why can't I look like that? But then her dad was pretty tough on her, both on screen and off so I couldn't feel too envious.But it all goes to show you what influence the fashion deciders have and here's another question. Who did this to men's shorts and bathing suits someplace in the last two decades?What a pity, I think every time I look at a guy in these ridiculous togs.  What happened to shorts that were really shorts? I did used to so love watching basketball back in the old days.  :-)