Ah yes, the ubiquitous ‘Speedo’ swimsuit that everybody loves to hate. Stay with us as we examine that irrational manifestation of heterosexual male gender insecurity in the following paragraphs. In case you’re wondering who the image below is of, I strongly suspect a liberal application of PHOTOSHOP in it; it couldn’t possibly be Jesus because Jesus hates Speedos…
Battle of the Bulge:
Jesus Hates Speedos!
Who in their wildest flight of imagination would ever think that a few square inches of polymeric textile could cause a highly contentious set-to among millions of people across the globe that would make you feel the wild passions released by Hitler’s genocidal depredations were as benign as a romp through Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood? I am referring here to what the Australians wryly refer to as ‘budgie smugglers’ and the Brits as ‘package posers’, those stretchy nylon swimming suits known universally (almost generically now) as Speedos. An item that not only originated downunder in Oz, but that has taken over the world of competitive swimming entirely since its introduction in 1950.
As a well educated ‘straight’ American born into the intensely homophobic White Anglo Saxon Christian US culture, I have probably heard (by the age of 62) just about every slam, every casual disparagement, and every bad joke about ‘Speedos’ ever conceived by the human mind, but let me qualify that a bit (fully mindful of the fact that by broaching this subject at all I am literally tip-toeing through a minefield with both eyes closed and one leg tied behind me). Fact is, I personally prefer Speedos for swimwear.
Most Americans have nothing against skin-tight nylon swimsuits…as long as they are being worn by some amply super-endowed female babe with long blonde hair and a figure to make men quiver from sheer, uncontrolled lustfulness (Pamela Anderson comes smartly to mind, thank you very much). But…let a person of the male persuasion don a Speedo anywhere in the public venue and an immediate electric tingle of sorely stressed-out testosterone positively charges the air, accompanied frequently by a maddened pawing of the earth, snorts of pure heterosexual anxiety, and a call to arms for all good brothers of the XY chromosomatological proclivity to gather up the pikes and head for the gender barricades! The chaotic and highly unstable swarms of confused male thoughts, displays of prejudicial dismay, and greatly agitated biases that arise thereupon are not atypically accompanied, at such moments of threatened masculine identity, by a chorus of younger female voices rising in an antiphonal Greek protest of strident angst and loudly declaimed protest over the mere thought of seeing a male body — any male body — clad in (Yuk!) Speedos.
My own personal association with Speedos began way back in early school years, when I joined the school’s swim team. Back in those days (the late 50s) Nylon Lycra Spandex polymer fabrics had not yet been invented and we wore baggy 100% nylon trunks that would loosen up over time and become fairly shapeless bags, especially after they had been subjected to that hyper Chlorinated battery acid that passes for public swimming pool water. My primary draw to the swim team was not initially the sport of swimming, as much as the presence on the women’s swim team of the school’s chemistry prof’s daughter, one (in my eyes) drop-dead gorgeous brunette named Annette. I had had a crush on Annette since junior high school and when I moved up to high school freshman status my ardor for her was largely undiminished (if anything, Annette had simply become even more beautiful with the bloom of post-pubescent adolescence). But enough about lovely Annette (who would end up as a car crash fatality the year after she graduated, sadly enough).
The people on our school swim team were an odd bunch, really, and while I’ve never regarded myself as an archetypal ‘nerd’ in the classically accepted sense, looking back on those days I can see clearly enough that my high school peer group definitely gave off nerdly vibes in just about every conceivable way. For starters, there wasn’t a single football team captain or homecoming queen (with the prominant exception of my Annette) among them and the telling characteristics of nerdliness go downhill from there.
The baggy, saggy, formless look our Speedos had then (early 60s) were almost considered a blessing by our swim team coaches, since the immense amount of drag they created in the water was actually a useful training asset (in view of the fact that wearing them required a higher level of muscle efficiency to move fast through the water). It was only during real competitions that this training ‘asset’ became an ineluctable competition liability, so the more ‘win-conscious’ members of the team took this problem up with their mothers, who agreeably altered their suits a bit to make them more body conforming and less bulky, by virtue of some clever nips and tucks, followed by appropriate needlework.
Both the guys and the gals adopted this approach to dealing with the hydrodynamic drag problems of baggy nylon suits, but a few swimmers went a bit further with the concept. In particular, a curious set of fraternal twins named Don and Donna seemed to blaze new frontiers in pioneering this ‘custom fitted’ swimwear idea. Both were somewhat tall and slender and had their mothers take in about as much slack fabric as good sense allowed. Reflecting back on those interesting days, it seems to me that Don and Donna were both somewhat more concerned with lounging languorously by the poolside in the sun than in setting new records for the crawl and butterfly. Sometimes it was almost too easy to mistake one for the other, except that Don always wore a man’s swimsuit and had shorter blonde hair, while his sister Donna, with her long blonde hair, always stuck to the women’s model (fortunately!). That helped us a lot when it came time to form up the women’s and men’s individual medley teams (being able to tell Don and Donna apart, that is). Then too there was Johnnie Hoover, who had all the chick-magnet appeal of a teenaged Charles De Gaulle, with hips to match his painfully narrow shoulders that were broader and wider than those of most girls we knew. His circus tent sized Speedos looked like a shapeless black bag with the pasty white blubber of a whale squeezed into it. What a group we were!
At any rate, I never did well as a swimmer, despite being mechanically adept in the water, since I was unmotivated to practice enough to compete convincingly. Being a top-ranked swimmer required lots and lots of practice, endless laps, and swallowing enough Chlorine to turn the skin a few shades of aquamarine blue. I simply wasn’t interested in competition enough to become a contender. But since my ‘thing’ wasn’t competition sports anyway, I just followed the path of least (hydrodynamic) resistance and remained one of the chief and supremely unremarkable exasperations of our swimming coach, Mr. Clements, for four long years.
During summers, despite my lackluster swim team achievements, I worked as a lifeguard and aquatic instructor at summer camps in the mountains. This was clearly an arena in which I showed promise, since I quickly picked up rowing, canoeing, and sailing, and passed my Red Cross tests all the way through the Water Safety Instructor rating. I was even planning eventually to take the National Aquatic Institute course. But I well recall that the unspoken inference from the chief camp staff coordinator was that Speedos belonged in the high school swim team locker…NOT at the camp waterfront, where cotton baggies (early predecessors of today’s surfing trunks) were the preferred uniform of the summer day. I complied, of course, but the desire to be relatively unencumbered by yards of cotton material while in the water remained undiminished and I kept a couple of my old Speedos in the drawer for non summer camp use.
On weekends, traveling to that section of the Central California Coast that includes the Pismo. Morro Bay, and Avila Beach areas, I would head over to catch the surf with my old Duke Kahanamoku pop-out longboard and my Speedos, despite the fact that the local surfing fascists all frowned on the use of anything other than ‘Hang-Ten’ baggies in that always frigid Pacific water. Their bias against Speedos made no difference to me at all, since back in those days there was still enough coastline to spread out and catch pretty much any wave you chose without having to do battle with a dozen or more guys who were stacked up on each other and trying to drop in on your wave. I have to admit, however, that even at that early age I occasionally wondered about this apparent prejudice against Speedos that existed among my gremmie peers. Having not yet studied human psychology, I was poorly equipped to analyse and diagnose this strange phenomenon, but I did reflect on it at the time without coming to any conclusions, either positive or negative. To me Speedos were simply a comfortable way of feeling more at home in the water and being able to move freely in that element. When I wiped out (as I did and still do frequently) and got smashed to the bottom under a wave, I didn’t feel as if I were a merchant seaman who had fallen overboard dressed in full foul weather gear and seaboots. There was something to say for that, at least.
Years passed and at some point in the early 70s the whole polymer industry was suddenly stood on its collective commercial head with the introduction of new blends of Lycra Spandex and nylon fabric that for the first time allowed swimwear to conform to the lumpy, bumpy contours of the human body in a more movement-friendly manner than had worn-out old nylon. Predictably, Australia’s Speedo Incorporated was in the vanguard of that development and for the first time ever, these new stretchy nylon swimsuits ‘gave a little’ more with exertion than we were used to. On swim teams, at least on men, they tended to get smaller and smaller in size to the point where some of the Olympians swimmers seemed almost to be wearing what body-builders like Joe Weider called ‘posing trunks’ (and the French call ‘cache sex’). No one seemed to mind this trend too much among the aquatic athletes, but out in the real world of conventional thinking (read Christian conservatism) I noticed more than a small amount of criticism directed towards men who wore Speedos at the beach.
This didn’t make me nervous, since as a good little god-fearing atheist, I was not afflicted by the straitjacketed dogma of ultra conservative morality that seemed to choke the holy pahootie out of the critical thinking facilities of my friends. It further did not trouble me (much) that I had noted a fair amount of homophobic sentiment lurking somewhat malevolently behind that critical take on the wearing of Speedos. As far as I was able to determine, the ‘conventional’ male attitude about Speedos seemed to be that they were OK on competitive swimmers and triathletes, but definitely NOT to be seen on anyone else who was discernibly male and viewable in a public place.
As I became more aware of this markedly undeniable prejudice that exists in America against Speedos, I also became aware of the fact that this seemed to be a uniquely American bias. In Australia, they think its queer if you don’t wear Speedos and in the Slavic republics that used to be part of the USSR, the sight of great big men in tiny little swimsuits at the beach is considered perfectly normal. In fact, in most other countries of the world,hardly anyone pays any attention to the sight of a grown man wearing a Speedo.
In the course of focusing more intently upon this enigmatic American bias, I attempted to analyse what the possible motives were for this seemingly profound dislike of Speedo swimsuits. Looking back over past decades of American culture, I began to detect what seemed to be a very pervasive, yet somewhat ill defined uncertainty over what exactly constituted manliness among most American men. Call it free-floating uncertainty and anxiety over one’s superstud reputation, if you will, but it certainly wasn’t a topic any red-blooded American male would dare to discuss openly. Firmly associated with this underlying masculinity issue was a corresponding bias against homosexuality, and by extension, any acts, behavioral trait, or characteristic associated with what was perceived to be a manifestation of homosexual affect.
In pondering all evidence, I started reading more about the psychosexuality of American life in 40s and 50s. It started to become clear that not only did most men perceive overt homosexuality as being a threat to their personal identification and association with appropriate manliness, they were equally as quick to label any sort of appearance or action by other men that could be remotely considered sexually suspect. Thus, by these severely skewed perceptions (closely associated with gender insecurities), the assumption that men who wore ‘skimpy’ bathing suits were homosexuals was (to these benighted souls) a natural conclusion to arrive at.
For reasons that weren’t altogether clear to me then, this view of Speedos as being somehow ‘gay’ apparel appeared to be further reinforced by the ultra-conservative morality of the Christian right. That is, Speedos had become tainted by their ‘apparent’ gayness, from the standpoint of conservative Christians. The fact that no one in ancient Sodom and Gomorrah ever wore Speedos seems not to have occurred to the average conservative Christian male, such was the popularity of this attitude among many good little church goers. I label this the ‘boxer shorts mentality’, wherein skimpy briefs are viewed as somehow unmanly, while baggy boxer shorts seem to conveniently fit the concept of what appropriate male under-attire should consist of.
Case in point: Yahoo, the internet giant, established a quirky little web interaction venue wherein people were encouraged to post questions (about anything at all) and solicit ‘answers’ from others. Members of the Yahoo community would then respond with answers, the gimmick being that the questioner would get to select which of the answers to his question was the best. An innocent, relatively harmless, and perhaps even quite interesting little participation game, eh? Not quite.
About a year ago, someone posted the question at this Yahoo site “Is it cool or uncool to wear Speedos?” I just happened to stumble across it one day, while looking for something else (as always seems to be the case) and started reading some of the answers submitted to this query. I expected to find the responses fairly equally divided as to the yeas and the nays, but no….the overwhelming sentiment conveyed severe attitudes of censorship regarding Speedo wearing males! This was certainly intriguing to me, so I started trying to determine the demographic parameters of the responders in order to better understand why a disproportionate number of ‘answerers’ stated they found Speedos to be very objectionable.
It didn’t take long to find out that the question responders were typically younger people, most being below the age of 25. How curious it was to find so much psychosexual repression in this age group! Was it the result of religious upbringing, I wondered? Was it juvenile peer pressure behind this haste to conform to the view that Speedos were somehow unmanly attire? Was the effect directly attributable to the influence of conventional right-wing, white Christian morality? There were no immediate explanations at hand, but almost without exception male responders stated they felt ‘extremely uncomfortable with’ males in their presence who wore Speedos and for the most part the (young) female responders kept repeating the terms ‘gross’ and ‘repulsive’ in their replies. Looking back on this, I do not recall seeing very many (if any) responders who were older than 25 or so (as nearly as I could determine), but if the grammar used in the replies were any valid clue to age, a high level of youthful naïveté, anti-intellectualism, and semi-illiteracy was also apparent in these answers.
Any social psychologist would have found, I am sure, this Yahoo ‘straw poll’ on Speedos to be quite interesting and a matter inviting much deeper and far broader analysis. It was further interesting to find that almost uniformly, the young female responders characterised male Speedo wearers by using terms like ‘gross, hairy, overweight, fat, disgusting, repulsive, yucky, unappealing’, and similar disparagements. Many males replying to the query were a bit more obtuse in their answers, suggesting that Speedo wearers ‘were probably gay’ or ‘sissie-boys’, etc. Again, the insinuative and indirectly suggested implication arose that they felt their own masculine virility was somehow threatened or questioned uncomfortably by the thought of men wearing abbreviated swimsuits. Fascinating.
All of this strongly suggests that contrary to all of the purported ‘liberation’ of sexual attitudes that has ostensibly taken hold in America since the early 50s , true sexual sophistication has only gained ground in relationship to conventional male/female gender polarities (and then only superficially). Anything that even vaguely suggests a possible alternative — even if it is only the indistinctly perceived possibility of an alternative — seemingly constitutes a thoroughly intolerable and unacceptable threat to the average American male individual (coming as he does from his conventional conservative Christian moral background). Further inferences I draw forth are that in America sexuality is still unconsciously but firmly rooted in the traditional customs attendant to male sexual aggressiveness and female passive receptivity. Sexuality based on a general acceptance of a sense of androgenous sensuality, rather than on conventional polar sexuality is far too complex a concept to gain much following in ‘square’ America. When one factors in the fact that the average American male is not just the victim of conservative Christian moral coaching, but also very likely not much of a reflective individual as well, the broad-based and very palpable social homophobic bias that is quickly brought to bear on any perceived suggestion of gayness constitutes a very strong and disturbing undercurrent in our society indeed.
It is at this contrasting convergence between the concepts of ‘sensuality’ and ‘sexuality’ that other aspects of rampant American sexual insecurities also enter the picture. One that is most notable among many males is the perception that ‘non-imposing’ appearance is somehow effeminate. That is to say, a male person who is slight of build, slender framed, or perhaps of an unremarkable overall appearance might be too quickly perceived (through these same socially skewed filters under discussion here) as being somehow ‘unmanly’, whereas a bulked-up, muscular, husky, and/or larger individual might be just as easily ascribed as being somehow ‘more manly’ (without further qualifying).
While this would seem to many to be an almost logical assumption, one only has to take a look at the body-building sub-culture, with its obsessive fixation on bulking up and developing the physical culture of the human body to an absurdly (at least to my manner of thought) impractical degree, to see the fallacy behind that sort of unthoughtful perceptivity. It would seem reasonable to suggest that many who dedicate so many hours to the extreme physical enhancement of self favored by serious body builders are narcissistic to an extreme degree, perhaps so much so that even a ‘normal’ heterosexual relationship would be somewhat beyond their emotional capabilities. If that is the case, is extreme ‘self love’ at all relatable in a direct way to homosexual tendencies any more than the act of a man wearing something like a Speedo swimming suit? Reason would suggest that it is no more or less so than in other situations involving obsessive behaviors affected by human beings.
An immediate awareness that comes to me is that, human sexuality being far more complex and vastly more convoluted than most people are even remotely aware, the use of visual cues are no longer an adequate basis for making important assumptions about personalities in our society. Simple dismissal of ‘manliness’ and accusations of ‘unmanliness’ on the basis of perceived impressions is absolutely untenable by any reasonable standard of rational intelligence (and certainly an indictment against the sort of irrationality that passes for conventional wisdom in many), and yet that is the reflexively unreflective mode of thought that most ‘average’ members of American society seem to be permanently locked into.
But returning to all things ‘Speedoish’, I recall back in Saudi Arabia that when we were clustered around the expatriate compound swimming pools, the UK, Australian, and Slavic expats would routinely wear Speedos. Only the Americans, slavishly faithful to this White Anglo Saxon Christian American standard of moral decency I allude to, would uniformly affect the standard baggy, knee-length ‘swim shorts’ that American surf-culture has popularized in the US. I suppose the regard among the Australians, who habitually affect an attitude of flagrant insouciance towards just about everything, is that if the basic standards of ‘proper’ moral conduct prohibit complete nudity in mixed company, the next best thing to being naked is wearing as little as possible and aesthetic conventions be damned. After all, they came up with the concept of the Speedo, didn’t they?
It seems to have been in ultra conservative Christian America, with its culture of repressed sexuality and suppressed fear of homosexuality always lurking just under the surface of conscious awarenesses, that the Speedo went awry as an acceptable article of male clothing. [Naturally, I am not considering the Arabs or their far more conservative moral culture here, since Islamic countries (to varying degrees) regard any exposed flesh to be a severe reproach to God (even men’s ankles and legs).] To be sure, in Saudi Arabia, among the expats, there were fairly large numbers of homosexuals of both genders. Both male and female homosexuals quickly found expatriate life in the Middle East to be rather attractive, since while Islamic religion obsesses on relations between men and women, it curiously turns a blind eye on intimate relations between two individuals of the same sex. Despite a clear proscription against homosexual practices that exists in the Holy Quarran (as well as in the Haddith, that recorded compilation of Prophet Mohammed’s spoken reflections and admonishments on how to live a properly pius Muslim life), male-to-male liaisons somehow fall under the Saudi moral radar. The possibility of woman-to-woman relations don’t even register on the Arab mind, since that sort of extreme ‘outside the box’ (no pun intended, although it is an amusing one, I must admit) line of thought apparently doesn’t even occur to the Arabs.
One of my good mates in Saudi, an Australian pilot, wore Speedos without any hesitance at all, simply because on Australian beaches the Speedo is as ubiquitous as kangaroos and koalas (that’s all men wear, there). No one bats an eye over a Speedo in Australia, or for that matter anywhere in the world where Australian expats congregate at water’s edge. In contrast to that, another of my friends in Riyadh, a good old southern boy from Alabama, thought Speedos were positively scandalous at best and evidence of being a lost soul at worst. (Interestingly, I learned later that he was also a Southern Baptist.) Still another of my flatmates was about as queer as a three-dollar bill, being a Canadian who took great pleasure in announcing to the world (with an effeminate flounce) that he was a graduate of ‘Queens College’ in Toronto; he was also, coincidentally, what I call a ‘flaming fag’ — that is to say, a particularly extroverted homosexual who was way involved with the more extreme leather fetishes that one finds commonly in San Francisco’s Castro Gulch. Since these blokes were also flatmates, it made for some interesting conversations, I can assure you, but it also gave me some excellent insights into how the ‘gay’ mind thinks in relation to other non-gay mind-sets from around the globe.
Larry (the gay fellow in reference above) was a registered nurse and one of his friends was a female colleague who worked in the local hospital in Riyadh as a critical care nurse. After falling hard for her (she was truly a beautiful brunette, as well as an accomplished swimmer and gymnast), I later learned to my utter surprise that she was also homosexual by preference and even lived with a female lover with whom she had come to the Kingdom from South Africa. All of them viewed the typical angst-ridden American male hang-up over men wearing Speedos as vastly amusing, probably due to the fact that they were all so far beyond anything as trivial as this that such sublime worries over gender identity were literally laughable. All of them except Alan, my Alabaman fellow countryman, wore Speedos out of preference, owing to the fact that nylon swimsuits dry fast and are easy to pack. For them, the question of whether or not the wearing of Speedos was masculine was a complete (but highly amusing) non-issue.
On a parallel tangent to the issue of men wearing Speedos, there are several related considerations worthy of reflection that have some bearing on this subject. As a bicyclist and runner who is long-accustomed to wearing exercise garments made from Lycra Spandex material, I have observed that a fair number of American men view Lycra Spandex as somehow abhorrent. Every now and then one will note a gratuitous comment made in some public context or other about men having a general dislike for ‘bicycle shorts’ or running tights, with some men actually avowing that they wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything made of that material. This attitude was particularly pronounced in the sports world, where the wearing of anything stretchy and skin-tight made from Lycra Spandex Nylon blends was long viewed by many as being almost an open admission of somehow being ‘gay’.
Then, lo and behold, an enterprising American company came along named the ‘Under Armor Company’ and started marketing body-conforming sports wear products they described…naturally enough…as ’under armor’. Lycra tights were similarly renamed ‘compression pants’ or ‘compression shorts’ and suddenly it was OK for men to wear the stuff, since it had been given a suitably macho name and ‘tough guy’ image (armor) to match. Soon, everything was made of the stretchy material, even the pro football team pants worn by every brutish linebacker in the country. Again, due to the allaying of American male fears of homosexuality that the macho marketing image provided, men could safely wear Lycra without suffering unsettling insecurities about their masculine identity. In fact, thanks to the same reality engineering, on football teams and in front of a nation-wide television audience men could now even pat each other on the butt without feeling even so much as a twinge of gender insecurity!
The difference between Speedos, made of Lycra-Nylon blended fabric and ‘compression shorts’, made from the same precise material, and in exactly the same way, is non-existent…except for the specific difference in nomenclature. This tells me that the only way American attitudes are ever going to seriously change over the masculinity quotient of Speedos is if the Speedo Company suddenly invested millions of dollars in remarketing Lycra-Spandex Nylon briefs as rough-tough macho wear. Now, granted that it is extremely difficult to think of the grizzled pro football linebacker’s bulky physique in the same light as a sparely built Olympic swimmer (who has the body build of a lean Greyhound), but it seems to me that because the all-pervasive power of American marketing and advertising is the most powerful single source of attitude shaping in the entire world, this hypothesis is probably a valid one.
That is to say that if Speedo suddenly spent a billion dollars in advertising to convince American men that only truly tough guys wore Speedos (made of Lycra-Spandex), we would undoubtedly witness a sea-change in male attitudes, and probably almost overnight as well. I seriously doubt if even the never-insignificant power of God-fearing conservative evangelical Christian moral dogma could resist such a massive and impactful commercial assault on the way men regard their virility and gauge their masculinity.
Given the manner in which commercial interests routinely absorb and co-opt subcultural social trends, attitudes, and affectations (perhaps the best single example of this is the popularization of gang clothing and styling as being ultra-hip wear for teenagers) I have little doubt that if the Speedo Company cared enough about this deeply entrenched and angst-ridden American male antipathy to the wear of Speedos to tackle the issue head-on, this state of affairs could be easily reversed. Regrettably, there has to be substantial profit-incentive to motivate the expenditure of advertising money and the consumer potential of reactive male conservatism is relatively small (say in relation to the sizeable women’s market for Lycra-Spandex sports wear that suffers no similar high anxieties). In other words, there’s simply not enough ‘untapped revenue’ in the male sector of sports clothing sales (now that ‘Under Armor’ cleverly captured so many male hold-outs in their own marketing campaign to popularize Lycra-Spandex sports gear) to warrant much bother by Speedo to help overcome bias against their famously contentious and controversial ‘budgie smugglers’.
In a sense that’s a shame, since there are still so many reflectively handicapped individuals on the loose out there who could stand having some of their pet prejudices laundered a bit. Further, I am sure a great number of people of ‘unconventional sexuality’ would greatly appreciate having some of the right-wing Christian moral heat taken off of them. The practical result of this reactionary sexual status-quo is likely that people like me who routinely prefer wearing Speedos in the water (whether at the beach, on my surfboard, or anytime I am at a beach and in the sun) will have to continue to deal with the occasional slurring innuendo directed towards us for daring to wear these body revealing swimsuits.
Here I should perhaps argue that one of the reasons (aside from the unhealthy influence of ultra conservative Christian morality) why so many younger women think men shouldn’t wear Speedos is probably that a great number of men who wear them these days are not necessarily attractive or in good physical condition. That is, they are likely overweight, aging, possessed of substantial pot-bellies, rolls of fat, etc. I would be the first person in the world to agree that from an aesthetic standpoint, a healthy appreciation for good taste is required of those who don Speedos (or any tightly conforming garment). The same principle is true for women who wear Lycra-Spandex exercise outfits, since the sight of overstuffed and grossly out of shape bodies of either gender that are squeezed into tight clothing and waddling ponderously around a shopping mall is more than a bit objectionable (from a male point of view).
Regardless of all the above embroidering around the issue, it’s all about aesthetics and perception, in the final reductive analysis. I presuppose that while there are likely still certain generalised absolutes to be acknowledged in good taste, that formerly fixed cultural nuance of American society (‘good taste’) has in the past 50 years been almost entirely dismembered and radically reconstructed (or ‘destructed’, if you prefer) by the marketing and advertising forces at work in the now wildly heterogeneous American economy to suit their partisan needs. After all, former standards of sniffy mainstream (read WASP) good taste do not help a commercial corporation sell ‘things’ to a greatly diversified America that may have little if anything to do with Caucasian Christian traditions and hoary old post-Puritan moral outlooks of white America. In the great effort mounted by commercial corporations to squeeze money out of consumers, for mer givens like ethics, morals, and ‘standards of decency’ are all among the many casualties of this war against common sensibilities, in the ongoing battle for the consumer’s money.
I would personally argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with the ‘Speedo look’, as long as the male individual wearing them is 1) in good physical shape, 2) using them as beachwear, and 3) not consciously trying to incite anyone into a public sexual frenzy. Ditto for exercise clothes made of the material. There’s nothing inherently repulsive about bicycle shorts, running tights, or anything else in this category of personal wear as long as they are being used for their intended purpose (as exercise gear). In the event that items of this sort are being used in what one might term a ‘kinky’ application (that is, as a sexual fetish item or for what I hesitatingly term ‘deviant sexual practices’), that naturally puts a whole different spin on the subject (of course), since such highly personal intimate behavior rightfully belongs out of the public venue.
As for me, I continue to wear my Speedos at the beach and accept that this will continue to draw looks of disapprobation. I further grant that in Hawaii such styles are looked upon with more than the usual arched eyebrow and biased outlook, since homophobia is perhaps even more firmly entrenched among today’s Christian Hawaiians than among the 1800s era evangelical proselytisers who reconfigured Hawaiians’ moral perceptions of ‘right versus wrong’ to suit the anal retentive, evangelical Protestant model. Although I am not bothered by this status quo to an extraordinary degree myself, I admit it is sometimes tiresome to have to contend with it on a continuing basis. If verbal slurs escalate into actual physical confrontations (as they sometimes can be when haoles and kanakas mix together), clearly there is an attendent need to be concerned for one’s personal safety.
Since I make a continuing concerted effort to remain in top physical condition (despite being 62) — a lifelong health habit — I am satisfied that I do not present a grotesque appearance to anyone in my Speedos. As for ‘fitting in’ from the standpoint of peer pressures, I am long since past the point where I care much if anyone approves of my behavior or not, since I conduct my affairs with a fair sense of respect and dignity for others and their rights. As a ‘straight’ and reasonably normal (who among us, after all, is EVER perfectly normal?) male person, I am also not anxious about my personal gender identity or virility. I’m perfectly happy with who I am and if the sight of Speedos on a well-toned older male bothers someone, I look upon it as being the other person’s problem (unless, as I said, covert prejudice becomes overt and physical hostility).
Fortunately for me, despite being a relatively small island, Molokai is ‘large’ enough for everyone to share equally without too much friction. The beaches on the island are typically almost always totally empty and the waves are in such plentiful supply that I don’t have to worry about receiving ‘beef’ from other surfers who resent the way I look. After all, before the Christians came along in 1820 to spoil things, Hawaiians all surfed in their birthday suits and thought nothing of it. I do admit that having a white skin on Molokai is still somewhat of an unavoideable liability, since no haole will ever completely fit into a community in which native Hawaiians always have precedence and in which ‘locals’ possess the highest status. That’s fine with me, though. It’s their land and I am just a part-time resident who acknowledges the need for haole malihinis to honor and respect local customs and habits (as much as humanly possible).
But to return to the title of this piece, whether or not ‘Jesus’ hates Speedos, personally speaking that’s really no overwhelming concern of mine, despite my strong sense of philosophical outrage over the continuing presence of such blind and profoundly ignorant prejudice as this continuing to exist in our modern culture. The next time you spot someone wearing Speedos, stop and reflect a moment before retreating to the automatic disparagements that frequently come to mind, eh? It might just be perfectly straight, normal little old 60s refugee me wearing Speedos on that surfboard, staring the virtual freight train roaring through that temporal pipeline directly in its squinty little existential eye.
— — — — — — —
PS: I’ve been advised by some of my Christian friends that Jesus isn’t into hating, so perhaps I should have retitled this ‘Jesus Loves Speedos’, eh?
