Why I Will Never Wear a Bathing Suit Again

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must defy the tyranny of tush tugging, end the agony of wedgie excavation and let her rolls bounce as freely as her spirit.

That’s the time to shout, “Screw it!” to swimsuits.

That moment occurred for me on June 23, 2018, the last time I yanked on my flirty swim skirt and cute tankini top — complete with squishy silicone “cutlets” stuck onto my chest to “enhance” my bustline.

I was not going swimming. I was posing on the pool deck of the waterfront Westin hotel in Sarasota, Florida, with a Cosmopolitan in my hand — a celebratory last hurrah to hotness.

I was 62 and heartbroken after a long relationship had ended with a man I still loved. Somewhere amid my sadness, I knew that ending was for the best. I tried to ease the pain by tugging on a new tankini.

What a delusion! I still looked good. But why did it matter to me? Was I trying to lure a new man? Was I out of my mind? Did I have heat stroke?

I felt a chapter of my life passing like the icy drink between my lips.

At that moment, I realized there are three epochs of a woman’s swimsuit identity. A social scientist will probably come up with this one day and win a prize, but you read it here first.

The 3 Epochs of Swimsuit Identity

1. The Stone Age (ages 14-25): When you’re a stone-cold fox but still manage to criticize and rip apart your taut and lovely body like it’s a piñata.

When we were in college, my roommate Jo Beth and I had matching bathing suits — well, almost matching. Mine was a red-and-white bikini with a flimsy top just big enough to cover my AA-cup breasts and hers was the same brand’s red-and-white one-piece. Jo’s ample boobs required several more letters of the bra-size alphabet and therefore more spandex.

We still laugh when we see the photo of us standing side by side in those bathing suits. We are adorable, gorgeous, perfect. But did we think so then? No. I wanted bigger boobs. She wanted smaller ones.

We were stone-cold foxes. And we were fools.

I actually believed the ads for the “Mark Eden bust developer” that promised “a fuller bust by summer.” The promoters were eventually convicted of mail fraud. But the tyranny of titty-expectations lingered.

The Stone Age is the epoch that the fictional Moira Rose of the series Schitt’s Creek, played by the brilliant Catherine O’Hara, is referring to when she tells the young and beautiful Stevie: “Take a thousand naked pictures of yourself now. You may currently think, ‘Oh, I’m too spooky.’ Or ‘nobody wants to see these tiny boobies.’ But believe me, one day you will look at those pictures with much kinder eyes and say, ‘Dear God, I was a beautiful thing.’”

2. The Skort Age (ages 26-60): When you’ve read one too many stories called “Swimsuits to Flatter Every Figure.”

Many women begin this epoch with small children, which means lots of bending over and the desire to cover stretch marks. This is when the “high-waisted skort” becomes a mother’s friend. Not a good friend, mind you — a skort, with its skirt business in front and shorts party in the back — is a questionable concept unless you’re playing golf.

But I wore one when I took my kids to the pool, you bet. I eventually graduated to “swim-dresses” or “swim-skirts” to hide my thighs. Yes, I disliked my thighs as well as my tiny boobs…until I reached my next epoch…