THE REAL SWIMSUIT ISSUE

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Not even the most dedicated transvestite could enjoy the annual rite of trying on bathing suits. All year long you've been judged by your efficiency, your creativity, your managerial talents--and suddenly, when you enter that fitting room, the only operative criteria are tilt of breasts and firmness of thighs. Where is the FDA when you need it? There should be warning labels on every suit: this product may be hazardous to your self-esteem.

True enough, bathing suits can do more for you today than they ever could. Only a couple of years ago, they were cut so high in the thighs that even the glammest gals approached the water awkwardly, bent over and tugging at their crotches. This year, mercifully, the suits are longer around the thighs and cunningly fortified with underwire bras and invisible tummy-flattening devices. The more fiercely constructed ones can probably swim without an occupant.

I am grateful for these advances in the architecture of swimwear, and I fervently await the dream suit that will be engineered to massage flesh northward from the belly to the bosom, where it will cluster in great alpine masses. The trouble is, though, that no matter how much a bathing suit can do for you, it cannot do enough. And I state this as a theoretical principle, rather than a confession of personal inadequacy. A recent issue of PEOPLE magazine revealed that even the "most beautiful stars" are not allowed to display their own bodies in nude and seminude scenes. "Body doubles" are employed in their stead--anorectic aerobicists, one must assume, 85% of whom, PEOPLE reports, have silicone implants.

Think of the implications of this startling fact for the average woman facing a fitting-room mirror. Nothing can make you fully beach ready: not total abstinence from carbos and fat, not Madonna's workout regimen, not even a $100 suit hot-wired for maximum curves. If Julia Roberts is deemed too unsightly for a seminude scene, what hope can there be for the rest of us?

Biologically speaking, it might still be worth the humiliation of trying to squeeze into a size-8 suit if the payoff were a guaranteed increase in reproductive fitness. According to the most recent beauty research, this should indeed be the case: the standards of beauty that men bring to the beach, scientists claim, are innate and universal and involve, among other things, a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7, which was apparently taken as a reliable signal of female fertility in the Pleistocene epoch. So if you have any ambition to propagate your genes, this theory goes, you'd better stay in that fitting room until you find something that works.

But what did those Pleistocene fellows know about the modern singles scene? Because here is the cruelest irony of all, which the warning labels should also be required to address: no bathing suit, no matter how artfully filled, can guarantee reproductive success; in fact, the foxier you look in it, the more likely you are to be a target of male contempt.

Yes, men are still drawn to the kind of female geometry that excited their caveman ancestors, but this atavism only seems to make them resentful. My dear brother, for example, a man whom the concept of political correctness persistently eludes, refers to dumb women as "D cups." Or consider the appellation "bimbo," with its implication that a great bod is incompatible with normal intelligence. Possibly also relevant here is the masochistic T shirt that says SPEAK SLOWLY AND CLEARLY; I'M A NATURAL BLONDE. The central fact to cling to in that fitting room is that in the post-Pleistocene epoch, the body counts for less and less. Once, just a few decades ago, women were expected to be sex objects while men were, in psychologist Herb Goldberg's phrase, "success objects." The pretty nurse landed the doctor; cute cocktail waitresses were known to snag bankers and lawyers.

Now, however, doctors marry doctors and lawyers marry bankers, without any help from the same-sex-marriage lobby. Stone Age men might have sat around calculating waist-to-hip ratios on their abacuses, but modern men are more likely to be trying to figure out your ratio of assets to debts. This is sad, of course, from the point of view of female upward mobility. But unless the market for trophy wives greatly expands, looks will remain a poor substitute for impressive job titles and higher degrees.

So if there's no winning in this business, and not much of a prize if you do, the question is, Why do we continue to compete? Probably for the same reason men are addicted to sports. They have soccer and hockey. We have our own undeclared female Olympics, featuring the flat-tummy semifinals and the thin-thigh play-offs, waged annually in fitting rooms and on beaches all over the nation.

Which is fine--if we could all agree that it's only a game, with near-zero relevance to anything that matters, like family or work or love. Most women hoping to score on the beach can forget about seaweed wraps and treadmill binges: better to fill the cooler with classy microbrews and have your resume tattooed to your upper body. The hardball swimsuit competition can be left to the young and the buff, or a body double if you can afford one.