The Women Who Won’t Wear Swimsuits

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/opinion/the-women-who-wont-wear-swimsuits.html

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“This isn’t a real thing,” my husband grumbled as he followed me up the stairs one morning in June.

He didn’t understand.

Woman versus swimsuit is a tale as old as — well, maybe just as old as that yellowing “Cathy” cartoon that your mom stuck on the fridge, underneath a bovine-shaped magnet that read “Holy Cow, Are You Eating Again?”

In the grand scheme of things, feeling bad about your jiggly bits as you wrestle them into scraps of Lycra in the unforgiving light of a department-store dressing room doesn’t compare with not having food or clean water. That being said, there are women out there who just don’t. They don’t wear swimsuits. They don’t go to the beach. They basically forgo summer, and the camera, because they hate the way they look.

Thus, our excursion to the roof.

I put on sunscreen, and lipstick, and a new size 16 swimsuit, black with a ruffled pink trim and a little slip of a skirt. I took a deep breath, pulled my shoulders back, and tried to believe that I looked O.K. and not to flinch as he said, “Here we go.”

Inside, I picked out my favorite shot, skipped the filters, went to my Facebook page, held my breath and hit “post.” The next time I looked, there were dozens of pictures of women in swimsuits — women who looked more like me, less like the airbrushed, perfected creatures I seem to spend my life looking at.

As summers go, this wasn’t a totally terrible one for body positivity. The Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers, who snapped a photo of a woman at her gym with the giggly, grossed-out caption, “If I can’t unsee this then you can’t, either!” was roundly shamed on social media.

Then, during the Olympics, in between commentators’ cracks about how a female swimmer’s husband was actually the one responsible for her gold medal, or how our gymnasts looked as if they should have been hanging out at a mall, you could actually see larger bodies being celebrated for their achievements; bodies that were winning medals as opposed to being “befores” on those weight-loss reality shows.

There was Michelle Carter, who calls herself the Shot Diva, all lashes and fuchsia lips, and thick, muscular arms and solid thighs. Arms like mine! Legs like mine! Except hers heaved the shot a gold-medal-winning distance.

Then the weight lifter Sarah Robles won bronze. It was the United States’ first medal in weight lifting since 2000, and Ms. Robles did it in sunflower-print kneepads and red-white-and-blue socks and a smile that threatened to split her face as she hoisted the barbell, then sent it slamming down in triumph.

Both women seemed comfortable in their own skin, proud of what their bodies could accomplish.

“You have to understand, everyone’s body was built to do something,” Ms. Carter told The New Yorker. “I think the world is realizing we were promoting one body type, and there have always been many.”

Ms. Robles told The Los Angeles Times: “I have a bronze medal, and I was able to be myself, embrace my body, do the things I’m naturally fitted to do to help make my dreams come true.”

It was so good to hear, and so rare. The Olympians are the outliers; their words a dissent to the daily chorus that tells us, and tells us, and tells us that larger bodies are loathsome, are laughable, are undeserving of love.

I was lucky. I had a mom who was always swimming, even when the choices of swimsuits for larger bodies were limited to horrid floral skirted things that flapped and dragged in the water while she churned out her daily mile. Staying on land, I learned, was not an option, especially when I had babies of my own to hold and help.

And so, even at my heaviest I never hesitated to put on a bathing suit and go in the water. Maybe that’s why my husband couldn’t understand: that there are women out there for whom bathing suits are very big deals; women who maybe could use a little push.

I wasn’t expecting #weartheswimsuit, the hashtag I used for that first Facebook photo, to take off the way it did. By the end of the week in June when I posted it, after some blogs had noticed and I got to talk about it on morning television, my Facebook page was overflowing with pictures of women of all shapes and sizes. Women on beaches, on floats, on stand-up paddleboards; women water-skiing or leaping off docks or cradling their babies in the kiddie pool.

Then there were comments that made me cry. One woman wrote that she and her family had been going to the shore for over a decade and, “this was the first time I wore a suit. Another wrote: “I have downright refused to wear a suit for YEARS. I avoid swimming altogether, and it’s actually one of my favorite things to do.”

This is how it is, for so many women. We endure the summer heat, swathed in cover-ups, sweating in sleeved shirts. We become inured to the indignities: hearing casual fat jokes, knowing that exercising in public means risking mockery; seeing strong, healthy, larger bodies once every four years, winning gold medals but somehow never getting many big-dollar endorsement deals or a gig on “Dancing With the Stars.”

These are the images I want to take with me from this summer: Sarah Robles’s smile; Michelle Carter’s confidence, and what my Facebook friend Jaime Rydman wrote beneath a shot of herself in a black one-piece with waves frothing around her ankles and wrote, “I’d always say ‘this will make a good ‘before’ picture. I need to stop ... it makes a good NOW picture!”