Fat Girl Bikini

I googled “fat girl bikini” using several possible word combinations (ex: big girl bikini, fat bikini, plus sized bikini). Besides the fabulous post from Dairy of a Fat teenager, I found practically nothing. Main stream plus size fashion stores, such as Lane Bryant do not even carry bikinis, the only store that I found that carries bikinis in big sizes is the wonderfully amusing Love your Peaches, while not my style, this store is awesome in its attitude, and of course its title. The models are in all sizes and all ages.

However, while hardly anyone actually admits to selling them, they are certainly available for sale; I purchased  a size 16 bikini at target.

Clearly, I am no fan of modestly or diets as can be seen from past posts, thus I spent the last few days contemplating the intersection of bikinis, feminism, and fat acceptance.

As Wikipedia will happy point out, we did not invent the bikini, the Romans did; however the bikinis in the west did not come around till 1946, and then were band from many beaches until the early 60^th, when the bikini began to go mainstream (or almost mainstream, back to that in a bit). The 60^th are all also the caldron where contemporary feminism stewed, until it too became somewhat main stream in the 70^th at least in regards to the law of this land. The acceptance of the bikini came about a decade before the key government reforms that are the corner stone of gender justice as understood today (equal pay/ anti discrimination legislation, marital rape laws, legalization of birth control and abortions).

There are basically three perspectives on this particular correlation.

(1) Skimpy clothes, aka Bikinis degrade women, and “gender equality” actually hurts women because it erase what woman really want, which is to mother children, while someone provides for them economically, an impossible situation in a world where men and women are expected to desire and pursue the same course.

This perspective appears in texts such as What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us : Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden.

According to this book Feminism makes women unhappy because it calls out social status into question, thus prohibiting women from being happy in their “natural” role.

“Those aspects of life — whether it’s the pleasure of being a wife or of raising children or of making a home — were, until the day before yesterday, considered the most natural things in the world. After all, our grandmothers didn’t agonize over such existential questions as to whether marriage was ultimately “right” for them as women or if having a baby would “compromise” them as individuals. Yet we do. We approach these aspects of life warily and self-consciously: A new bride adjusts her veil in the mirror and frets that she is selling out to some false idea of femininity; a new wife is horrified to find herself slipping into the habit of cooking dinner and doing the laundry; a new mother, who has spent years climbing the corporate ladder, is thrown into an identity crisis when she’s stuck at home day after day, in a sweatsuit, at the mercy of a crying infant. It is because of feminism’s success that we now call these parts of our lives into question, that we don’t thoughtlessly march down the aisle, take up our mops, and suppress our ambitions.” -excerpt from  What Our  Mothers Didn’t Tell  Us

(2) While equal pay is all good, and women should go to college and question their roles, the skimpy clothing is actually bad (“degrading”), and speaks to feminism gone wrong; it’s a kind of side effect of liberation, that actually hurts women by preventing them from being who they really are and getting what they really want which is of course marriage and motherhood.

One of the most prominent voices within camp is Wendy Shalit the author of Girls Gone Mild and a Return to Modesty. All over her books is this weird question “If doing away with “repression” was supposed to be liberating why are things now so bad?” (p. 16 of Girls Gone Mild, the first chapter is available on her website).

It is entirely unclear to me what is so bad, however the very premise of this ideology is that things are bad. In both of her books the “mild girl” aka the “virgin” is compared to the “whore” who sleeps around with guys she does not care about because of social pressure. This particular character is at the heart of the argument, just as in the first perspective rests on the character of the unhappy career women who is ignoring her true calling of house work. Thus, it is impossible for a woman to love her job or love having sex with several partners, she is actually repressing her deep unhappiness.

(3) Both the equal pay, and the bikini are aspects of our liberation. It cannot be ignored that societies where women have the most rights are also societies were women were can wear and due wear the most revealing clothing. Feminism is about the liberation of both our minds and our bodies (this is my perspective if you have not figured it out).

This perspective is often loosely labeled as third wave feminism. (Shalit occasionally tries to call her point of view fourth wave feminism). This movement is fragmented, and does not have a single unified voice; however one of my favorite blogs that represents this ideal is Feministing.

From this perspective wearing a bikini is not degrading, it is actually liberating. Now, if it is considered hideous or completely inappropriate for some people to wear bikinis (or revealing clothing in general), it would follow that those people are not as liberated, or rather are not as privileged as the bikini wearing group.

Discrimination against fat women is a documented fact, fat women are denied equal pay protection routinely. While, wearing a bikini will not end the everyday inequality faced by fat women, it is still a political and a feminist act for a fat woman to wear a bikini, just as it was a feminist and a political act for women to start wearing bikini’s in the 60^th (a decade until the passing of legislation that radically changed women’s lives).

This summer, at the biggest size I have ever been (size 16) I will wear a bikini (to bad I could not find a yellow pok-a-dot bikini), because Bikinis heralded the arrival of gender equality, and I too am equal (and very hot indeed J)

It would be amazing, If people actually read this post and send me comments with pictures of themselves in a bikinis of all sizes to post on my blog, as protest to fat discrimination (No that’s 4^th Wave feminism!)