Baring my Bikini Body

Last night I did something that once upon a time I thought I would never, ever, do. I bought two bikinis. I already own two bikinis so that means I own a grand total of FOUR BIKINIS. I’m pretty sure that my fifth form maths teacher Mrs. Strang would be positively delighted to see me using my NCEA mathematics qualifications to so accurately add up how many two-piece swimsuits I own.

I bought the bikinis online so they’ll probably arrive next week sometime. One is leopard print and the other is blue with a really cute frill on the boobs.  I’m going to wear them to the pool and the beach and to the McIver’s Baths, these rad ocean baths at Coogee Beach that are only open to people who identify as women.

I get that for a lot of people the bikinis wouldn’t seem like a big deal. It’s just a swimming costume and lots of people wear them all the time. You could very well could be wearing a bikini right now. For me though, wearing a bikini in public is kind of a colossal deal. It feels so significant because I’m fat.

I’ve been using the word fat to describe my body for the last four or so years, and it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done. I use the word fat as an adjective because it describes my body, just like the words ‘brunette’, ‘flat-footed’ and ‘seriously on point eyebrow game’ describe other parts of me.

I try to use the word ‘fat’ neutrally, factually. Sometimes people try to tell me I’m not fat because they don’t think of me as lazy or unattractive, or any other quality that our culture associates with fat people.

Actually though, I am pretty fat. My BMI says that I’m very fat. I wear plus-size clothing. You can pinch great hunks of my fat in your fingers. When I use the word fat it takes the power away from all the people who have called me fat as an insult, whether they were yelling at me out of a car window or whispering in my ear with a hand on my forearm.

Wearing a bikini while fat feels like such a big deal because of the whole ‘beach body’ complex. Every year, in the middle of winter, magazines start barking at us to get ‘summer ready’ and gyms plie us with offers of trim and taut bodies so we’ll look ‘good’ in tiny bikinis.

I spent my whole life thinking that I had to look a certain way to wear certain clothing, that I needed to lose thirty kilograms to be seen in a swimsuit. I had totally accepted the fact that puberty and weight gain had stripped me of my right to swim in public as a fat woman.

This was super gloomy because I love swimming so much. I love diving under water and feeling my hair fan out behind me like a mermaid. I love swimming laps, cutting through the pool with my arms and wondering if you get sweaty when you swim really fast but you just don’t know about it. I love spending the day at the beach and driving home with your friends in silence, salt prickling on your skin.

I love swimming so much that eventually I started to feel pissed off that I wasn’t doing it. I joined the Sydney chapter of Aquaporko, a synchronised swimming team for fat people, and I found the most blissful sense of belonging swimming with people who looked like me. I felt encouraged by pictures of plus-size fashion blogger Gabifresh wearing a bikini and looking amazing, and the gallery of fatkini pictures and the gallery of fatkini pictures she collected for womens’ website xoJane. I felt so inspired by Gabi and by the synchronised swimming that I bought a bikini. 

I had to buy it online, of course, because I still don’t know anywhere I could just wander into a brick and mortar store and have multiple swimsuits to choose from. When it arrived in the post I tried it on straight away and I felt pretty scared. Bits of my body that usually only saw the light of the day in the shower were on show: scars, stretchmarks, hairy bits. It felt terrifying but it also felt exciting. A couple of weeks later, I wore a bikini swimming in public for the first time in my life.

I know that in the scheme of things, this isn’t a major revolution. Wearing a different pair of togs isn’t going to address global wealth inequality or dismantle the patriarchy. Not everybody even wants to wear a two-piece swimsuit - wearing a bikini might chafe uncomfortably with your religion or your gender expression or your personal style.

What has been important and revelatory to me is the fact that I’ve actually had a bikini body all along, because I had a body and I could put a bikini on it. I spent so many years hating my body, and thinking that my life would change when I was thin instead of actually going ahead and doing what I wanted to do.

If you want to go swimming in a bikini, go for it. If you want to wear a little crop top, go for it. If you want to wear a skin tight pencil skirt, go for it. It’s just skin and flesh and it’s not like covering that in fabric means that you magically appear to other people as a different size. It’s your body and you should do what feels good with it. It feels completely delightful to get sunshine on your belly and you have got to experience ocean waves lapping softly at your underboob.

I seriously missed out on decades of ocean waves just because I thought my body wasn’t good enough, that it wasn’t acceptable to be seen by other people in a swimsuit. Maybe you’ll wear a bikini and people will be a jerk about it. I was on the beach last month and some dude called me a pig because my body was just that offensive to him.

If this is something that feels really scary to you, you could go to the ocean or the pool in a pack first. Going swimming with other people can be really great for building your confidence and also for comparing whose boobs are the most buoyant.

When that dude called me a pig, I was with my friends and that definitely helped but I was pretty surprised how unaffected I was by his opinion on my body. Maybe it was all of the years of calling myself fat or maybe it was the ocean on my skin, but I really did not care what he thought. Because here’s the thing: your body belongs to you, not other people. It’s not your job to make sure that your body is acceptable viewing. Your body is great already and it’s ready for the ocean.

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