Pity poor Houston and Detroit. They're the fattest cities in the USA, according to an analysis in the February issue of Men's Fitness magazine, on stands Tuesday. Other flabby towns: Philadelphia, New Orleans and Columbus, Ohio. On the other hand, the fittest cities in the country are San Diego, Honolulu, San Francisco (tied for second), Seattle and Minneapolis... Yoshie
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This is a funny thread. God, viagra and speedos? You don't need viagra if you can manage to look okay in a speedo---since your cardiovascular system is probably pretty good. Although taking viagra in a speedo seems mighty daring: Beach Boner Baldy, Busted, details at eleven?
This year is turning out to look about as bad for the beach as last year. The fishing is bad too. All the salmon are still too far south. That was the one really nice thing about El Nino. The water up here in SF was warm enough to swim in without a wet suit.
In any event, as for a wax job, it isn't necessary if you get a tan since the sun bleaches or at least changes the color of those funny looking hair patches. Some guys on the other hand look like somebody squashed a giant hair bug under their suit. Well they could probably do with a wax job. But then were do you stop--the chest, the shoulders, the neck? Do commercial places charge by the square foot? If you have enough hair, then you can forget about it. Its that in between point where hair becomes an issue.
I actually heard about this wax business in the barber shop. The woman cutting hair next to me was talking up various products to a young asian guy while she was styling his hair. He was having one of those designer patterns shaved down to his scalp. I asked her later what she was talking about. The kid she was working on didn't look like he needed a body wax job.
I admit I had to steel myself in some sort of absurd psyche struggle to put on a racing swim suit in my fifties. I had to work through similar issues over nylon cycling shorts. For climbing, I need pockets so that pre-empted any longing for lycra. I wear a pair of heavier tights under baggy shorts for cold. It makes moving around easier than wearing full length pants.
Three or four years ago when the ocean was warmer I had to get a Nike to replace an old Speedo, because the evil Nike hegemony had taken over most sports retail places. Since Nike designed this thing for a sexless, anorexic midget with my waist---which is physically impossible---I just got one about four waist sizes larger. But this beach thing is not too different than the way I felt the first time I wore a racing swim suit forty years earlier in LA as a teenager.
Back when, we used to wear a racing suit for the water and then a baggy pair of cut-offs or shorts for the sand---and cruising around. The point, besides showing off was the nylon dried out faster. In those days the only place that sold nylon racing suits were team sports wear shops. These were not actually bikinis since they did manage to covered more than your crack.
There is no doubt in my mind that teenagers looked better in them then and now than us old guys, no matter how fit we are. On the other hand, what it really seems to depend on mostly is a sense of relaxed physical poise---which I think is quite a different mode than the overly laden term, objectification. If you can manage a certain poise, which I think depends on feeling at home or at least accustomed to your body, then you probably don't look too silly---or at least that's what I tell myself.
I learned a certain amount of poise from disabled people going to the beach, river rafting and sailing. Water sports and recreation are great things to do if your disabled, since the water supports you and gives you a certain physical freedom you can't get any other way. There is an interesting kind of social acceptance of body that goes on in the process of stripping down in public to go in the water. Among disabled people who know how to handle themselves well, it makes their physical disability seem more like a kind of costume. If they are white, once they get a little tan, then they look healthy enough.
In any event the US has definitely gone backward into some weird angst over bodies since about the mid-Eighties. It is an interesting social phenomenon that I never seen written about with any rational sense. Maybe that's because it doesn't make sense?
Chuck Grimes