Why I Wear a Speedo

Well, the glib answer is that it's the closest I can get to skinny-dipping in public without being arrested. The deeper, more profound explanation is that the Speedo is a fashion statement that's closer to the metaphysics of this blog than a pair of baggy trunks that hang down over your knees (seriously, boys, why don't you just jump in the water with your bib overalls on?) In Love's Body, Norman O. Brown writes:

The reality of the body is not given, but to be made real, to be realized; the body is to be built, to be built not with the hands but by the spirit. It is the poetic body; the made body; Man Makes Himself, his own body, in the symbolic freedom of the imagination.

So there. In my Speedo, I’m projecting the freedom of my imagination. I am free to do this…free to exhibit my body rather than cloak it, disguise it, shrink in shame from it. And as Nobby says, it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what we commonly understand as “body-building” (though there’s a spiritual element to that, too, as explored in that ever popular post Patti Davis Goes Nude Again). 
I love being on European beaches where the older folks are not cowed or bullied by a corrosive youth-obsessed culture into covering up. Bellies abound, drolly drooping over the bathing bottoms of men and women alike, who refuse to surrender the surf and sun to their more naturally well-toned young. I hear a quiet, albeit unconscious, declaration to Nobby’s love's body on those beaches—this is my body, I own it, I live in it, I love it, and I’m not going to drape it in another square foot of nylon or polyester or spandex to suit your aesthetic tastes. (Ick been mine prerogative!)
It’s been a notoriously rough week for Mitt Romney, so I want to take a moment in this post to have his back—his bare back at least. In an otherwise totally political assessment of Romney’s campaign, Democratic strategist Bob Shrum inserted this bit of snark:

And Romney won’t make up lost ground by pursuing a makeover on daytime TV. Last week he told Kelly Ripa that he’s a “fan” of Snooki from Jersey Shore and likes to sleep wearing “as little as possible.” The latter elicits an image we didn’t need.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith, give the guy a break, Shrum! It actually elicits just the image Romney needs and we need of him, or at least the suggestion of an image that the man is comfortable enough in his own skin to sleep in it. Romney’s spirit is all cloistered…and that’s projected in the buttoned-down way he presents his body in public. If anyone ever needed to embrace the freedom of his own body, it’s Mitt. So damn your own eyes, Bob Shrum.
Shrum there has echoed the juvenility often on display in ESPN’s Sports Guy column where frat boy nonpareil Bill Simmons, not once but twice, broke from his wiseass ruminations on football and basketball to call “Ick!” on actress Jane Alexander for baring her golden-aged breasts on HBO’s Tell Me That You Love Me. This childish attitude pervades our culture, and I’m reminded of the time I pitched a movie idea to a tyro producer about a couple in their 40s who tried to reinvigorate their marriage by getting involved with the swinging life. My David O. Selznik wannabe’s response was, “No one wants to look up at a movie screen and watch a couple of naked 40-year olds writhe around in bed.”
For the record, here are a few of the actors who would’ve been in their 40s at the time, and thus age-appropriate for the roles: Viggo Mortensen, Jayne Seymour, Mickey Rourke (pre-facework), Ellen Barkin, Andy Garcia, Melanie Griffin, Ray Liotta, Lynda Carter (!!!), Val Kilmer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Kostner, Angela Bassett, Mark Hamil, Rosanna Arquette, Mel Gibson, Kim Bassinger.
(No, I can’t think of anyone who would’ve wanted to see any of those bodies bare-assed on the big screen, can you?)
Anyway, I was glad to see Hope Springs recently, and glad the project didn’t run into some wunderkind producer who said, “No one wants to look up at a big screen and watch Meryl Streep trying to give Tommy Lee Jones a blow-job.” Hope Springs brilliantly examines what happens to people who retreat from their own bodies—first the love goes, then the contact goes, and finely the self-esteem goes.
Love's Body is not, as some have erroneously concluded, about free love and hedonistic abandon. It’s about embracing our bodies as the vessels of our life's deliverance from the shackles of shame, guilt, and regret. Overwhelmed by remorse from eating all those breadsticks and skipping all those workouts? Well, then, don your Speedo or your two-piece, boys and girls, and strut that body proudly because that belly of yours is a lot lighter and prettier than all the self-loathing shit.   

And that's why I wear a Speedo...take it away, guys....