Wearing bikinis at the beach is one of those things that has become so normalized that any opposition voiced against it (even in conservative circles) is met with some type of canned response that references 'Sharia Law' and Islam.
But do we really have to be Muslims to have some sort of standard for public decency? America is a Christian nation, and always have been–in fact, we used to have actual 'modesty police' who would stroll the beaches enforcing bylaws against obscenity.
I was looking through an old 1945 edition of Life Magazine, published right around the time of the debut of the two-piece swimsuit. Here's what the mainstream media (no, not a Christian newsletter, but the most popular magazine at the time) had to say about the new swimwear:
What I find so hilarious about this article is that the general public at the time was scandalized by what would now be considered a relatively modest bathing suit. My favorite line is at the end of the piece, where it says "there is–or seems to be–nothing more to cut off." If only they knew...
Fast forward 80 years, it's 2025 and 400-pound women can be seen at every public splash pad, waterpark, or beach wearing nothing but a thin slice of fabric (the size of dental floss) over/up their backsides.
Much of the swimwear people wear today is even more revealing than underwear, but for some reason, as long as you're in general proximity to a body of water, it's considered appropriate to wear in public!
Even worse, now a majority of impressionable girls in their teenage years, sometimes as young as twelve or thirteen, are posting bikini pictures on their Instagram accounts for the whole world to see.
Show casing your bikini body on social media is so normalized that even young women from conservative Christian families, who are otherwise well-behaved, can also be seen posting half nude photos for all of their peers to see. The sad thing is, these photos can stay on the internet forever. They are shared between classmates and commented on by creeps from foreign countries.
How did we even get to this point? How did our wives, sisters, and daughters all become convinced that showing all your skin is somehow 'empowering' and 'freeing?'
If you want the full story, feel free to watch the video below. I was also joined by Catholic content creator Franco TV to discuss what people misunderstand about modesty: the 'private' parts of our body are to be covered up not because there's something wrong with them, but because they are sacred.
If you don't want to watch my whole video, I'll give you a short overview:
The Bikini was brought to America by a Jewish immigrant from France named Jaques Heim. He originally came up with the design for the bikini in a fashion house in Paris, where he named the swimsuit the 'atome' to emphasize it's tiny size, which he compared to that of an atom. In 1946, it made it's debut and was branded the 'smallest swimsuit in the world.'
Another designer called Louis Reard had stolen Heims' design, and took the first photograph of a woman in what we now know as the modern bikini. It might be hard to believe, but no self-respecting models wanted to been seen wearing something so skimpy, so Reard had to photograph a nude dancer—the equivalent of a porn star today.
For two decades, it was impossible for fashion designers to encourage women to wear such small bathing suits in public. But when the film Beach Party (1963) came along it was a hit with American teens and popularized the bikini with the youth. Every woman in the film was seen wearing a skimpy bikini, this was now the new trend, and we all know how much influence celebrities and Hollywood have.
This all happened just as the sexual revolution was starting to pick up momentum. That same year (1963), radical feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique, a hugely successful cultural book that is credited for sparking the second-wave of feminism.
The reality is, the path to public obscenity has not been a grassroots effort. It took years of media campaigns, funding, and subversive designers to convince women that there's nothing embarrassing or shameful stepping out of the house wearing clothing that's even more revealing than underwear.
What you seen on U.S. beaches today was banned and stigmatized when our grandparents were in their prime. It only took two generations go make it 'normal'. And the truth is, there's nothing radical about opposing this change. What's actually radical was the top-down cultural engineering that took place to push these obscenities.
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