Gluteal outrage | Blogotariat

In the online magazine ‘Pacific Longboarder’ there is a photograph of the Gold Coast businessman who complained about the wearing of g-string bikinis away from the beach. Under the photograph was the headline “Ian Grace says thong bikinis make him feel uncomfortable’1. I laughed out loud when I saw that, as the unwritten reply “well, he shouldn’t wear them” flashed across my ageing brain.

Ian Grace wrote a letter to the Gold Coast mayor requesting the ban. His request has received support from religious nutters in the Family First Party. Their supporting post was, in part, as follows:

“The media has made the most of reporting on this and undoubtedly cherished the opportunity to show us numerous pics of women in this garb, under the banner of ‘news’ of courses [sic]. But living in the real world and not the magical fairy land that we are supposed to pretend we live in, for all their offence at Ian’s comments and grandstanding about people not looking if they don’t like these bikinis, they know as well as we do that these G-string bikinis are worn to be seen. They are meant to make everyone look”2.

While it is reasonably perceptive to say that photographs of bikini-clad young women help drive up clicks to sell advertising (which is what the media is about), the lack of awareness from the religious in saying other people live a ‘magical fairy land’ is hilarious. The lack of self-awareness beggars belief. However, this piece is also perceptive in noting that these bikinis are meant to be seen. Surprisingly, décolletage (the showing of female cleavage) didn’t seem to bother Ian Grace when he ‘liked’ an item about the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) awards night, when décolletage was everywhere, including in the numerous photographs on the site which he liked3.

I haven’t tried to find any, but I suspect there was no whining about such displays of cleavage from other easily outraged people like Ian Grace. The reason why? Familiarity and time. Women have been flashing their cleavage for decades, if not centuries, and for such events as the AACTA event, décolletage is de rigueur.

I am old enough to remember when there was outrage over some bikinis, not the fact that they existed, but the fact that they were getting smaller and their sides narrower and their distance from the navel, greater. ‘Beach inspectors’ were sent onto the beach brandishing tape measures to gauge the dimensions of the bikinis. Even before that, a woman wearing a bikini on Bondi Beach in 1946 was charged with offensive behaviour; all part of the then war against ‘public indecency’4.

On the 1961 October long weekend, 50 women were ordered from Bondi Beach because their swimsuits did not ‘conform to regulations’. This was the beginning of the end of the old Ordinance 52 of the Local Government Act under which these women were charged. It was abandoned and a new ordinance introduced which simply required that bathers be ‘clad in a proper and adequate bathing costume’, without defining exactly what this was4. Bikinis were no longer deemed an affront to public decency.

I imagine Ian Grace will get over his outrage and the ridicule he has to endure5, as he becomes more familiar with the g-string bikini, or he learns to avert his eyes when one ambles off the beach into view, or he realises that he is just in the wrong epoch, or the wrong country.

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