"Last month in the Southern Amalfi Coast of Italy, I hopped onto the back of my friend Vincenza's Vespa, and we zipped down to join her friends at the beach. She set up our ombrellone (sun umbrella) in the sand, we laid out our towels next to the other women, and then walked in the water. "Why are you wearing that?" she asked me, gesturing at my bathing suit with a grimace."
"Vincenza, who is in her sixties, was wearing a strapless black bikini. "Only very old women wear one-piece bathing suits here," she informed me. The Beach Where Beach Body Wasn't a Thing I glanced around the beach and sure enough, not a single one-piece in sight. Women of all ages and sizes were in bikinis. Enjoying the sun, splashing in the water, with a kind of freedom and lack of self-consciousness that I'd never seen before."
"I, on the other hand, was wearing a one-piece red bathing suit, tight and uncomfortable with built-in "shaper" technology, complete with a flouncy skirt to hide my bottom and upper thighs. Suddenly, I felt positively Victorian. "I thought that I'm too old for a bikini now," I explained, "that's how it is in North America. Also, my previous partner made me self-conscious when I showed my body."
On the Southern Amalfi Coast, an older Italian woman named Vincenza rode a Vespa to the beach, set up an ombrellone, and invited companions to swim. She questioned a visitor's one-piece suit and insisted that, in her community, bikinis are common across ages. Women on that beach wore bikinis without sucking in their stomachs, splashed freely, and displayed a lack of self-consciousness. The visitor admitted wearing a tight shaper one-piece and feeling influenced by North American norms and a previous partner who policed her modesty. The contrast highlights cultural differences in acceptance of aging bodies and suggests that older women who do not hide their bodies model confidence and reduced shame.
Read at Psychology Today
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