I was recently in Brazil. My husband, Michael, and I ventured to the chichi shopping district in Fortaleza a few minutes from our hotel by car. It's a road like Worth Avenue in Palm Beach or Yorkville in Toronto with lots of clothing and shoe shops where you can buy something nice and expensive-looking to wear. The thing is, it wasn't Palm Beach or Toronto; it was Brazil and the prices reflected that. They were astonishingly reasonable. Clothes, even well made ones, were cheap there.
Our goal was to buy me some bathing suits or, as the Brits and South Africans say, cossies. I needed some new ones to refresh my collection. I've got oodles, as you can imagine, living on a sailboat, but some are looking tired and worn. I hope bathing suit owners aren't like dog owners who, after years of close proximity, start to resemble their pets. I really don't want to look like tired and worn spandex. Feeling that way is bad enough.
My bathing suits weren't just old, they were old-fashioned looking. It's not that I was wearing reinforced one-piecers with flouncey skirts or anything like that. Most of my collection comprised string bikinis that anywhere, other than Brazil, would have been considered stylish and hip and, on occasion, risqué, though I'm probably flattering myself with the last comment. Brazil, however, marks a high standard for beach wear exposure and I felt like I was an old lady in my full coverage bikini bottoms sitting at the hotel pool. The problem when too much flesh is covered by dowdy fabric is that it looks like you have more to hide than you do. The Brazilians solve this problem by wearing the thong. Practically everybody does.
I'll explain. Brazil is the land where beach life rules supreme. It's also the home of the perfect butt. Here most, but not all, beach bunnies and pool pashas have sculpted and bronzed rear ends. The standard for beach wear is accordingly skimpy, to show off your hind assets.
But it's not just women with perfect figures who don the thong. The rule is to flaunt it, even if you've got too much of it or it's not exactly the classically flawless form. Brazilians have a forgiving standard for less than perfect body types. Women, who anywhere else would be wearing a one piece with a towel wrapped around their midriff to hide a bulge and possibly a towel over their head to hide their identity, will wear something revealing on a public beach. The rule appears to be, if it's tanned, display it even if it's puckered with cellulite.
I think we North Americans are tough on ourselves. Come to Brazil and get over your body image hang-ups. It doesn't matter if you've got a bit extra on your thighs. Squeeze into a thong, tan it and you, too, can be off to the races or, more accurately, the beach. Brazilian women wear the slightest of coverings with a confidence and panache that make the rest of us in our full coverage bathing trunks/body armor look like uptight prudes, who will never be able to enjoy life because our asses are sheathed in too much nylon.
Naturally there are certain things that need to be take care of, if you're going to opt for maximum exposure (I'm not talking nude sun bathing here, the aficionados of which often seem not to care about what they look like). Of course, I'm talking about the excess of hair and the pubic kind that doesn't look great when it goes public in a skimpy bikini thong.
Brazil, in addition to being home of the perfect butt and thong beach-wear for the whole family, is also home to the Brazilian wax. Even if you opt not to get the full Brazilian which, as the name suggests, is a total removal of the hair God gave you in your nether regions, you can remove various degrees of it from all to token tufts. You certainly don't want to be wearing a skimpy patch of spandex and have everyone distracted by the five o'clock shadow on your upper thigh or your bum crack; neither will do in polite society.
In combination with our afternoon of thong buying, I parked myself at the hotel beauty salon and demanded a "depilation." Adila does the waxing and her atelier is in the back of the shop. She looks like somebody's grandmother off to the theatre-matinée wearing her helmet hair, tortoise shell glasses and string of pearls, not somebody who's about to pull your hair out by its roots. I knew they were serious about wax jobs in Brazil when Adila donned a headlamp for the task. While I lay on an operating table pretending to read a Portuguese gossip magazine, she applied the hot wax and pulled.
I don't know, if you've ever had a wax but it's basically another term for pain in all its forms of excruciating glory. It gives an insight into why different religious traditions condone self-flagellation and infliction of pain for the betterment of the soul. At least, I'd like to think it does. There has to be some higher reason for all this. Mercifully, like all good waxers, Adila was fast. She even used a comb and scissors to trim the remaining hair like a hair stylist would, except she was working below my waist. If you're wondering, I neither asked, nor did I get a blow dry.
After jumping off the table and tipping Adila too much money for stopping the persecution, I was off to the pool in my new thong, for the entire world to see.