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    #51
    Swimsuit issues

    Creatine is the go-to supplement in rugger bugger future Barristers schools in Ireland at least. And I'm sure roids are there at the fringes too.

    And now every cunt everywhere is a Lifelong Irish Rugby fan (who knows, maybe even in fucking Ballybrack or Darndale now?) or sincerely looking up to that feral Conor McGregor cunt, that's just going to push the demand for muscle higher at a crazy young age. Who knows, maybe porn is a factor as well? Don't seem to be too many skinny bastards or Ron Jeremy types on the skin flicks anymore.

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      #52
      Swimsuit issues

      I don't think I ever thought much about my body so far as how it looked. Physically I've always been Mr Average, there were always better looking dudes than me, and uglier fuckers too. Nowadays as long as most parts of it continue to work reasonably well I'm happy. For C it's different.

      We met when she was 17, and she was drop dead gorgeous, scarily so. That too, I learned later, comes at a price. Early on she cultivated a cold, brittle exterior to fend off the constant advances. Wore shapeless sweaters most of the time (standard art-student gear anyway back then) and flat shoes (she's never worn high-heels in her life). Saddest thing of all, she had few female friends.

      When we married 35 years later (it was a long courtship) her stroke happened. Aside from more serious consequences, she was no longer the woman who turned heads when she walked into a room, or she was — but for very different reasons. She felt she'd been plunged into old-age overnight, broken and — worse — ugly. She's wrestled with the latter ever since. Sometimes she feels it's a kind of karma, or a bad fairytale, when she looks in a mirror the face that stares back isn't really hers. If she could only find the right spell she'd get her own body back.

      But I shouldn't over-dramatise. Most of the time she accepts how she is now, and deals brilliantly with the deficits. Nevertheless there's a palpable sense of loss that no reassurance from myself, or others, can completely assuage. Swimsuits? No, she doesn't do those anymore.

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        #53
        Swimsuit issues

        Being beautiful as a young woman and a little broken by it probably gets a fairly small violin, but it must be a bit shit, and frightening I suppose. Cut off from a lot of stuff almost as much as the geeks and the outcasts.

        When I worked in an otherwise all female office, the shifting alliances and the politics of break taking was a bit perplexing. Everyone seemed to dislike the unnervingly beautiful middle manager. Who seemed perfectly pleasant and professional, if Uber Nordie.

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          #54
          Swimsuit issues

          My (then) best friend moved from the UK to Alaska when we were 14 (her dad got moved there by his work, a mining company), and mentioned to other friends when she came back to visit the next year that a lot of the guys at her high school worked out, unlike (obviously) basically all of us guys back in England, even the sporty ones. Given she was talking about 15/16/17-year-olds, I remember thinking even then, 'Isn't that a bit... weird?'

          Count me in the Lang Spoon 'same weight as I was twenty years ago' camp. In my case not actually twenty years, because twenty years ago I was twelve, but my weight's remained stable since I was about 18. By and large I'm happy with that, and living in a place that gets so hot in the summer does cure one to a certain degree of any fear of taking one's shirt off in certain situations, but it's hard to be completely comfortable and I have to admit that when my girlfriend tells me I'm sexy, my first response is often to wonder whether she's taking the piss.

          I would also never wear Speedos. No thanks. No major body issues at the pool, appearance-wise at least - but given that my second shoulder dislocation (of four) came in a swimming pool, after I put a bit too much into a forward stroke and the joint popped out (yeah, seriously; I have a really fucked shoulder), I do feel very uncomfortable swimming ever since because of that. Which is a shame, as I loved swimming before it happened.

          Back to the original point of the thread, ESPN Magazine do a thing called The Body Issue, which has always struck me as trying to cash in/gain publicity in a similar way to SI's Swimsuit Issue, with the quite major difference that a) the subjects of the photos and interviews are all completely Billy Bollocks and b) they're all sports people. I've never actually picked the issue up, but it seems preferable to SI's approach, on face value.

          Mention of the nudist beach reminded me of a hysterically funny story my good friend and OTF Chess participant (but not OTFer) Alex told us at his girlfriend's birthday party on Saturday night, but this probably isn't the thread to repeat it.

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            #55
            Swimsuit issues

            My wife wears those board shorts, or sometimes a swimskirt, but she's self-conscious about her thighs and butt. But as she says, she's 43 and had two kids, so fuck 'em if they don't like it.

            I'm self-conscious about looking like everyone's idea of a skinny old man, so who am I to throw stones? I'm actually getting more vain as I age, keeping my hair tight to the wood in order to hide the grey, and wearing a 'rash guard' at the beach...you know...for sun protection.

            I think the one promise we can all make and try to keep is to keep our feet from looking old-man: trim your fucking toenails and rub on a bit of moisturizer from time to time.

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              #56
              Swimsuit issues

              Back when I played football I was surrounded by all these super-tall, super-fast, super-fit, muscular Dutch lads who would outmuscle and outrun me, a sweaty grey blob, in the first half of every match. As a right-back I would usually have to foul in the first half, sometimes picking up a yellow card.

              But something strange always happened in the second half. In the final 30 minutes of the match, everybody else was knackered, but I was still going at the same level as in the first half. I would make match saving tackles and clearances off the line to make up for my fellow defenders who were finished. Then I'd bomb up the wing and win a corner or pop in an assist.

              So these muscular bodies? They can be a limitation. Look at what happened to Ronaldoriginal after he left Barca and the Italians beefed him up. He was never the same player again.

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                #57
                Swimsuit issues

                Amor de Cosmos wrote: I don't think I ever thought much about my body so far as how it looked. Physically I've always been Mr Average, there were always better looking dudes than me, and uglier fuckers too. Nowadays as long as most parts of it continue to work reasonably well I'm happy. For C it's different.

                We met when she was 17, and she was drop dead gorgeous, scarily so. That too, I learned later, comes at a price. Early on she cultivated a cold, brittle exterior to fend off the constant advances. Wore shapeless sweaters most of the time (standard art-student gear anyway back then) and flat shoes (she's never worn high-heels in her life). Saddest thing of all, she had few female friends.

                When we married 35 years later (it was a long courtship) her stroke happened. Aside from more serious consequences, she was no longer the woman who turned heads when she walked into a room, or she was — but for very different reasons. She felt she'd been plunged into old-age overnight, broken and — worse — ugly. She's wrestled with the latter ever since. Sometimes she feels it's a kind of karma, or a bad fairytale, when she looks in a mirror the face that stares back isn't really hers. If she could only find the right spell she'd get her own body back.

                But I shouldn't over-dramatise. Most of the time she accepts how she is now, and deals brilliantly with the deficits. Nevertheless there's a palpable sense of loss that no reassurance from myself, or others, can completely assuage. Swimsuits? No, she doesn't do those anymore.
                You should make this into a film. I'm thinking young art school you would be played by that kid who is going to play Spider-Man and mature you could be Liam Neeson.

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                  #58
                  Swimsuit issues

                  ROFL!

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                    #59
                    Swimsuit issues

                    So these muscular bodies? They can be a limitation
                    It used to make me laugh when all the triangle-shaped Jonny Bravos at the gym would look like they were going to die after 10 minutes on the cross trainer at level 9, and the incredulity in their eyes when fat little me was clocking up an hour on level 15.

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                      #60
                      Swimsuit issues

                      Lang Spoon wrote: I'm a little bit heartened to hear of other bashful skinny freaks tbh. I'm pretty much the same build and shape as more than twenty years ago, which isn't great. Amazingly, haggard underweight adolescent is a body shape that never appears in Men's Health. I'm sure that if I do end up putting on weight it'll be all around the middle and my arms will continue to resemble birch twigs.
                      Bad news for you LS – that's exactly how it works. I swear I don't have triceps, never have. It must've been something to do with my high school installing a Mars vending machine when I was 12, meaning I spent my pubescent years eating Galaxy bars for lunch instead of protein.

                      laverte wrote: I'm not at all shocked that many men dislike their bodies and suffer for it. A friend went to a boys school where during games lessons one of the teams had to play topless. This was presumably excruciating for boys who were fat, spotty, hairy, etc.
                      Oh jeez, yes. At my aforementioned high school, it was bad enough just for a moment in Games lessons when you found yourself on the team who had to take their rugby jerseys off and turn them inside-out (to make it 'plain' vs 'stripes') whilst out on the playing field in the open air. When not playing team sports though, the boys' PE kit was only a black singlet vest and a pair of little, shiny, weirdly satiny bright red shorts. This was embarrassing enough wear for labouring around the grassy athletics track in, or attempting to throw a javelin, or pounding the nearby streets doing cross-country; but at least when you had your trainers on and were running about it felt kind of normal and sensible.

                      Whenever we had a lesson actually in the school gym, however, that kit was reduced – for no reason I could ever perceive – to just the shorts.

                      The mere smell of a changing-room (stale sweat, damp feet, lingering deodorant) even today could still take me straight back to being 11 (12...13...14) years old, padding barefoot and apprehensive out onto the wooden floor of the gymnasium, nothing of me but ribs, elbows and "outie" belly-button, nipples shrivelling in the cold air. I was baffled as to how some other boys seemed to have come built in with muscles, tans, natural grace and/or chests that stuck out further than their stomachs. And equally perplexed, of course, as to why it was deemed necessary by the school, in this the early 1990s, that I should have to coax my already reluctant and uncooperative body (without any muscles, courage or athleticism) into doing headstands, climbing ropes, vaulting pommel horses etc. whilst entirely naked except for those tiny red shorts.

                      And I was merely one of the skinny runts. I could only speculate what it felt like to the handful of heavy, podgy, doughy boys in our class to confront whatever fresh physical torture the teacher had conjured that week clad in this fashion. I imagine they, even more than me, spent the opening minutes of each such lesson hoping like hell the girls didn't come past too closely or slowly outside of the gym's glass fire-exit door, on their way off to play hockey or netball or whatever it was girls did while we were being mercilessly exercised in all our fleshy adolescent shamefulness inside.

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                        #61
                        Swimsuit issues

                        That's just hazing.

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                          #62
                          Swimsuit issues

                          Yeah, I often think that many of the UK's health problems might not be quite as pressing if teachers - certainly from my own generation, and judging by what I've read here and heard elsewhere, from previous and more recent ones too - weren't seemingly encouraged to make PE lessons as unpleasant as they possibly can for as many of the non-elite athlete students as possible. The entire point ought to be to make exercise enjoyable rather than traumatic, and yet the aim seems to be exactly the opposite.

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                            #63
                            Swimsuit issues

                            Same here

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