Stupid Summer Activities IV: Changing Clothes at the Beach – The American Spectator

Since Julius Caesar’s time, science has been unsuccessfully investigating why women wearing tiny bikinis need to set up a military tent in the middle of the beach to change out of their bathing suits. Anthropologists, always enthusiastic about people who live in the nude, are now studying the parallel male phenomenon.

After arduous research, they have discovered a certain analogy between this female behavior and that of normal men, who, while hiking in the Amazon, need to walk half an hour into the jungle to distance themselves from the group to pee.

The Male Change

Man is an animal for whom nudity is not a good thing. A naked man is a pitiful being in almost every sense, no matter how much the leaders of the Nothing to See Here (NTSH) current happily stroll around men’s locker rooms airing their most intimate appendages. Fortunately, most of us men try to prevent things like this from happening, even if it means risking our lives. 

I will try to explain why men need at least seven people to hold the towel around us to change out of our bathing suits at the beach. Also, we need a confidentiality report on those seven people, to ensure that they are all trustworthy people, that there are no infiltrators, that they are all male or, failing that, sexless, and that they have no interest whatsoever in what is happening on the other side of the towel but are sufficiently aware of the capital importance of what is occurring, because that could otherwise result in neglect, carelessness, and the subsequent dropping of part of the towel.

MILOTB Changer

When a man has no one to hold his towel for him, he must avoid swimming, or else he must wear his wet bathing suit forever. Total loss of masculine dignity: giant, billowing, fluorescent patchwork, mother-in-law-on-the-beach (MILOTB)–style changing sheets that fit around your neck with an elastic band and drape around you like curtains to the floor. It is preferable to die devoured by your own child’s floating plastic shark than to have to change using one of these contraptions.

Women, on the other hand, can use MILOTB with dignity, for one reason: Women can do whatever they want. Besides, at the end of the day, they will do it anyway.

Seaside Fashion

Part of the requirements for the Blue Wave Certification, I guess, must have included someone insisting on installing both public toilets and changing rooms on the sand. Absolute nonsense. Because of this initiative, bathers believe that now it is OK to relieve oneself on the beach, so long as it is inside a cabin of very questionable plumbing. 

Not so long ago, we had not yet lost all moral standards, and people knew that nothing was to be done on the beach. You had to come prepared from home and leave when the sting of physiological urgency told you to do so. An unnatural extension of one’s stay on the beach making constant use of the toilets is a filth. 

The same goes for changing rooms. Only scientists, particularly those who are looking for evidence of the next pandemic, should go into those huts, that horribly cold, wet, sandy surface.

Changing in the Car

One of my most refined techniques consists of changing into my bathing suit inside the car at the parking lot at the beach. I drop down low in the driver’s seat but lean my head on the passenger seat, so that the handbrake pokes hard into my ribcage, between the 13th and 14th ribs. Instantly, I pull the lever that moves the seat back and push on the steering wheel to gain as much space as possible. Some experts believe that the best thing to do is to lower the handbrake so as not to hurt your back, and to control random movements of the car by pushing the brake with one of your free hands. The problem is that this operation requires at least three hands, and this considerably reduces the number of men who can perform it. You think it’s embarrassing for someone to see you changing inside the car, until you discover what it’s like to tear up the sandy beach with an out-of-control vehicle, occupied by a naked idiot who forgot to push the brake properly with his hand.

When the time comes, I look around to confirm that there are no humans in sight, and, with a nimble hip thrust, I lift my feet toward the ceiling while twisting my head backward, pulling hard on my swimsuit’s waistband, then overcoming the critical moment: my ass sticking out of the window, with my wet bathing suit tangled around my knees. It’s important to get away quickly because the beach is now full of people with phones in their hands and whose only mission in the world is to photograph the asses of journalists in distress. When at last you are free and naked, the operation of putting on the dry swimsuit must begin, and you remember that it is in the trunk. At this point, there are two possible solutions.

The best one is to not overthink it, open the door, run to the trunk, grab the dry bathing suit, and run back looking like nothing happened (NTSH). I have friends who are able to do this breaking the sound barrier and, therefore, with no chance of being detected. In my case, a quick search on Google Maps shows, on several beaches that I frequent, a guy who looks a lot like me, with a panicked expression trying to jump the span of a car in his birthday costume. Luckily, they blur the faces. 

The other solution is to crawl around inside the car, stark naked, fold down the seats, and rush into the trunk. But I’m not sure that this show would be much more dignified on Google’s cameras and satellites. 

Translated by Joel Dalmau.

READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:

Stupid Summer Activities I: Climbing a Mountain

Stupid Summer Activities II: The Perfect Barbecue