Bikini Women

The most famous piece of swimwear, and arguably the most well known, has nothing to do with its name.  The bikini was a French invention which piggybacked off the fame of U.S. nuclear test bombs first set off in the Bikini Atoll in the year 1946.  Subsequent bombs, including a hydrogen bomb said to equal the power of 1,000 bombs of the type used on Hiroshima in Japan, completely vaporized one island and erased parts of two others.  The strength of this bomb was unanticipated, which was unfortunate because it resulted in widespread nuclear contamination which had a severely negative result for the natives of the island, including stillbirths, miscarriages, and faulty pregnancies.  The island remains contaminated to this day, and food grown in its soil is unsafe to eat because of the high levels of radioactive contamination.  The natives of the island have been unable to return to their homeland.  As a testament to the strange world we live in, the real "Bikini women", the ones who were forced to leave their home and later had to deal with the horrors of radioactive contamination, are not even given a thought when we talk about bikinis.  What if every time a bikini was sold, a portion of the proceeds would go to helping restore the Bikini islands?  I know that will never happen, but it's a thought.   
 

Out of this historic tragedy, the bikini for women was born.  In a way, bikini swimwear has had an explosive effect on the world.  It certainly caused a lot more outrage than the atomic bombs did.  Fortunate are those who can treat it as just a thing of fashion, and who live in a society where it is okay to wear a bikini.  This article isn't meant to take bikinis off the market or demonize what is, after all, something worn by women which took its name from a beautiful piece of the earth destroyed by man.  Rather, it's to show you some of the women behind the bikini, but also to remind people about what happened in a tiny atoll in the Pacific.

The first woman to publicly wear a bikini was French topless entertainer Micheline Bernardini in 1946.  She was the only one that designer Louis Réard could get to wear it! 
The popularity and acceptance of the bikini passed the point of no return when the movie "And God Created Woman" was released.  In it, a very sexy Brigitte Bardot sported a bikini, and the rest was history. 

Since then, bikinis have had to overcome moral and cultural barriers to become what they are today, the most popular swimwear on the planet.  In some places, they are still considered too risque for women to wear.  Sad as it is, there are actually countries where a woman would still be stoned if she were caught wearing a womens bikini in public.  These women, usually living in and/ or bound by the dictates of religion, have to cope with a whole different swimwear situation.  Usually, this means Muslim women.  They have had to put up with swimming in all the layers of their various robes and dresses for a long time now, so understandably were overjoyed when (a man, of course) invented a "bikini" for Muslim women.  Hey, bikini is just a word, right?  Now, instead of being weighed down by untold layers of heavy, soaked clothing, covering their entire body except for the face, they can get by with a light-weight layer covering their entire bodies excluding the face.  Modesty is a virtue, but I hope that these women will be able to enjoy the freedoms of something along the lines of a tankini sometime in this lifetime.

Amongst the more free/ morally degraded (depending on your value system) countries, Brazil has probably been the most forward-thinking in terms of the evolution of womens bikini swimwear.  Whereas earlier versions covered up the key "private" areas of a woman's body quite well, flesh-loving Brazil was able to reduce sizes in conjunction with Brazilian body waxing so that less and less of the body was covered, with the obvious result that more and more of it showed.  This gave rise to the fil dental, or the dental string bikini.  The fil dental covers more than a piece of dental string, but not much more.

This, in turn, led to g-strings and thongs becoming popular and accepted.  Now, I'm not sure about the rest of you, but this man's opinion is that some of these garments which are labelled "swimwear" are more titillating than nudity in the way they accentuate and tease.  It's may sound funny, but I truly believe that being naked would be more modest in a lot of these cases.  I find that while going nude doesn't leave much of the body to the imagination, but covering up key areas with little bits of cloth does a lot to get the mind racing.  These kinds of womens bikinis may have already exceeded full exposure in terms of what is morally acceptable.