budgie smugglers...
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/nothing-says-boomer-entitlement-qui...Dear Australian men who aren’t Mack Horton, Kyle Chalmers, or Ian Thorpe, we need to have a serious conversation about budgie smugglers.
It’s a short conversation and it starts with the letter N and ends with a big fat O.
For the sake of a country whose dignity has been in sharp decline since Tony Abbott first emerged from the surf donning a pair of Lycra underpants in 2009, we need to work together to eradicate this disease from our shores.
This has nothing to do with body shaming, or fat shaming, or slut shaming, or any of the new categories of shaming the internet has thrown up this year. It’s about my right to not be exposed to the outline of your manhood when I take my kids to a public beach or pool.
When you go to these places you enter into an implicit social contract with other bathers. You promise to not be a lecherous creep who makes everyone uncomfortable, and you promise not to look like one either.
If I had my way a budgie ban would be enshrined in the constitution along with other inalienable Aussie rights such as knocking off at 4pm for a Friday beer, picking fights with kangaroos that look at you funny, and calling umpires “filthy green maggots” at the footy.
It seems Australia agrees with me, too. In a 2014 newspaper poll, 92 per cent of readers of Toowoomba’s The Chronicle said they’d find a beach full of burqas less confronting than Onions Abbott in his undies – sorry, I mean Speedos. And that’s in a seat where One Nation polls more than 13 per cent of the vote!
Nothing says boomer entitlement quite like a pair of budgie smugglers. Like slip, slop, slapping a “F*ck off, we’re full” sticker on your groin, it says to the world you don’t care about anyone else’s rights or freedom to enjoy their summer devoid of your rod and reel.
But the budgies are making a comeback for a new generation of Australians who don’t remember the horrors of the ‘80s. I do, and I’m still having recurring nightmares about pristine beaches polluted with coconut oiled men looking like Tom Selleck after a decade-long Maccas binge. For simplicity’s sake let’s just call these people ‘Dad’.
Back then the only thing separating our coastline from a soft porn set was 70 centimetres of spandex. Which is why the ‘90s ushered in a more pleasing era – both morally and aesthetically – of board shorts.
Ah, boardies. Our greatest contribution to the world since the Akubra and the Hills hoist. Pioneered in the ’70s by Rip Curl, Quicksilver and Billabong – the Netflix, Stan and Disney+ of their time – it wasn’t until the ‘90s that the summer of the boardie fully took hold.
For more than two decades now, boardies have kept our beaches safe from the speedo scourge. But like a bunch of unwanted things on the comeback trail – measles, antisemitism, and Beverly Hills 90210 – it seems history is repeating itself in the most troubling of ways.
At the start of the year, GQ magazine asked whether 2019 was the year budgie smugglers became “socially acceptable”. It cited unofficial celebrity ambassadors such as Zac Efron and Prince Harry and the steady growth of mens’ swimwear brand Budgy (sic) Smuggler as evidence of the modern man’s willingness to expose their “upper thighs to the open expanse of the world outside”.
If this were just about thighs, I’d be okay with it. But it’s not, and it’s about time we not only addressed the elephant in the room but also his carefree, unsightly trunk.
hilarious!