The one-piece swimsuit is back in vogue, but for most of my life it was the aquatic equivalent of pleated khakis. One summer at my church youth group, it came from on high, Pastor Kyle’s office, that we would be having a mixed-gender field trip to the local water park.

There was a swell of excitement. Many of us girls, I suspect, yearned to parade our nubile bodies around like a bunch of Pearberry-scented Jezebels. But then came a very unfortunate caveat: all the girls would have to wear one-piece bathing suits, and those who didn’t wear one-pieces would have to wear a t-shirt to cover themselves. In the end, it would be many years before a man would see my navel.

A few summers ago, I bought a new swimsuit from a hip young people’s store. When I put it on, I realized the top violated rule 3 from above—it started sliding down my chest just as soon as it was on me. In hopes of salvaging the situation, I ordered a new top from a more grown-up store, since I have also heard that “mixing it up” is an acceptable thing to do with the two halves of a bikini these days.

As soon as the new top arrived and I tried it on, I knew I had only made the problem worse. It was neon yellow. It looked cheap and hastily made, like a sexy banana Halloween costume. I returned to the store website to read the online reviews: “BEWARE. The seams on this make it look like there are ARROWS pointing at your nipples.”

This is a common complaint among female bathing-suit reviewers: that a bathing suit clearly designed to showcase your breasts makes it too obvious that you have breasts. The ladies’ swimsuit sweet spot seems to lie on the smudgy line between confidence and modesty, originality and conformity, body shame and unabashed celebration.

“This ‘elephant in the room’ is perhaps the strangest paradox of the pool: everyone is nearly naked, yet nobody refers to the fact,” writes the sociologist Susie Scott in Reclothing the Emperor: The Swimming Pool as a Negotiated Order,27 her study of the norms of swimming pools. “Male swimmers wear trunks or boxer shorts and women wear swimsuits or bikinis, in both cases to cover the sexualized parts of the body, though actually accentuating them.”

But ignoring this is necessary so that we can maintain the notion that sprawling out in two square feet of polyester is just what respectable career women do on weekends.

“To openly acknowledge the potential for sexual contact between people would disturb the polite fiction that this is just a place of exercise, inviting embarrassment and making normal swimming impossible,” Scott adds.