{"id":142668,"date":"2022-03-07T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/culture.org\/?p=142668"},"modified":"2022-03-07T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T12:00:00","slug":"tool-cdlp-swim-shorts-159","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culture.org\/archive\/tool-cdlp-swim-shorts-159\/","title":{"rendered":"Tool: CDLP swim shorts, $159"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">FEATURES:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Side-seam pockets<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Available in \u201cDeeper Lagoon\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ecologically considerate<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>\u201cConsciously constructed\u201d in Portugal<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Call them hams. Call them my milkers. They are thighs, mine, and these names are the blows two boyfriends dealt them. I was, admittedly, ill prepared. Though spoken in the spirit of loving jest, the remarks nevertheless cut me. Let\u2019s agree they cut me. Years on, I still secret my thick, pale burdens beneath denim and leather. Spring comes, summer\u2019s in the offing: swimsuit season. My friends acquire Charlie- or Speedo-brand Speedos. I waver.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For much of my adult life, I have worn swim trunks disparate in cut but united by the fact that I didn\u2019t buy them. At age twenty, a smallish, light-gray pair appeared in the stairwell of my Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment building, on a landing where tenants discarded junk for their neighbors\u2019 taking. Young, shameless, brave, and, above all, cheap, I took them. Six years later, a black Polo Ralph Lauren swimsuit came into my possession courtesy of my roommate\u2014or, more specifically, her boyfriend, whose body the not-quite-knee-length suit did not fit. In between, I paid bottom dollar for fast-fashion options from Topman and ASOS.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By age twenty-eight, something had changed. I was older, perhaps wiser, vaccinated, and ready to invest, at last, in a finer, hypothetically more flattering swimsuit, albeit one that still complemented my particular neuroses. I had become a gay man who loved his heaven-sent body and a gay man who loathed his rotten body. I therefore required apparel that would split the difference between showing off my delightful goods, which everyone wanted to see, and modestly presenting my spoiled milkers, with which I encumber onlookers solely because the season\u2019s pools and beaches obligate me to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;Short but not briefs, loose yet supportive, blue and also green, hinting at bulge without giving print, with tiny inlets at the sides of each thigh pushing a centimeter extra of skin into the sunlight: Here was a swimsuit as ambivalent about its form as I was professing to be about mine; here were CDLP\u2019s Swim Shorts in Deeper Lagoon. The only trouble was the price. Though I had not spent money on swimwear in years, I also had not saved any funds that would license me to spend $159. I did, however, have a new credit card and new credit limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>CDLP swimwear\u2019s other selling point is that it\u2019s <em>good for the environment<\/em>\u2014or certainly no worse than my polyester Topman suit. The swim shorts are made of 100 percent&nbsp;Econyl, an endlessly recyclable nylon synthesized from garbage carpets, fishing nets, and other industrial plastics that clutter landfills and oceans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The idea that ethical consumption is, if not a scam, then an inadequate solution to climate change by now borders on axiomatic, even if its profiteers can\u2019t admit as much. \u201cOur appetite to create new products and buy new products is infinite. The planet\u2019s resources aren\u2019t,\u201d Econyl\u2019s homepage sagely observes, before insisting, \u201cBut it\u2019s okay because we can have both: new products and a better environment.\u201d (Farther down, Econyl advertises products adorned with labels like ethical labor, eco design, craftsmanship, and made in italy. Econyl is owned by Aquafil, an Italian company.) The labels give the lie. Whatever their real relationship is to waste reduction and sustainable manufacturing processes, they, like Econyl, also function to help shoppers suspend their disbelief\u2014in the narrative proposing ethical consumption as a salvific force\u2014long enough to enter their credit card information.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what <em>should <\/em>we do? Jo Livingstone, writing in <em>The<\/em> <em>New Republic<\/em> about \u201cthe impossibility of doing no harm while shopping\u201d for groceries, answers the question frankly: \u201cI have no idea.\u201d One option is to sip the corporate Kool-Aid just enough to get a light sugar rush: because CDLP markets its swimwear as sustainably produced, the shorts allow me to feel good about having bought them over a pair manufactured using unrecycled nylon. And if that feeling evaporates almost instantly, at least I can look hot\u2014or possibly not\u2014in them. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hotness haunts us\u2014not Adonis\u2019s heat but that of climate change, n\u00e9e global warming. We perform high-wire acts to get by; there are few other options. <em>If I recycle<\/em>, we murmur to ourselves, never finishing the sentence. <em>If I eat no meat<\/em>. If we believe we <em>could<\/em> do more, on an individual level, to change things, we might feel less helpless and small. We might be given to overinvesting in narratives of personal responsibility, in which something other than a miracle\u2014of relentless collective action, of the rapid advancement and adoption of new technologies, of a socialist God, of merciful aliens\u2014halts the advance of the overwhelming thing. And yet that investment\u2014a sort of bit we perform, its bit-ness pendulating from the front to the back of the mind\u2014has its purposes. It fills space and time, not unlike my body and my supposedly troubled relationship to the reportedly elephantine appendages that motor it. And the bit affords me an inch of agency, however illusory, and so an inch of pleasure. It\u2019s something to play with.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, in my hither-and-thither CDLP Swim Shorts in Deeper Lagoon, I accept the thing rather than shy away from it. I give thanks for the bit\u2014for all bits: for aesthetic and moral vanity, for pay-per-praxis, for hope, the bit that is \u201cthe bit.\u201d What I\u2019m avoiding is wearing a Speedo.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FEATURES: Call them hams. Call them my milkers. They are thighs, mine, and these names are the blows two boyfriends dealt them. I was, admittedly, ill prepared. Though spoken in the spirit of loving jest, the remarks nevertheless cut me. Let\u2019s agree they cut me. Years on, I still secret my thick, pale burdens beneath [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":143528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142668"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}