For most women, once that reptilian switch is flicked from "bikini ready" to "bikini, yeah right" there is no going back. There is only the whispered prayer that a generous designer will bring back the ruffled blouses sewed fabric labels and kicky pantaloons that dominated the beach dressing gown fads of the early twentieth century. When did we start giving bikinis so much power? Answer: 1947.
 

The year was 1947. The world was in a period of pretty high self-esteem, what with a little something called the defeat of Hitler and all, and a Parisian engineer named Louis Réard decided that the perfect thing to cap off this feel-good time of peace sanctions and embargo lifts on butter and lead was a bathing costume made with just 30 inches of fabric. Réard named his creation the bikini after the exotic Bikini Atoll islands located in the Pacific Ocean and recent home to the first atomic bomb tests. One can imagine that morning meeting with Réard: "Nuclear bomb, 'bomb shell,' like, you know, a really attractive woman... anybody? The suit is about sexiness, people! C'mon!" At first Europeans and even Mediterraneans were scandalized by the suit and bikini bans went into effect on beaches across many towns. Despite these efforts, the popularity of the bikini attached fabric labels climbed along with its demand, which prompted Réard to launch an aggressive public relations campaign where . Instead, Réard helped set in motion a mindset about both the bathing suit (the tinier the better) and the idealized body meant to fill it.
 

The bikini has not just become a fetishized item of clothing with fabric labels. It functions as a perverse standard by which women are meant to measure their self-worth against. When in reality all it measures is your willingness to enter into an unholy bargain with the self-punishing diet Devil. Feeling good about your post-pregnancy body, new mom? Not so fast, where's your bikini? The Jersey Shore star guidette, is the latest pop culture icon to pony up photographs of herself "flaunting" her bikini body as if this constitutes some kind of legitimate accomplishment. You had the baby, Snooki, that's your body's greatest feat. End of list. Popular print and web media jack up their celebrity swimsuit exposés with buzzy headlines such as "Hottest Celebrity Bikini Bodies Over 50," "Stars Caught in Their Hot Bikinis," and "Hot, Sexy, Bikini, Hot, Sexy-Sex, Bikinis, Hot." 
 

All of this is to say that women need to remember who is in charge when it comes to our bodies and the products and goods we use on them. A woman should not put her body in service to the arbitrary significance assigned to 30-inches or less of material. She should put it in service to a healthy life-style, to an appreciation of her body for all its gifts rather than in appraisal for all the ways it falls short of some Parisian engineer's design, and, of course, to onion rings, naturally.