Swimming in regular clothing increases the risk of drowning.
Seriously–it’s not safe.
Both my daughters were lifeguards as teens, and I still remember the training exercises they had to do when they jumped into the pool in normal clothing and then had to rescue others–or be rescued.
It is much, much harder to swim in anything that is not swimsuit material. Regular clothing absorbs water and weighs you down, plus it can get snagged on things, or balloon out and make it easier to carry you away with an undertow or tide.
Especially with lake swimming, it is not safe.
Yet despite this, teen girls are often made to swim with regular clothing covering swimsuits.
They’re told to swim with t-shirts or shorts over their swimsuits to protect the boys.
Boys’ comfort trumps girls’ safety.
I’ve been talking about this quite a bit on X and Facebook this summer, and I kept having men saying, “that doesn’t really happen.”
So I created a post and asked women to share their stories–and so far there are more than 600 of them. Here are just a few:
People Who Never Learned To Swim:
“I cannot swim. I was told as a child that I did not need to learn to swim because I was never going to go swimming as an adult because swimsuits are immodest. Then I was playing (as a child) in a friend’s pool and got trapped underwater by an inflatable raft. Her dad fished me out, but now I have a panic attack whenever water covers my face, and I have not been able to learn to swim as an adult. I made sure both of my daughters took swimming lessons.”
“I spent the first part of my life near the Gulf of Mexico (Pensacola, FL) and never learned to swim because I wasn’t allowed to wear a swimsuit of any kind. When I was older and went to church camps in the Midwest, girls and boys had to swim separately and while some girls were allowed to wear one piece swimsuits, others had stricter rules and also had to wear t-shirts and shorts (or even culottes, which are so not safe for swimming). It took me so long to feel comfortable in any kind of swimsuit but once I got there, I’ve never looked back.”
“I wasn’t allowed to take swimming lessons in junior high because I would be required to wear a swim suit during the lessons. I heard this message about my clothes “causing the boys/men to stumble” sooooo many times growing up.”
People Who Had To Wear Shorts/Pants/Skirts:
“I did not do this personally, but it was normal in my fundy circles for girls to swim in ankle length denim skirts.
I was too ashamed of my body so I pretty much did not go swimming at all from 11-28, except for two rare occasions with only girls present. Any other time I chose to just soak my feet in the water while staying in my normal clothes making excuses as to why I wasn’t swimming with everyone else.
Even now it’s hard for me to wear a swimsuit — even a modest swim dress. I show more skin than that in my normal clothes, lol, but swimwear is too triggering.”
“I’ll see your t- shirt and raise you a denim jumper with rocks, literal rocks! sewn into the hem to keep it from floating up in the water. My poor mom. She tried so hard. I bought myself my first one piece swimsuit in my life this year for my birthday present to me. I love it!”
“Oh goodness! At my Christian high school girls weren’t allowed to swim without shorts AND T-shirts over their swimsuits. This — even tho it was gender segregated swimming
But that’s not even all… until the year I got there, female students weren’t allowed to wear just snow pants for skiing trips either. Girls had to wear long dresses OVER their ski pants.
Boys wore regular snow gear, and normal swim trunks without shirts required.”
She Deserves Better!
Because we all deserve a big faith.
Your daughter deserves better than what you likely grew up with in church.
What would it look like to prepare the next generation without toxic teachings about modesty, sex, or consent, and instead set her up for a big faith?
Boys And Girls Were Even Separated:
“I don’t remember a time during youth group activities when boys and girls were allowed to swim together. My parents didn’t implement that level of covering up in our own family until after I was an adult and had moved out.”
“Most of the time it was split. Rarely was it coed swimming. But if it ever was – boys could swim without their shirt. I remember at times girls had to wear shirts and other times one piece.”
“Mixed swimming???? I had to sign a contract from jr high-high school that I wouldn’t go “mixed swimming” (boys and girls together) or I would get kicked out of school.
At youth camp, girls swam alone. There was a 6 ft wooden fence around it so no one could see, and if had a 2 piece, even with all girls, we were required to wear a t shirt.”
Men Were Impacted Too:
“I’m a man and it happened to me. I had to wear a shirt so girls didn’t get the wrong idea. This was the same place I met my wife. She had it worse… Long shorts and shirt over swimsuit.
“Im still so used to watching the girls wear clothes over swimsuits I thought it was how they all wanted to swim, and I was going to try it until my wife corrected me. I got desensitized to it and didn’t know that’s what the girls were told to do.”
“I grew up in a culture where girls weren’t even supposed to wear regular swimsuits. And I never had swimming lessons because God forbid that I, as a boy even, see a female’s bare leg or shoulder.
The only thing that’s unbelievable to me in all of this is that some men think you’re making this crap up.
I freaking LIVED it.”
Please, please don’t ever let your children swim in regular clothing.
Safety takes precedence over everything (and incidentally–safety also means that we should be cautious of UV rays, and likely wear rash guards at the beach or for pool swimming to prevent burns, too. Not because of modesty–but because of safety!).
It makes me so sad that we’ve so burdened teen girls with this. Remember that our survey of 7000 predominantly evangelical women for our book She Deserves Better found that when girls were taught as teens that they bore responsibility for boys’ sin, they were 67% more likely to marry abusers, and 52% more likely to experience sexual pain disorders. So it’s not just dangerous now; it’s dangerous long-term.
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Our girls deserve better!
We have an awesome modesty hand-out to give to youth groups or summer camps that have these rules, and it’s part of our Great Sex Rescue Toolkit. It summarizes all our stats and findings, and talks about how to discuss clothing and dress codes in a healthy way, rather than making girls sin management tools for boys.
And, of course, if you want to have healthy convos with your daughters about this, please check out our book She Deserves Better.
So people are being deprived of a live saving skill because they don’t want girls to be seen as immodest.
That is incredibly dumb.
You wouldn’t go around saying your children shouldn’t be able to read because that means they will be smarter than their peers. It is absurd.
Also at some point men and women get curious about each other’s bodies. It’s better to help them develop a healthy view of each other early. Why not use this as a teaching opportunity rather than make women feel self conscious and men feel as though they are being set up to fail?
Exactly!
I was never in any youth group during my teens so I didn’t know about the swimsuit issue. However, because I was shy about my body and didn’t want any possible perverts looking at me while I went swimming, I covered up with a long shirt. I also dealt with a distorted body image and believed I was fat when I wasn’t.
Now if I’m swimming outdoors (I usually swim at an indoor pool), I do put a shirt over my suit to prevent sunburn because I’m fair skinned.
What’s ironic is that when the church or Christian culture hypes up girls/women’s bodies and swimwear as something that boys are not supposed to see, making them taboo, they are making them more sexualized and causing boys/men to be more intensely drawn to them. Making a big deal over girls wearing two piece swimsuits ends up making boys a lot more affected by then.
It’s the Forbidden Fruit Effect, a lot of things that are made taboo just end up making people more drawn by them. Apostle Paul in Romans said the Law although holy actually said the law ended up actually increases the desire to do those things. When we are actually talking about actual real sin, that’s one thing but a lot of rules just make peope want to do them more or more attracted to the things they say not to do . Rules and boundaries are off cours necessary but they have to be made with wisdom.
Also if boys/men are able to see womens bodies in swimsuits it can actually be helpfull because if they get used to seeing them they won’t be as affected as ,say a guy who never hardly sees them. Even if a boy is sexually attracted, these a difference between that and Lust (bad intent) Boys and men who go to the beach a lot probably have significantly have more self control than men in the church.
I actually know of a case where a thirteen year old girl did drown because of her dress requirements..
Back in the mid nineties I was a county constable. That is an elected law enforcement position of which our county has twelve.
Little River flows through our small town. Most of the time it’s barely deep enough to tube. There’s a stretch about six feet deep behind a 100 year old mill dam. It’s a popular swimming hole in the summer. It’s where my dad taught me to swim.
This sweltering Saturday afternoon an early teen Sunday school class from the local Pentecostal church was having a picnic. They were splashing around in the shallow water in their long denim shirts and long sleeve blouses. Sooner or later the dare to walk the dam gets started and a group of three of them decided to try it. Now, it’s doable. I’ve done it several times myself but never in a long denim skirt. There’s about four inches of water pouring over that dam and the dam itself is slick as a babie’s butt. The group of girls got about half way across when one of them fell on the upstream side. She was pinned against the dam by the current and tangled in her skirt.
I answered the call from county dispatch for all available officers to rush to the park. I arrived right behind a deputy sheriff and a city officer. The deputy and myself dropped our belts and vests and dove in. We found her pinned against the dam. We did our best to free her without getting pinned ourselves. Now, she had been underwater for about fifteen minutes when we arrived so she was already dead. The fire dept arrived and wound up getting a rope around her knees and pulling her loose with the fire truck. We all felt that if she had been wearing a bathing suit she could have gotten loose and surfaced.
This is horrifying. That poor little girl
Oh, my goodness, that’s so sad!
Why am I getting weird flashbacks to the post about the pastor who said it would be better if his wife were murdered than raped?
https://baremarriage.com/2022/08/rape-victims-deserve-life-nathaniel-jolly-preaches-death/
So now it’s better to drown than to risk being seen in a swimsuit?
What’s the over/under on how long till women are simply not allowed out of the house? Ten years? Five?
It reminds me of the horrific story in Saudi Arabia of the girls’ school that was on fire, and the police wouldn’t let the girls out because they didn’t have on the hijab. Or the dress code at Pensacola Christian College which told girls that in cases of a fire they had to put on modest clothes before fleeing.
I cannot imagine burying a child because I wouldn’t let her wear a normal bathing suit. That is horrifying, and that isn’t how God wants us to treat the beautiful children entrusted to our care.
Also… maybe it’s better for people to just get used to the fact that we have bodies. If you can’t handle the fact that women exist in bodies that go through numerous stages, you aren’t socially developed. We hit puberty, gain weight and grow breasts, menstruate, ovulate, might get pregnant and have children and breastfeed, hit perimenopause and menopause, and get old and die. I’m not advocating for nudity or anything, just for men to find our bodies as unremarkable as we find theirs.
“Boys’ comfort trumps girls’ safety.”
Actually, I think in a lot of these situations it’s the comfort of the adults who are projecting their anxieties onto teenagers!
I didn’t grow up with a lot of explicit rules about modesty. But missions trips and Christian summer camp definitely taught me that there was one kind of swimsuit that was OK to wear around church folk, and another kind that wasn’t.
As an adult I’ve found it useful to abolish this distinction for myself. If I get funny looks or comments when I’m wearing a not-particularly-daring bikini, that gives me important information about the attitudes of the people I’m with. Just deciding to wear what I’m comfortable with also saves me the trouble of worrying what any particular group will think is OK.
I want to tell of my youth because of how things swung at the height of purity culture. Circa 1980 on as a teen in the Assembly of God in the NW, and me having a strict mom and a pool, we both simply bought and wore the most modest one- piece we found …I had a “blouson” style for years. (Later I bought real swim shorts to go over it, and now I have long swim shorts and a swim tank that’s very modest for all day at a water park in public…looks like normal clothes so I don’t have to change back and forth, since I’m lazy too. At a friend’s house, my house or just a hotel pool I usually just wear an average one piece for older women. I do love that there are “modest swimsuit” companies with lots of options, and Lands End to fit people’s comfort levels.) We went to pool parties for teens or adults and everyone wore normal stuff but not bikinis or speedo. I don’t know what the camp rules were at AG camp because I never went. I hated the regimentation of camps like that.
At AG Bible school in TX they still had a “no mixed bathing rule” but I don’t think anyone obeyed it…and if they did any swimming at all either all girls or not, I’m sure it was in normal one piece suits. We didn’t have a swimming pool or a body of water available anywhere anyway at that school. At another Christian colleges that had apartment pools people dressed normally. And I never heard any sermons on modesty. But boy did things change by the time I had older kids, and of course I was kinda quiverfull by then, but not in a literal cult church or group. Our house church was pretty chill and my husband was by far the extreme person, and he wasn’t in charge of anything there. Later in a relatively normal and healthy homeschool co-op with a broad spectrum of church cultures represented, smd in various regular youth groups there were too many modesty messages hitting my girls at the height of purity culture from all directions. My girls were in a youth ministry but the only rules about suits were having a one-piece
I also had cute mesh shirts for my boys during our super modest faze with my German Baptist husband. So they weren’t not weighed down by a T shirt. I had a mesh women’s cover up that one of my daughter’s wore over a two piece. It’s very hard to find that tnough…I think more of these should be available as shirts or cover-ups…if anyone wants them. One of my boys was very uncomfortable going shirtless even though his brothers were not. Men should have options that are safe and comfortable for them too. My husband and I were more concerned about this stuff than the German Baptists were, at least for kids.
The G.B’s had their kids wear regular swimsuits until they were baptized into the church as teens and were required to wear the “uniform” (think old school Mennonite type clothes). I heard thru the grapevine that the member girls swam in their long dresses, which would be dangerous. Probably the moms never swam again at all. We live by the Columbia River so swimming is a constant thing in the summer.
As soon as we got away from my husband I relaxed a lot on all this stuff. I never believed that women shouldn’t wear pants for instance, I just tried to compromise on lot of things to keep an abusive husband happy as he became more and more fundie over the years and then joined the GB’s. I attended but did not join which would have meant agreeing with the doctrine, rules, and wearing the clothes. They were awesome in helping me confront him and get away from him in the end though. Very nice people, most of them.
Angela, was it SAGU? I went there late 80s early 90s. And the no mixed bathing rule existed then because the college was close to a lake. One of the older professors showed up and asked if mixed bathing was taking place. Another student, I don’t remember who it was said that he didn’t see any soap, shampoo, or any wash cloths around, so no mixed bathing was taking place.
Unrelated to this post, but I’ve been listening to the various episodes deconstructing classic marriage books like Love and Respect and For Women Only etc and what constantly bothers me is like, who ARE these authors? Like, why did they ever become any sort of authority about anything? They wrote books that went big but they don’t have any credentials or education or data backing up ANYTHING they say yet somehow a small group of ten or twelve people shaped the lives of millions
Yep. This drives me bananas.
ROCKS sewn INTO YOUR CLOTHES??? This was what people in the 19th century did when they were going to jump into the river to end it all! That’s INSANE! And I am so glad you didn’t have anything bad happen!
I’m late to this party, but I just want to add one more story to the mix. I had to start wearing a long t shirt over my bathing suit starting at age 6. The very first time I tried to swim in it in a hotel pool, I went under, couldn’t get my head above water, and panicked for what seemed like ages before a lady pulled me out. After that I barely ever tried swimming again, both from embarrassment of wearing the tshirt and fear of drowning. I still have trouble putting my face under water and I kept putting off getting baptized for that reason – I didn’t actually get baptized till i was in my late 20s. Still not comfortable with water or beaches or bathing suits or my body… the list goes on. LOL
So nice that someone is finally talking about this. I have two teenage kids, a boy and a girl. When around the church crowd, they both wear swim shirts and shorts. When we go to the naturist camp, nobody wears anything at all. You can really feel the difference in the drag between a long swimsuit and no swimsuit. We can all swim so much further without them. Objectification is taught, and it can be unlearned. The teens at the naturist camp have a much better relationship with their bodies and with each other.
Wow. I would have been one of those people who didn’t believe there were extreme rules or expectations around swimsuits to this extreme, but I believe it now! Maybe there are pockets like this in Canada, but thankfully I have never come across them. I try really hard not to make my daughter ashamed of her body – she has bikinis but also cute one pieces. I tell her to pick the suit for the activity – sitting on the beach vs jumping off the dock, out with friends vs swimming with boyfriend’s parents.
As a Canadian, it’s definitely more of a thing in the U.S. (though there are pockets here). It surprised me once I got online and started hearing people’s stories!
My grandmother and aunt made me wear a tshirt and baggy shorts over any swimwear I wore–my grandmother was scarcely evangelical (liberal ish leaning Catholic) and my aunt was…something else, I guess. I didn’t get to go to the pool much, and my dad tried to drown me at age 3, and my mom and grandmother constantly wanted me to Cover Up so I didn’t learn to swim until I was 27.
Ironically, that was after I got my first bikini! I still to this day will not go swimming in anything but a bikini.
And people are terribly Islamophobic, but tbh having seen many Muslim women in their version of modest swimwear–it’s literally just a neoprene wetsuit with a hood and a bit of a skirt–they get it right, especially if you swim in colder water. And it’s probably very hydrodynamic, too.
But sewing rocks???? Into the hemline of a jumper????
What on earth…you’re asking to drown, at that rate.