Thong Wrong? Depends On Who's Wearing It

MIAMI - It's not easy, being a trained professional journalist. This past weekend, for example, while you were enjoying yourself mowing the lawn and fixing the holes in your screen caused by aggressive subtropical mosquitoes the size of mature eggplants, I was out fulfilling my First Amendment obligation to look at women wearing tiny bathing suits.

The journalistic reason for this, of course, was the decision last week by those busy beavers in the Florida Cabinet, who, in response to a widespread statewide outpouring of zero complaints from anybody, decided to regulate swimwear on beaches in state parks.

The new regulations, which were proposed by the Department of Natural Resources and Bun Regulation, prohibit swimwear that reveals ``male or female genitals, pubic area, the entire buttocks, or female breasts below the top of the nipple with less than a fully opaque covering.''

Certainly we all agree that the Cabinet's action was necessary. You have a lot of women these days wearing these ``thong''-style bathing suits consisting of roughly the same amount of fabric as you might use to make an eyepatch for a Barbie doll.

We cannot allow this on our state beaches. We cannot run the risk that an official of the Department of Natural Resources, or, God forbid, a Cabinet member, might witness an uncovered buttock and be seized by an uncontrollable frenzy of lust and be unable to stop himself from committing wanton acts of regulation.

So I'm sure we're all strongly in favor of the Cabinet's crackdown (ha ha!). But is it working? To find out, I consulted a swimwear manufacturer and retailer, Connie Banko. She is the designer of (really) the Half Moon line of swimwear, featuring a model called ``Dental Floss,'' which you could make approximately four dozen of from the fabric contained in a single underwear label.

I asked Banko if the Cabinet's action had caused a sharp decrease in thong sales.

``No,'' she said. ``It encourages women all the more to buy them.''

This will come as no surprise to those of you who have followed the meteoric rise of 2 Live Crew, the group of increasingly wealthy rap twerps who, thanks to the vigilant and highly effective suppression effort by various law-enforcement officials, are now household names as far away as Iraq.

But back to swimsuits. As a trained journalist, I felt the only way I could really assess (ha ha!) the situation was to visit the beaches personally. Accompanying me was a Research Team consisting of three keen observers named Beth, Carmen and Sylvia. These are sensible women who of course do not personally own any ``thong''-style suits, because:

-- They believe that this style of suit is lewd, indecent, decadent, immoral and disgusting.

-- They don't think they'd look good in it.

The women agreed that a person definitely has to have a certain type of body (known, technically, as an ``unfair'' body) to qualify for a thong. They discussed this at some length in a conversation that went like this:

``You have to have buns that start high.''

``It's not just the bun. It's the legs below there.''

``When you flex, your buns should go up.''

At this point - I am not making this up - they all got up, right in Carmen's dining room, and flexed their buns, after which they agreed that they should definitely not wear thongs.

With that settled, we set off for our Field Observation. We decided to go to the southern end of Miami Beach, which does not fall under the new state regulation, but which we figured would be a fun place to be observers in.

It was. We sat right in the middle of a very large crowd of young people, each of whom had thoughtfully brought a radio the size of Yankee Stadium, only louder. It was a very thong-intensive area, and even though I am a highly trained observer, I had trouble keeping track of all the decadence.

``Look at that one,'' Beth said, and my head whirled around.

``Look at that one,'' Carmen said, and my head whirled around again.

``The Exorcist!'' Sylvia said, looking at my head.

As a journalist, I was shocked by what I saw. Shocked. I feel that the Florida Cabinet should extend its regulations to cover all beaches - even if they are not state-owned beaches, even if they are not technically located in Florida.