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Where bimbos fail

Rating: NNNNN


There is no human quality so indefinable yet so sought after as sexiness. Everybody wants to be desirable, and if they tell you they don’t, it’s probably because they read somewhere that pretending you don’t care whether you’re sexy or not is sexy. The thinking woman’s quest for sexiness is an elaborate game of blending beauty with brains. In an Indian restaurant she runs her fingers seductively through her hair, lowers her eyelids and asks if you’ve read V. S. Naipaul. She wears heels and quotes Kierkegaard. She watches documentaries naked.

The thinking man is aroused by her intelligence and wit. He places an arm around her shoulders – buff but not too buff, from just the right number of hours spent in the gym – cocks a head topped with slightly unkempt hair and tells her she should read Julio Cortázar.

Hopscotch really turned him on to Ma Rainey.

But while thinking people are busy checking their modestly plunging necklines and leaving Foucault lying around conspicuously on coffee tables, there’s a whole other larger and more prominent segment of society with much simpler criteria for sexy.

If reports of parties in Ibiza and media like MTV are at all credible, what most men really want is a bimbo in a bikini, and what the bimbo really wants is a bevy of boys screaming at her to shake it.


Enticed by this seemingly much less complex option, I grab my boyfriend, David, and drag him to the Swimsuit Canada pageant down at the Docks on Saturday afternoon.

The ad looks tempting, featuring several trashy, pouting, oiled-up chicks in slutty swimwear.

“It’ll be just like Fort Lauderdale!” I promise, picturing women gyrating and crawling around as guys hoot and holler like apes, maybe spraying them with hoses (!).

Having spent some time working in Montreal strip clubs (in much more modest times, before the lap dancing takeover), I’m no stranger nor am I averse to the notion of woman as sex object. In fact, it has served me quite well in the past. But as a “dancer,” I still had to rely heavily on my personality and conversational skills to get a man’s attention. In fact, if you were really good at your job you hardly ever had to take your clothes off.

The bikini contest, however, with its complete lack of verbal exchange, is based solely on visuals and reduces both men and women to what appears to be a state of total idiocy. Yet idiocy, while distasteful, is far too common to dismiss outright. Like any natural human trait, it must be studied. Besides, they always look like they’re having so much fucking fun.

The Docks keeps 12 packs of condoms in a fridge with the vodka drinks. A giant likeness of Captain Morgan looks down on us from the stage, and a display of Viper cars sits behind us. Hoochies, hooch and horsepower. It’s the perfect setting. And it all goes horribly wrong.

The “models” who tromp out onstage aren’t the dewy, hot nubiles I was expecting, but a painful display of mediocrity dressed in cheap-looking “clubwear.” (I have yet to see skin-tight shiny white spandex porno dresses with slits up the side, coupled with heels, outside of a strip club, so I guess that’s the kind of “club” this “wear” was meant for.)

Several of them have obviously spent enough time at the gym to beat the snot out of me, but most just look like your average stripper – not to be confused with your above-average stripper, who is so gorgeous she always has a lineup of men vying for a moment of her attention. (Every club has a few.)

Some are kind of pretty, but none would I look at twice if they were seated at the next table. This is the best Canada has to offer? Awkwardly, they parade around, switching from clubwear to lingerie to swimsuits. The small crowd doesn’t exactly go wild.

It turns out that jiggling and dancing are against the contest rules, so all they can do is walk around blowing kisses, waving, smiling and trying to get a crowd reaction as even the shirtless himbos with tribal tattoos remain stubbornly unmoved.

Ouch! I cringe, and feel increasingly sorry for them.

It’s degrading enough, I imagine, to be reduced to a spectacle while wankers hoot and holler at you (the way it’s displayed on MTV and Ed the Sock), but to have to beg them to hoot must be much, much worse. I reason with myself that they deliberately put themselves out there and therefore deserve whatever reaction they get, but still it’s pitiful.

I hoot loudly, hoping to get a reaction going, but I fail. Even Captain Morgan seems to slump with boredom as the show wears on. And on.

The Swimsuit Canada pageant isn’t sexy, even though it has the quintessential, clichéd ingredients. Despite desperate attempts to make the fantasy real, nobody seems to be particularly interested in the hoochies, the hooch or the horsepower.

Perhaps Canadians can’t pull off the hot beach sex party. Maybe it’s because we can’t parade around in swimsuits nine months out of the year. We just don’t get it. Or maybe it’s because you can grope whatever you want in Toronto strip clubs, so watching women stomp around in bathing suits pales in comparison.

I’d like to think that the impossibility of judging breast size through a parka has forced the Canadian male to look elsewhere for attractive qualities, placing him above the average MTV neanderthal, but the catcalls that greet me whenever I leave the house won’t even let this theory breathe.

I don’t know why it sucked, but I’m kind of glad it did. Despite my desire to be open-minded and cool about these things, I suspect I’d have been disgusted if the affair had lived up to my expectations. In theory, it’s all just good, cheesy fun, but in practice reducing men to demanding, chest-pounding beasts and women to mute, desperate spectacles is scary. Frightening and fascinating like a horror movie, but in real life not sexy.

I still don’t know exactly what sexy is, but luckily I’m a thinking woman. So the next time a guy yells, “Hey, baby! Cm’ere! I wanna lick your ass!” at me from his car window, I can think, “Ha! I bet he’s never even heard of Foucault.”

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