Friday, November 16, 2007 Seares: Bikini closed By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
"BIKINI," word experts tell us, was coined by the French. The paper Le Monde Ilustre used Bikini Atoll, US atom bomb test site in Marshall Islands, to describe the two-piece swimsuit for women.
The name suggests "explosive effect" of a bikini on viewers, mostly unimaginative males whose hormones rage when they see a lot of female anatomy.
The bikini swept French beaches and beauty contests in 1947, the same year their media popularized the term for the "small pair of pants and a brassiere."
It was not until almost 60 years later that organizers in Cebu exploited the Bikini Open, a beauty contest usually held at a beach resort where judges rate female candidates on how they look and move in skimpy attire.
The Bikini Open had electrified Lapu-Lapu City until recently when the Radaza-and-Pelaez show outdid it in heat and intensity.
Most of the seamy tales from a Bikini Open are about beer and liquor flowing, loud music blaring, and rowdy audiences hooting and leering at scantily clad women cavorting on stage.
There are talks of drug abuse and copulation at the beach or in shacks but local governments apparently have looked the other way.
Bestseller
A Bikini Open sells a lot of alcohol and food and shoot up gate receipts of organizers. But must beauty contests ape them?
Gov. Gwen Garcia, who pushes the successful "Suroy-Suroy," doesn't think so. At the Boljoon fiesta last weekend, she walked away from a stage show where women pranced in bikinis.
It's not the morality of wearing a bikini or the wisdom of flaunting it when you have it. She may just hate the idea of spending Capitol funds on strip shows disguised as cultural offering.
