Ban the tech suits?

My vote is that if men are limited to wearing briefs only, women should be also. I don't think you have been to too many Western Pennsylvania area YMCA masters swimming competitions. As a veteran of these myself, all I can say is: Be careful what you wish for. P.S.When Mr. Cyclist posed the legitimate question regarding "advantage" if everyone is wearing the same suit, I agree with Chris--the advantage, for me at least, is not so much over my contemporary competitors but over my younger self. As a semi-centenarian-plus, the idea that these suits help me swim times nowadays that I was doing in high school is both enormously satisfying and motivating, particularly as long as purists remain that suggest the benefit is mainly a placebo effect.Thanks to the latter, I can tell myself, "I do not need these magic shoes to dance with the stars--the power to do so has been within me the whole time. Nevertheless, I think I shall wear the magic shoes anyhow because I like how they look!" To the self-enabling suit addict, it's easy to find reasons to wear these things even as we tell ourselves they don't make much of a difference. All this notwithstanding, I do think the best argument against the suits is that, like with almost everything else in our quickly bankrupting country, such technological "improvements" once again confirm our status as capitalist tools. The genius of our species is to ferret out things we have evolved to want, then figure out ways to turn these into things we need, and sell them to us. From cocaine to feminine deodorant products to county fair elephant ears to high tech body suits, the consumer economy is built on stuff our prehominid ancestors could (and did) get along very well without but nevertheless probably would have bought themselves if A) money had been invented back then, and B) such products were available. I can flesh out this argument in more detail to those who are interested; it seems i have had to leave out steps 3-87 for brevity's sake. But to simply sum up the conclusion: We are an avaricious, status-driven, hierarchically-competitive species--easy pickings for our fellow apes who can sell us what is at the outset a putative advantage, but very quickly becomes a putative disadvantage for those who don't have it. We can't help ourselves. Oh, and we like to bicker, too. Which is why this definitive evolutionary-psychology-based explication of body suits will not, as it should, be the final word. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if some of our more primitive ape-brothers might even argue the basis for evolution itself! (even as they fork over fistfuls of luchre for the body suits...)

My vote is that if men are limited to wearing briefs only, women should be also. I don't think you have been to too many Western Pennsylvania area YMCA masters swimming competitions. As a veteran of these myself, all I can say is: Be careful what you wish for. P.S.When Mr. Cyclist posed the legitimate question regarding "advantage" if everyone is wearing the same suit, I agree with Chris--the advantage, for me at least, is not so much over my contemporary competitors but over my younger self. As a semi-centenarian-plus, the idea that these suits help me swim times nowadays that I was doing in high school is both enormously satisfying and motivating, particularly as long as purists remain that suggest the benefit is mainly a placebo effect.Thanks to the latter, I can tell myself, "I do not need these magic shoes to dance with the stars--the power to do so has been within me the whole time. Nevertheless, I think I shall wear the magic shoes anyhow because I like how they look!" To the self-enabling suit addict, it's easy to find reasons to wear these things even as we tell ourselves they don't make much of a difference. All this notwithstanding, I do think the best argument against the suits is that, like with almost everything else in our quickly bankrupting country, such technological "improvements" once again confirm our status as capitalist tools. The genius of our species is to ferret out things we have evolved to want, then figure out ways to turn these into things we need, and sell them to us. From cocaine to feminine deodorant products to county fair elephant ears to high tech body suits, the consumer economy is built on stuff our prehominid ancestors could (and did) get along very well without but nevertheless probably would have bought themselves if A) money had been invented back then, and B) such products were available. I can flesh out this argument in more detail to those who are interested; it seems i have had to leave out steps 3-87 for brevity's sake. But to simply sum up the conclusion: We are an avaricious, status-driven, hierarchically-competitive species--easy pickings for our fellow apes who can sell us what is at the outset a putative advantage, but very quickly becomes a putative disadvantage for those who don't have it. We can't help ourselves. Oh, and we like to bicker, too. Which is why this definitive evolutionary-psychology-based explication of body suits will not, as it should, be the final word. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if some of our more primitive ape-brothers might even argue the basis for evolution itself! (even as they fork over fistfuls of luchre for the body suits...)