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Originally Posted by Fairfax
Thanks for sharing your story.
I also grew up in Australia during that same time period when boardies were becoming the chosen style for fashion conscious young men. However despite this briefs remained popular (for a while anyway) as they were still the only sensible choice for water sports and sunbathing.
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Wow Fairfax, we really did grow up in the same Australia at the same time.
I suspect you went to a private school given the reference to compulsory speedos and waterpolo. Neither happened at my state school.
At my first high school swimming carnival when I was 13 I ended up being the only boy on the starting blocks in Speedos. I was given a hard time for quite a while about that, but it's fair to say that most of it was joking rather than terrible. I'm sure it felt really bad at the time though, especially finding my place in a new school.
It was funny because you'd go from the all of school swimming carnival where there were literally just a handful of boys wearing speedos to zone / district school swimming where everyone did. The private schools had their name printed on theirs somehow while the state school kids like me had do do with school colours only.
But the speedo politics at state school swimming were weirdly complex. By the time I was in high school in the 90s, there were essentially 2 types of boy who would wear speedos. The first were those kids who swam competitively, or did surf lifesaving and it just seemed so obvious. The 2nd were those kids who were probably slight outcasts and lacked awareness of the weird social structures that existed and determined what was and wasn't acceptable swimming attire.
By the way, I play waterpolo and it's the case that speedos are still universally worn there unlike competitive swimming and surf lifesaving where jammers have infiltrated a lot.