Global Warming Is Coming For Us, So You Better Get Used to Seeing Skin

I’m not sure if anyone else has picked up on this, but summertime in most of the continental U.S. is hot—and this summer, it’s been record-breaking, scary-chart-making, fatally hot. New York City specifically cycled through heavy rain (and subsequent flooding); unseasonal heat; and the kind of wildfire-driven air quality dip all too familiar to people on the West Coast in the span of like, six weeks. The rest of the globe isn’t doing great, either: Temperatures hit 130 degrees in Death Valley and Las Vegas earlier this month, and it was only June. People in Oregon and Washington were dying for lack of air conditioning, thanks to a phenomenon called the “heat dome,” again, in June. Even Siberia—famously cold!—is hot as shit right now. 

How are people responding to this? Wearing fewer and smaller clothes, obviously. COVID cases are ticking upwards again, especially among individuals who’ve failed to get vaccinated, leading to heartbreaking stories of people begging for the shot while they die from the virus. Vaccinated people are getting sick too in “breakthrough cases,” thanks largely to the Delta variant that’s already forced places like Los Angeles to reinstitute indoor mask mandates. Basically, the safest place to be is outside, even as the weather situation oscillates between the Great Flood, the surface of the sun, and the inside of a clothes dryer. 

But not everyone is willing to let this behavior slide with the occasional appreciative glance. The New York Times expressed its chagrin Thursday that people are roaming the streets in “ bralettes, itty-bitty bandeaus and crocheted bikinis” or “Daisy Dukes cut high enough to expose buttocks curvature,” according to a piece from the paper’s fashion section published Thursday. To crib a line: Noticing people’s shorts? In the summer? Groundbreaking.

The Times piece takes care to note that women’s fashion has traditionally been policed more than men’s; that “these items are by no means relegated to people who identify with the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’’; and that being cooped up during quarantine has made everyone eager to flaunt what they’ve got. 

The piece fails to note, however, the most important factor of all: The world is crumbling around us and a steady hum of dread is the soundtrack of this summer. Why wouldn’t I show a little cheek in the prelude to the climate apocalypse? I am not only trying to stay cool and look good in a sweltering world—I also don’t care what anyone, especially pearl clutchers who can’t stomach the idea that a bra can be a shirt, thinks about the aesthetics thereof. There are so many other problems to deal with right now. Why wage a war on sexy people? Shouldn’t we be your greatest allies, your gleaming messengers, letting you all know that society needs to change its priorities lest we start stepping out in nothing but thongs on Fifth Avenue and really getting the jealousy flowing?

Obviously, it’s not up to any individual New York Times critic to carry the torch for climate catastrophe, our national public health nightmare, or the profound failure of our elected officials to do anything meaningful about either of them. Still, our cultural commentators could stand to read the sweaty, scantily-clad room a little. The worst look of Spring/Summer 2021 is clearly Jeff Bezos in his little spacesuit and his cowboy hat, suborbitally joyriding while his workers miscarry on the clock. How’s that for shocking and tacky?

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