Baffle of the Bulge

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A little editorial hot off the press and posted here. I hope it's not offensive :P

Baffle of the Bulge

It’s bad enough that so many photos of swimmers and divers and water-polo players are so unrevealing. Where you’d see full-body shots of soccer and football players, your typical swimmer is shown cropped at the waist or depicted as a waterlogged cranium splashing away in a pool, sans bawd. And even in photos that show a little below the waist, strange coincidences appear more often than not: A sitting swimmer’s head blocking the suit of a standing one, or a gesturing hand, a clipboard, a diving board, or simply a view of back sides only. Indeed no photography of any sport is so cloaked and privatized as that of an aquatic one. Which frustrates those who enjoy looking at suits and what’s in them — bulges, to use the technical term. This blind spot is a transgression, to be sure, but it’s getting worse. Because now, even when you’re lucky enough to see it in detail, the modern bulge is becoming even more cloaked and private, and for one big reason: Turbo.

A bulge is an imprint of shapes, contours, dimensions, and directions. If you’re a longtime student of bulges, you can read the language of those imprints on a Speedo suit, or a TYR suit or a TruWest suit very well. You know immediately how plump a sack is, whether one side of it is a bit higher than the other, and whether its adjoining tubing is pointed straight up, straight down, or off to one side. You can judge the likelihood that it stands straight up or leans left or right when aroused. And you can tell if it ends somewhere and a head begins, or if the skin seems to proceed to the end of the line — in other words, whether a bulge owner is cut or not. After deciphering the clues, you can decide whether a swimmer suits your taste, because you now know exactly what he has to taste.

The trouble is that not everybody’s wearing those suits like they were 10 years ago. They’re wearing Turbo. The Turbo suit is a blanket of heft and thickness that paves over a bulge so heavily as to render it shapeless and mute, as if a drag queen had slathered a bottle of concealer across it. So now a swimmer who in 2000 would’ve had a TYR bulge with a distinct sack, topped off with a downward-pointed cut dick almost three inches soft (see photo), instead has a Turbo bulge composed of a smooth goose egg — no other shapes, contours, dimensions or directions.



What’s worse is that many of these suits are throwing yet another “curve” at the bulge analyst: Where sunlight and visibility might be adequate to take some readings even on a thick Turbo suit, the growing use of colors and patterns across the bulge is camouflaging it beyond analysis. These suits are often splattered with multi-colored graphics whose designs — what a coincidence — directly bisect the bulge in 10 places, rendering it an abstract mosaic that warps light — light that, were it hitting a solid-colored suit, would expose a dick in more detail. Even seasoned bulge analysts would have better luck looking through a cracked windshield.


Turbo vs. TYR: What’s inside the TYR is suit is obvious — a cut dick, pointed down. The Turbo only shows a “goose egg,” creating much more guesswork.


Turbo indeed. Turbo is a 50-year-old Spanish company that perhaps finally has a little buyership because it happened to be the “official outfitter for 2012 USA Olympic Water Polo teams.” It practically boasts of its bulge-concealing thickness and patterns, extolling that it’s the “originator of dye-sublimated competition swimwear” that “uses the world’s toughest anti-chlorine fabric.” In other words, thick fabric full of patterns that hide your glossy wet dick.

It would seem that the company has a history of obscurity — not just obscuring — since it’s not even mentioned on Wikipedia’s “List of notable swimwear brands” as of this writing. Speedo is there. Arena is there. And Agon, Dolfin, Head, Hurley, Rip Curl, and TYR. A search at nifty.org, which archives stories about swimmers and their gay relationships, shows “Speedo swimsuit” appearing in stories from 1996 onward. The term “Turbo swimsuit” or “Turbo suit” doesn’t appear at all. But as of 2014, one developing story on mensswimsuitboard.com follows several swimmers with Turbo suits — a sign of the times.

Turbo is new, and it’s here. And it’s burying more and more bulges in the very obscurity it is emerging from. A Turbo suit’s weight alone is a big telltale. A Size 32 Turbo King of Hearts suit weighed in at 73 grams here at the seriousaboutspeedos bulge lab. A Speedo of the same size, 54. Around 51 for a TruWest double-layer nylon suit. So a Turbo suit is practically 30% heavier than swimmers’ traditional gamewear.

This trend of bulge cryptography is unorthodox. It’s been suspenseful and mysterious, certainly, but it’s time to return to traditional values, as the conservatives say. Maybe it’s time to cut the liners out of the Turbo suits — if they must be used at all. And time to return to solid colors. Half the reason to be in an aquatic sport is to display one’s body, to grow self-esteem by revealing it to spectators who appreciate it, to showcase it to your teammates, and to be photographed standing up, out of the pool, unabashed, and have something for a scrapbook besides a head splashing in the water.