The Briefest Border

The air conditioning at the departure gate is set to a determined, artificial winter. Outside the glass, the tarmac shimmers.

On the screen above the desk, the flight to Hurghada says boarding in twenty minutes. A man two rows over asks his friend, loud enough for the whole row to hear, whether he should have packed Speedos or swimming shorts for Egypt.

It is a practical question. It is also not.

No one asks this about other clothes. No one wonders if loafers are acceptable in Jordan. But swimwear is different. It is the one time an adult male is required to consider his body as something to be looked at, and to decide how much of that looking he can tolerate.

For most men, most of the time, the body is a vehicle. It carries the head to meetings. In swimwear, it becomes an object. A foreign object, especially abroad.

Egypt makes this negotiation literal. There are two Egypts that touch water, and they do not touch each other.

There is the Egypt of the Red Sea resorts, where the pools are chlorinated blue and the hotels have swim-up bars and animation teams. There, European men have been wearing briefs since the seventies, tanning in neat rows like seals. No one will stop you. The staff will not stare. The other tourists will assume you are German or Italian and grant you the privacy of that assumption.

Then there is the other Egypt, the one of Alexandria in August, of public beaches in Agami, of the Nile-side clubs in Cairo where families go on Fridays. There, men swim in shorts that reach the knee, often with a t-shirt on top. Not because there is a law, but because there is a consensus. Modesty in Egypt is not only a female concern. It is a general attentiveness to not making the body too present.

Tourism has always offered a loophole. A kind of extraterritoriality for the flesh. What would be unthinkable on a Cairo street becomes permissible behind the resort wall. The question about Speedos is really a question about whether you want that loophole.

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I have watched men at those resort pools perform a small ritual. They arrive in their tailored, longer shorts, the ones that signal a certain Anglo-American idea of reserve. They sit. They notice the older man from Lyon who is perfectly comfortable in his briefs, reading Le Monde, his stomach pale and unapologetic. And they feel, for a moment, overdressed.

The brief is honest. The long short is diplomatic.

One says: this is my body, in this water, on this afternoon. The other says: I am aware that I am a guest here, and I would like to impose as little as possible, even upon the air.

Both are forms of respect, but they respect different things.

The man at Gatwick wanted an answer. The internet, trending as it does, will give him one: board shorts at the resort are fine, briefs are common but will mark you as a tourist, and outside the resorts cover up more. All true. All beside the point.

The deeper discomfort is that no one told men how to be looked at while swimming. Women have been negotiating that gaze for decades, with entire vocabularies of cut and lining and coverage. Men were given two choices and told they were free.

I packed the longer ones. Not out of modesty, exactly. Out of a desire to not be too legible from a distance.