By Cliff Potts, Chief Strategy Officer and Editor-in-Chief, WPS News
BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines — August 14, 2026 — 9:00 p.m. PHT
A beach is a strange little society.
Take several hundred people who normally go through life wearing shirts, pants, dresses, uniforms, jackets, shoes, and all the other layers through which human beings advertise—or conceal—who they are. Then put those people beside an ocean, remove most of the clothing, and watch what happens.
The social hierarchy does not disappear.
It simply becomes more visible.
At the beach or swimming pool, bodies, fitness, age, fashion, confidence, attractiveness, money, peer-group membership and even the willingness to occupy visual space become unusually easy to see. The result is a temporary social environment with its own rules, its own expectations and, inevitably, its own forms of competition.
This does not mean everyone walking onto a beach is consciously competing for attention. Plenty of people really are there because they want to swim, tan, play with their children, drink something cold or sit under an umbrella and do absolutely nothing.
But human beings do not stop communicating simply because they have taken their shoes off.
We Are Always Presenting Ourselves
Sociologist Erving Goffman famously described ordinary social interaction as a kind of performance. People manage the impressions they give others through appearance, behavior, setting and the roles they adopt (Goffman, 1959).
The beach makes that performance particularly interesting because so many of our normal props disappear.
Clothing remains important, but there is considerably less of it. The body itself becomes part of the presentation.
Modern research on dress reinforces the broader point. Clothing, hairstyles and accessories influence how people form impressions about such things as social identity, status, mental states and aesthetic taste. Just as importantly, those meanings are culturally dependent rather than universal (Hester & Hehman, 2023).
A $200 swimsuit and a $15 swimsuit may perform exactly the same mechanical job in the water. Socially, however, they may not be doing the same job at all.
Brand, cut, color, accessories, sunglasses, watches, beach bags, tattoos, grooming and even the choice between fashionable swimwear and whatever happened to be clean that morning can become pieces of information from which other people construct impressions.
Whether those impressions are accurate is another matter.
The Body Becomes Part of the Outfit
At an office, restaurant or grocery store, physical appearance is partly mediated by clothing. At the beach, physique becomes much harder to separate from presentation.
Muscle definition is visible. Body shape is visible. Tanning is visible. Age is more difficult to disguise. Tattoos that spend most of the year underneath clothing suddenly become public information.
That visibility can change how people think about themselves as well as how others see them.
A classic experiment by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues had participants try on either a swimsuit or a sweater. Among women in the experiments, wearing the swimsuit increased self-objectification and body shame, illustrating how simply placing the body into a more exposed social context can alter self-awareness (Fredrickson et al., 1998).
That study should not be stretched into the claim that wearing a swimsuit automatically produces insecurity. It does demonstrate something more useful for our purposes: the social experience of wearing a swimsuit is psychologically different from wearing ordinary clothing.
People know their bodies can be seen.
And they know other people know it.
The Summer Pecking Order
This is where the beach becomes a particularly interesting laboratory for social comparison.
Humans compare themselves with other humans. At the beach, some of the comparison categories are practically lined up on the sand.
Who is fitter?
Who is younger?
Who has the fashionable swimsuit?
Who appears comfortable in their own body?
Who has money?
Who has friends?
Who is getting noticed?
Research on women’s body image has found that exposure to idealized thin, athletic and curvy bodies can increase social comparison, while cultural appearance norms influence whom people consider relevant comparison targets (Betz & Ramsey, 2017; Betz et al., 2019).
Men are not exempt from this machinery. Research involving men has linked muscularity-oriented body dissatisfaction with both internalized body ideals and social comparison (Karazsia & Crowther, 2009).
In other words, the woman looking at another woman’s bikini may not be thinking about men at all. She may be evaluating fashion, physique, confidence or how she herself compares.
The man noticing another man’s shoulders may not be sexually interested in him. He may be silently recalculating whether skipping the gym for the last six months was such a brilliant idea.
The beach contains sexual attraction, certainly.
It also contains status competition.
Sometimes they are the same performance.
Sometimes they are not.
Men Peacock Too
It would be ridiculous to discuss beach signaling as though women are doing all the signaling while men sit innocently under umbrellas studying marine biology.
Men perform.
A lot.
The signals may include muscularity, posture, tattoos, jewelry, watches, fashionable trunks, grooming, swimming ability, surfing, volleyball, athletic movement and the peculiar masculine performance of trying extremely hard to look as though one is not trying at all.
Some male display is directed toward women. Some is directed toward other men. Frequently it is both.
Evolutionary accounts of human appearance have long distinguished between characteristics that may attract potential mates and characteristics that may also communicate dominance toward same-sex rivals. Those explanations should not be treated as a complete account of modern human behavior—culture has a tremendous amount to say about what counts as attractive or prestigious—but the distinction between attracting mates and competing with peers remains useful (Barber, 1995).
A muscular man walking down the beach may want a woman to notice him.
He may also want every other man on the beach to notice him.
Those goals are hardly mutually exclusive.
The Most Revealing Swimsuit Doesn’t Necessarily Win
There is another mistake worth avoiding: assuming that attention is simply proportional to exposed skin.
Social signaling rarely works that neatly.
What attracts attention is often difference from the local baseline.
Imagine a beach where nearly every woman wears a bikini. Another bikini may communicate fashion, physique or personal style, but the fact that it is a bikini communicates very little because it is normal.
Now put exactly the same swimsuit into an environment where most women swim in shorts and T-shirts.
Nothing about the garment has changed.
Its social visibility has changed enormously.
The person attracting the most attention therefore does not necessarily have to wear the least clothing. Often, the person who understands the local norm and pushes just beyond it becomes more conspicuous than someone who goes much further.
Fashion works partly through distinction. If everyone adopts the distinction, it stops being distinctive.
Then somebody moves the line again.
What I See in Baybay
Living around Baybay City, Leyte, has made the cultural part of this particularly obvious to me.
My observation here is not that “Filipinas don’t wear bikinis.” Some certainly do, and the Philippines contains more than 7,000 islands and an enormous variety of communities, resorts, income levels, generations and social environments.
But around Baybay, I routinely see women go swimming in shorts and T-shirts.
They simply get into the water wearing them.
For that matter, I commonly swim in my tactical gym shorts. I do not own a special ceremonial uniform for entering the ocean. The shorts work. I get wet. Mission accomplished.
There are many reasonable influences on what people wear into the water: modesty, economics, sun exposure, practicality, family expectations, local fashion, religion, age, what clothing somebody already owns and what everyone else at that particular beach happens to be wearing.
International beach culture itself varies substantially; accounts of swimwear practices around the world show combinations of local fashion, climate, modesty, comfort, craft traditions and practical needs rather than one universal beach uniform.
That matters because American popular culture can make Miami, Waikiki or Southern California look like the natural human condition.
They aren’t.
They are cultures.
A bikini that could disappear into the crowd on South Beach might attract considerable attention somewhere else—not because one population is inherently more sexual or more modest than another, but because normal is locally constructed.
Class Goes to the Beach Too
Removing people’s shirts does not remove social class.
Sometimes it makes class signaling more subtle.
A person may communicate money through designer swimwear, expensive sunglasses, jewelry, watches, resort access, equipment, transportation, boats, surfboards or the simple ability to spend an afternoon doing nothing beside expensive real estate.
Thorstein Veblen’s old idea of conspicuous consumption remains relevant here: possessions can have social value precisely because other people can see them.
Yet class at a public beach can also become unusually scrambled. A wealthy executive and a minimum-wage worker may both be standing barefoot in the same sand wearing approximately the same amount of fabric.
That does not abolish inequality.
It does make the visual language of status more interesting.
Confidence May Be the Strongest Signal
Then there is confidence.
Two people can wear nearly identical swimsuits and create completely different impressions.
One hides behind a towel, repeatedly adjusts the clothing and searches for somewhere inconspicuous to sit.
The other walks straight down the beach as though the beach was expecting them.
That difference will be noticed.
Confidence itself becomes part of presentation—not necessarily because the confident person considers their body superior, but because willingness to be seen communicates something socially powerful.
This also helps explain why the conventionally “best” body does not automatically command the most attention. Humor, movement, posture, conversation, social ease and apparent comfort can compete very effectively with measurements on a scale or hours accumulated in a gym.
Attraction is not a spreadsheet.
And No, A Bikini Is Not an Invitation
None of this means observers can reverse-engineer someone’s intentions from their swimsuit.
A revealing swimsuit can be chosen because someone wants to look sexy.
It can be chosen because someone wants attention.
It can be chosen to attract one particular person.
It can be fashion.
It can be tanning.
It can be peer competition.
It can be body confidence.
It can be comfort.
It can simply be the swimsuit the person likes.
Those possibilities can also overlap.
Clothing is social information, but it is noisy information. Research on person perception specifically emphasizes that meanings inferred from dress are complex and culturally dependent (Hester & Hehman, 2023).
That distinction becomes particularly important when attraction enters the equation.
Noticing someone is not the same thing as being invited to approach them. Wanting to look attractive is not the same thing as wanting every person who finds you attractive. Being comfortable displaying your body does not provide a reliable answer about whom you want to date, kiss, sleep with—or avoid entirely.
For those questions, behavior and actual interaction tell us considerably more than fabric ever will.
That is where the second article in this series will go.
The Beach Is Society With Fewer Layers
The beach is not merely a place where humans wear less clothing.
It is a social environment in which the ordinary rules of presentation are rearranged.
The body becomes more visible. Fashion becomes concentrated into fewer garments and accessories. Fitness becomes harder to hide. Age becomes more apparent. Confidence becomes conspicuous. Attraction becomes part of the atmosphere. Class finds new ways to announce itself. Men compare themselves with men. Women compare themselves with women. Men notice women. Women notice men. Everybody interprets everybody else through cultural rules that seem obvious until you travel somewhere those rules are different.
And through all of it, plenty of people are simply trying to swim.
That may be the most useful lesson.
Human beings can turn almost anything into a social hierarchy.
Even going to the beach.
This essay is written by Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief of WPS News. WPS News has been active in one form or another on the internet for years; for more information, visit CliffPotts.org.
If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going through the WPS News Patreon.
References
Barber, N. (1995). The evolutionary psychology of physical attractiveness: Sexual selection and human morphology. Ethology and Sociobiology, 16(5), 395–424. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(95)00068-2
Betz, D. E., & Ramsey, L. R. (2017). Should women be “all about that bass?” Diverse body-ideal messages and women’s body image. Body Image, 22, 18–31.
Betz, D. E., Sabik, N. J., & Ramsey, L. R. (2019). Ideal comparisons: Body ideals harm women’s body image through social comparison. Body Image, 29, 100–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2019.03.004
Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T.-A., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M., & Twenge, J. M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.269
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Hester, N., & Hehman, E. (2023). Dress is a fundamental component of person perception. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 27(4), 414–433. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683231157961
Karazsia, B. T., & Crowther, J. H. (2009). Social body comparison and internalization: Mediators of social influences on men’s muscularity-oriented body dissatisfaction. Body Image, 6(2), 105–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2008.12.003
Veblen, T. (1899). The theory of the leisure class. Macmillan.
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