I posted the "surf bunny" page last Friday, then tied myself in knots over the weekend with what you're about to read.

First off . . . I'm the killjoy who kept SURFER from doing bikini issues in the '80s. 

 launched their "Swimsuit Preview" feature in '83 (biting 

), tickled the downy-haired groins of their young readership, and never looked back. I arrived at SURFER in '85, and by the following year Surfing's annual bikini issue was guaranteed to kick our ass on the newsstand every Spring no matter what we threw against it, and there was pressure building, especially from the ad guys, to compete by producing our own bikini issue. I wasn't juiced-up at the mag yet, but at an editorial meeting I climbed onto a desk, loosened my tie, made an impassioned speech against the bikini issue, and carried the day. Publisher Steve Pezman, the big wonderful bear, backed me up.

For four years, until I left SURFER, I held the line. Readers noticed, and for the most part were not happy. I got "Warshaw, you fag!" hate mail. I also got letters saying that girls in small bathing suits have always been part of surfing, and to ignore this fact is a distortion of the truth.

Then, as now, I had a knack for being contrary to myself. Sexism included. Pungent locker-room talk, "how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb" jokes, Andrew Dice Clay riffs—yes, please, come to my office and share and laugh and make the work day a little lighter. I briefly dated a surf-mag bikini girl, even. So why hardline SURFER on the bikini issue? Apart from calling out the WCT on the four-way stupidity of running world tour contests in South Africa during the apartheid era, the bikini deal was the only political stand I took during my six years as a SURFER staffer.

For starters, we didn't need to burn editorial pages on bikini girls. Surf print was blowing up, beachwear was king, and in any given issue of SURFER there were already a dozen pouffy-haired models in bikinis, slender arms raised overhead, eyes closed, lips moued. Why add to that? You're bringing coals to Newcastle. That was one of my 1980s arguments, anyway.

Then there were the women pros. Debbie Beacham worked in a cubicle down the hall from me at SURFER. Bells Beach winner, '82 world title holder, fearless at Sunset Beach—Debbie was accomplished and smart and tough as nails, yet the thought of a bikini issue nudging the mag that much deeper into the muck of surf-world sexism could bring her to tears. Women's surfing in the mid-'80s was getting an incredibly raw deal, at every level of surf media. I knew this already. Debbie crying in my office, in 1986, over a not-even-published SURFER bikini spread, threw the issue into sharper relief.

That same year I also had a dinner date and crush on world tour #2 Jodie Cooper. Great surfer, endlessly cheerful, wonderful raspy voice, and both amused and no-bullshit when it came to the overdetermined male prerogative in surfing, in all its forms, bikini girl adulation included. "Don't Think With Your Dick" was the title of Jodie's first and only surf magazine article, in 1994. (Three years later Cooper came out as gay—the first pro to do so.) Burn five color spreads on bikini girls in the mag while Jodie and Debbie and Pam and Frieda and rest of the pros were struggling for matchbook-sized black-and-white shots at the back Derek Hynd's latest contest article? No way. I got all righteous on that point too.

So there it was. Down with the bikini chick. Up with Pauline Menczer.

Except here comes Roxy. And here comes Alana Blanchard and Laura Enever, and Sally Fitzgibbon doing lingerie pics for 

, and Coco Ho surfing nude for ESPN, skin and curves and perfect teeth and perfect cutbacks, and Jesus, what are we supposed to think now? If the lines between sexy and sexism and surfing were hard to discern before, they are now, to my 54-year-old eyes anyway, pretty much invisible.

SURF BUNNY, GET THEE BEHIND ME!

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