'They are on stage with an emcee, completely out of reach of the audience. 'They do take their tops off occasionally,' Lorenzo told the Sun Sentinel of contest participants. Lorenzo and other local bar owners pushed hard to convince the public wet T-shirt contests were 'wholesome' events. In 1985, one year before MTV premiered its infamous Spring Break coverage from Daytona Beach, Florida, Paul Lorenzo, a Fort Lauderdale club proprietor, went so far as to describe the contest as 'an all-American event.' This, of course, was shortly after state regulators fined another local bar, the Button, for hosting sexualized contests. Getting wet and wild: By this point, wet T-shirt contests had indisputably become a part of Fort Lauderdale spring break tradition, in addition to such charming practices as banana-eating contests rewarding women who could 'c onsume a banana in the sexiest possible fashion.' By 1977, thanks in large part to actress Jacqueline Bisset's sopping appearance in The Deep, wet T-shirt contests caught on for real - and bar owners started facing public indecency charges for hosting them.Īnd yet, despite lawsuits and government regulators' efforts to end the 'lewd' activity, the contest kept on keepin' on. Precisely because of the gains of the women's liberation movement, young women, in particular, had come to expect an increased level of social and sexual freedom. It's not exactly a coincidence that wet T-shirt contests caught on at a point when feminism had 'penetrated every layer of society, matured beyond ideology to a new status of general – and sometimes unconscious - acceptance,' according to Time, which named 'American Women' its Person of the Year for 1975. But that was arguably because they no longer felt they had to. Having 'given up on changing the world,' as one college student explained to N ewsweek the following year, the college students of the 1970s were apparently more inclined than their forebears to get drunk and flash their boobs, without giving much thought to the political implications. press.Ī complicated, anti-feminist history: While it might seem ironic that the wet T-shirt contest arose during the second-wave feminist era, the tradition actually arose during a fairly politically conservative period. The first known report on wet t-shirt contests in U.S.

That gem of journalism appeared in the Palm Beach Post in 1975, under the headline 'Wet T-Shirt Contests Pack Pubs,' and detailed how several 'discotheques' in New Orleans had started putting on 'a contest gimmick that would drive feminists prematurely gray.' In his autobiography Breaking Even, filmmaker Dick Barrymore claimed to have hosted the first wet T-shirt contest as part of a 1971 promotional event for K2 skis, though the contest's first mention in the press wasn't until four years later. Some have speculated that the tradition was inspired by La Tomatina, a Spanish festival where people throw tomatoes at each other (thereby rendering many female participants' clothing damp and transparent). It's not entirely clear how the contest made its way to Floridian Spring Break parties.

But the wet T-shirt contest seems to have first shown up in the United States a few years later, in the 1970s. It first came to prominence in the early 1960s, thanks in part to the 1960 release of the seminal spring break film W here the Boys Are.

A relatively new tradition: Historically speaking, the idea of young college students traveling down south for spring break is relatively new.

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