I don’t know what came first: the sexualizing or the sex. I flirted with my pediatrician before I could speak very well. Batted my eyes and said dot obeeskee, are gonna gimme shot? My mom says I was boy crazy since I was born. One way or another, when I was three she put me in a tiny swimsuit, gave me a pile of chemical cloud curls and a wet cherry pout and entered me into a swimsuit pageant for children sponsored by the Hawaiian Tropic brand of suntan oil. I think I remember parts of it. The view of the seated crowd from the stage and the hiss of their murmuring, program fluttering, and camera flashing. My mother took home three trophies they awarded to my body, one bigger than me and with a gold plastic disc that said Best Eyes. 

I imagine walking up to the moms and grandmas in the crowd in my three-year-old shape to tell them this display of soft, newly-formed children is sick, sexual. In my imagination the moms and grandmas balk and snort. They think we’re cute and our youth extends their own. They think I’m the one sexualizing it, being weird. Maybe I am. Even this made-up version of me doesn’t have the language to tell them she’ll always feel exposed and won’t know the difference between being consumed and being seen.

Hawaiian Tropic doesn’t do children’s swimsuit competitions anymore, or adult ones. Evidence of the way things used to be seems to disappear more quickly and more utterly with the internet. It’s funny because growing up they kept telling us everything was forever on the internet, and now we’re buried in a pile of refuse that never stops growing. On eBay, a collector is selling the flier for the exact pageant I competed in: June 20th, 1993 at the Mariott Hotel in San Ramon!!! with a blue photo of the previous year’s winners. GIRLS - BOYS - BABIES - TEENS. Round crowns for girls. I wonder if he was there. It’s four dollars. Maybe you’ll buy it for me. If you want something like MISS HAWAIIAN TROPIC INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY PAGEANT 1993 BUSTY MIXED CARD SET, or a rare videotape (only $80) from 1991 called Heat Wave featuring Benny Hill performing His Incomparable Comedy, the seller’s got those, too. 

The back of it says This video, without a doubt, shows the most breath-taking women in the world. Over 3,500 contests were held around the globe to narrow it down to the 48 finest beauties you will ever see. Wearing the latest beach fashions from Brazil to Greece, these women were filmed with the latest in video technology during a week of beach parties, pool parties, celebrity press parties and of course at THE COMPETION (misspelling and all). 

You will also see behind the scenes preparation, back-stage pressure, and the beach fun that is synonymous with the Miss Hawaiian Tropic International Beauty Competition. See if you agree with our celebrity judges. To be fair to yourself and these beauties you’ll have to watch this over and over again. It’ll be tough work, but you’ll be glad to do it.

The founder of Hawaiian Tropic died a few months ago, in Daytona Beach. I’m not sure what killed him. According to his Washington Post obituary—Ron Rice, ‘Suntan King’ who Founded Hawaiian Tropic, dies at 81—he invented Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil in his garage. In Florida he saw beautiful women in swimsuits and dreamed of selling them something to cover their bodies in, something better than the coppertone they kept rubbing into their warm skin. He dumped a number of liquids, random ingredients, and coconut fragrance oils into a 20-gallon garbage can, stirring it all together with a broom handle. 

His story has a carnival barker echo, not unlike the bootstrapped red-blooded American male success stories you hear from politicians or their Silicon Valley remora CEO counterparts. Before all the sex and suntans he was just a folksy Carolina mountain boy, and then with a $500 loan from his dad he started selling his oil in 1969. I suppose his story and his success are no more or less real than each other, or the beautiful young bleached women on whose bodies he grew rich. 

The real gush of Ron Rice’s wealth came when he started promoting his suntan oil with beauty pageants. The first Miss Hawaiian Tropic swimsuit competition was held in 1983. It was absolutely magic, Ron Rice said. I had never seen anything like it. We had every horn dog in the world come in and see the pageant.

I leapt off a barn roof when I was 16 for a movie some guys at my high school were making. One of them showed me once how to fall, turned his body to land on the plastic-coated mattress below and bounced back up with long cowboy boot strides. I had no fucking idea what I was doing. I just went for it, stepped off and felt like I was floating. The fall was nice. The mattress slid out under me and my ankle took most of the weight as I hit the ground. White hot and then tingling sharp numbness masked it, but there had to be pain, because I felt like I was going to throw up. Embarrassed and confused, I shot up and limped around. No I’m fine. I’m fine. I couldn’t see what I was looking at. The guy’s parents gave me horse ibuprofen and horse tranquilizers. I was so ashamed of getting it wrong. 

I always had my hair in my face, always. Long black and brown bushy curtains. I needed a haircut for that same never-completed movie, and asked my younger sibling, who cut it too short on accident. I told them it was no big deal and tried to get it fixed at a supercuts where they gave me a sort of bowl cut and bangs combo. My goth boyfriend came over and yelled about my hair until I cried. I kinda liked it, though, later. It felt like I was the only person who looked like she could have been a member of the Buzzcocks in an alternate universe, and  I told myself that meant something. 

It was a relief when, later that year, I had to start wearing glasses. Thank god, I have something to hide behind. 

They call Ron Rice the Hugh Hefner of Florida. He was a man with lamborghinis to spare for friends like Burt Reynolds. The New Yorker obituary, written by Susan Orlean, carries this subheading: Curiously, Ron Rice was not a tan man, but, with Hawaiian Tropic, he became the king of tan. It feels conspicuously bland. He’s always just described as fun. I don’t know why this bothers me. He looks like shit. Why did a guy who looked like him have so many young gorgeous women under his sway? Perhaps the girls didn’t diminish themselves in power the way I seem to be doing by asking that. To some of them, he must have been just another mild annoyance to be tolerated for a paycheck, or at least, for the exposure. 

Do you ever know for sure when someone is being honest? Maybe I’m projecting self-doubt onto these beauty contestants the way others project their fantasies. Or in some absurd way, there is a taint of jealousy, the feeling of having missed a monkey bar. I briefly had proximity to this big kind of beauty but I was only three, which is one of those humbling thoughts that gives you the relief of laughing at yourself. Sometimes you think or notice that beauty might be within your reach. Or maybe you don’t think about it at all.  I love the calm in those blank, forgetful moments. But left unattended, beauty’s touch lingers and becomes an ever tightening chokehold that says you don’t look right and that means something.

There’s no mention of the Little Miss Hawaiian Tropic contests on the Hawaiian Tropic Wikipedia or website. My dad still talks about how uncomfortable he was, how angry. Even my mom realized something was off when a member of the audience waved a $20 bill at us, the pre-schoolers on stage. There’s a video of one from 2008 on Youtube. The girls look the same age as I was, some with neon colored swimsuit bottoms stretched tight over diapers whose white edges peek out like lace frills. I wore a glittering lime green bikini. Little round tummy. Giant eyes. 

Two women sued Rice for sexual harassment. You might be thinking oh, shocking in a sarcastic voice. Rice denied everything, settled out of court with one and dragged the other for six more years until the judge decided he wasn’t liable for damages. Rice sold Hawaiian Tropic to Playtex in 2007, made over 80 million, and then someone else got it from Playtex when they bought Playtex or another group bought it from the next guy. You know how it is. 

There are lists of winners in the various types of pageants Hawaiian Tropic held. Marla Maples, the second wife of President Donald Trump, was once a Miss Hawaiian Tropic contestant. Many went on to do Maxim, Playboy, WWE. There are women who collect beauty titles from among many categories of beauty queen, some I’ve never heard of before. In addition to Miss Hawaiian Tropics they are also Miss Hooters, Playboy cover models and centerfolds, MMA ring girls, WWE Divas, Miss International Israel and Miss Suprainternational Israel, and a contestant on a British reality tv show where American porn stars take acting classes and perform classic English drama in the West End. 

If your body is something they can make money off, you’re a glamor model. With other models, they sell us a flimsy sweatshop product, but with you they are selling an experience of beauty that is so pure, so unbuyable, because it is yours. And because, like you, it is not permanent. Scarcity is good for business. Like many unattainable, immaterial products, beauty is being constantly hawked at us. All our senses saturated either with beauty or with its lack. We are fed this and other formless things like unwitting sin-eaters. Maybe the root of this jealousy is in the fear that my body isn’t a material resource in the same way. Not the kind of body that can make me money or make someone else wealthy, or not in this particular line of work—all we have in this life are our bodies, to make money off of. I know this. So where did this lack-shaped hole come from? 

Again and again, from the pediatrician to the boys at school and coworkers and older guys in bands and boyfriends and their best friends, I fumbled blind for understanding expressed as desire or vice versa. Anyone who looked in my direction must be a trophy-bearer. I tried to fit the word love to so many like a badly-made bridle but my  fingers have always been clumsy.

I wonder if drawing money through the idea of one’s body in the way a glamor model does feels like power, the way that the performance of labor seems to confer some kinds of power. Collective power, certainly. But the other kind, that draws itself from exploitation rather than work, fills the negative space like noxious gas. 

So many onetime beauty queens seem to die in their 30s and 40s. Suicides. Overdoses. Murdered by husbands. Bodies broken for what? Trying to earn a living? Maybe we want it to be for something beyond that. An aesthetic ideal. A confirmation—of the sense and symmetry in our artificial systems, against which our deep animal bones thrash—that their bodies can bestow upon us supplicants.  

After divorcing his first wife, Ron Rice married a former Hawaiian Tropic beauty queen 25 years younger than him named Darcy LaPier. They had a carriage drawn by a spotted Appaloosa whose mane and tail were dyed vibrant pink. They drank champagne from what was supposed to be that same goddamned garbage can he mixed all the coconut shit in. This man loved his garbage can. 

Within two years, Darcy left him for Jean-Claude Van Damme, who broke it off with his bodybuilder wife for her, and it turned out she never divorced her first husband so Ron annulled their marriage but raised a daughter with her, anyway (child support, no alimony). Then she left JCVD for the founder of Herbalife and JCVD remarried his first wife, and Darcy’s Herbalife guy OD’d and died a year later. Now Darcy has another husband and all these children of successful men, and lives on a ranch in Oregon where she has made herself over into a star rodeo barrel racer. I sort of smile, imagining her. 

I was on a date with someone else when I met Michael. He wanted to see Michael’s band on their tour from Seattle because Michael was one of his favorite artists. As soon as Michael entered the bar, we were pulled to each other. He slammed a beer on the table, sat down, and that was it. To be so easily beheld and opened up there with my date watching was intense and unsettling. He said what’s your story? and irresistibly I emptied myself to him. 

He came back soon after, stayed for a week. The first night we spent together, I laid on top of him, fixated on the patch of hair nested in his clavicle. He lifted my face to his and said You’re the kind of person I could develop real feelings for in a sort of heavy, troubled voice. I wrinkled my nose and said What does that mean? He answered I was interested in you right away. Because of the way your eyeballs look. I knew he didn’t mean it the way the toddler bikini contest judges did. He meant how I peer through them. I knew it because I saw him, too, in the way his sad Paul McCartney eyes did their looking. 

After that week we spent splashing in the mess of our big love, Michael went back to Seattle. We struggled to make sense of the parting. What if this is real? he asked before I dropped him off at the airport. What am I supposed to do? I told him It’s real and told myself it’s so real that I bet most people go their whole lives never feeling it. Holy shit I’m so lucky I got that for even a week. I can do anything, now. As long as I live I’ll be happy because someone saw me, once. 

Michael and I saw other people and didn’t see each other for five years. By the time we reconnected we were living even further apart than before. I twisted and pleaded my body into imitations of centerfold poses and showed Michael photo after photo. I begged for videos of him making himself cum, with sound. I wanted him to know I saw him, too. 

Not long after Hawaiian Tropic’s Hooters-esque restaurant venture launched and crashed in sexual assault lawsuits, the brand realized that, since women were their target market and primary consumers, they should appeal to those women instead of to their husbands’ fantasies. With unretouched models they sell wellness, a contemporary spin on desirability that is attainable for every body. 

Compared to the original brand image, the current Hawaiian Tropic website is nuts. They declare themselves inspired by the Hawaiian lifestyle and values, not that they have any kind of connection to Hawaii. I wonder what they refer to when they describe making products in the spirit of the islands. Something about freedom from restriction or responsibility, I guess. They still claim to be in pursuit of beauty, only now it is the beauty and joy in all things: our skin, ourselves, our communities, our planet. This is why they proudly make products that are free from oxybenzone and octinoxate. Those things bleach and kill coral reefs. Hawaiian Tropic even rejects bleach, now. Gone are the luminescent bottle blondes who once carried their beauty for the brand. 

Ron Rice founded another skincare company before he died. Habana Brisa. They launched this year and their about us mentions the trash can and exotic ingredients, then their man’s whole legend-making history is boiled down to Ron founded Hawaiian Tropic and grew it to become an $8B global brand - #2 in the world, which was sold in 2007 to big industry. The rest of it is a cloud of feel-good messaging like reef-friendly. Environment. Locally owned. Trust. Integrity. 

Above it all a banner blares developed by Ron Rice, legendary founder of Hawaiian Tropic. No mention of the international beauty queens, the golden bodies that carried his product. His body never sold a single bottle of suntan oil. 

The second night I spent with Michael, I purposely left my face and hair undone, wore leggings and a long old purple flannel shirt. I wanted him to want me for anything but my body, my appearance, but it’s bullshit because I also wore a delicate lace thong, peachy, sand colored, and the idea entered me from everywhere and nowhere while I undressed. Actually, will you take my panties off? 

It thrilled me. I’d never asked a man to do this before. He looked at me like he was praying, like he had understood a sound from heaven’s frequency, and said Yes with a capital Y. He took the lace in his big hands and slid the underwear down my thighs, his fingertips skimming the surfaces of my knees, the contours of my long calves. Hovering between Michael and my bed as if on a cloud, between being touched and being undressed, I felt beautiful. Seen. 

Even though we’re a little creeped out by the government being involved in our true love, Michael and I decided to get married. I tell myself this love is a kind of justice. Not a temporary comfort or proof of worth, but an ever-growing knot of desire, excitement, and physical attempts to understand metaphysical sensations. 

In the spaces between our tangled threads, I see new shapes to try on.