> Whats with all these teenage girls?

I remember when a 13 year old girl looked like a 13 year old girl. Flat chest, knobby knees, that half-finished face that still belonged to middle school. You could clock age from across a pool deck without doing a double take and then a silent mental background check. Somewhere between then and now the whole timeline broke. Same age, full hips, tits that paid their own rent, faces that already know how to look bored at a man. I am not saying I like it. I am saying the biology department skipped a grade and nobody filed a complaint.

Has anyone actually looked into this or are we all just pretending the water is fine. Hormones in the chicken, soy in the milk, plastic in the placenta, whatever the latest cope is. Girls hit woman shape like they hit a growth sprint with a side of Instagram face. The result is a public pool full of bodies that read adult at 40 feet and legal at zero, and the only people who seem calm about it are the parents who bought the string bikinis.

And yes, the bikinis. Why is a middle schooler allowed to wear two postage stamps held together by dental floss in a municipal facility. I am not lobbying for burkinis. I am lobbying for some basic age-coded fabric that does not turn every glance into a felony risk assessment. You walk past the shallow end, your eyes do what eyes do, and suddenly you are doing the full Internal Affairs review of your own retinas. Did I linger. Was it two seconds or three. Is that lifeguard already writing my plate number.

So I do what any man with a functioning survival instinct does. I go straight to the adults only section. The lap lanes. The empty deep end where the only curves are the flotation noodles and the occasional divorcee who still wants attention. I plant my towel like I am claiming land. I stare at the tile. I stare at my phone. I stare at the chlorine levels like they are the Dow. Anything but the direction where the middle school swim team is treating the deck like a runway.

The comedy is that the adults only section is full of other men doing the exact same math. We all look like we are meditating. We are not meditating. We are running the same risk model: accidental glance equals list, list equals life over, life over because some kid's body developed on fast forward and the culture decided the only safe response is total ocular celibacy. You become a monk of the deep end. You leave when the kids leave. You never make eye contact with anyone under 25 just to be safe.

Back in the day this was not a skill. Kids looked like kids and you could exist in public without a lawyer in your head. Now every public pool is a minefield of early puberty and zero fabric, and the only winning move is to sequester yourself with the other paranoid adults and hope the chlorine burns the thought out of your brain. I am not proud of the strategy. I am just not going on a list over a glance I did not even want.