Wetlook and body insecurity
Posted by Phil on November 16, 2025 at 21:07:51
Hi guys, this might be more of an intellectual post and maybe a little too boring. But I want to get this out and see if anyone else has the same sort of experience.
About me: I'm Phil, I'm 26, I'm an American and I'm gay. I've been fixated with wetlook for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my favorite movies and TV shows were anything where a character might fall in a pool or get soaked in the rain. I loved having water fights with my friends in the summer.
One of my clearest memories from childhood was when me and a bunch of my friends were hanging out at some friend's house on a summer day, and a summer rainstorm started. It was the perfect kind of storm - heavy rain, but no thunder or lightning or wind. Just torrential rain. My friend's dad suggested that we go out and play in the rain. I remember we all looked at each other, and then look at him, thinking "REALLY? We can actually do that?" And we did - just ran around the back yard, slipping and sliding down a small hill in their yard into a puddle of rain water. We all got completely soaked and had an absolute blast. I remember walking home after the rain stopped (I lived just a couple houses down from my friend) and my parents just laughed at me showing up soaking wet, and told me to shower and change and then do a load of laundry.
Another clear memory is when me and some friends were at a carnival in town. There was a dunk tank setup. At the time I was probably 11 or 12, maybe. High school kids were the ones going in the dunk tank, so they were a couple years older. Most of them wore shorts and t-shirts, a couple of the guys were shirtless and in swim trunks. One of my friend's older brother was supposed to take a turn going in the dunk tank, so a group of us were standing nearby to watch and heckle him a bit while he was getting dunked (I remember he was kind of reluctant about having to do the dunk tank, which we of course thought made it more fun.) But what was more interesting to me was an interaction that I overheard - a kid was being encouraged by his friends, and maybe his girlfriend, to go in the dunk tank. He clearly wasn't prepared for it - he was dressed in a button down shirt and blue jeans, and clearly didn't have a towel or change or clothes with him. But his friends keep egging him on and he ended up agreeing to go in the dunk tank, so he climbed up onto the seat fully clothed. I was transfixed! I remember people in the crowd shouting at him asking if he had a change of clothes, and he just smiled and said "nope!" It looked like he enjoyed getting dunked, too. But most of all what I remember is what happened after he climbed out of the tank. He walked proudly around the carnival, soaking wet, grinning from ear to ear, seemingly showing off how he was completely soaked fully clothed. At this point in my life, I was just gradually starting to understand that I was more interested in looking at guys than looking at girls - and I remember thinking that I just wanted to follow this guy around and experience exactly what he was experiencing. It looked SO COOL.
But also from a pretty young age, I started to develop some insecurity issues with my image. A lot of my friends had pools at their houses, so hanging out at the pool was pretty common during the summer. Plus, even during the colder months, it was pretty common for someone to have a birthday party at an indoor pool, or for a friend to take the group to an indoor pool on the weekend or something. And I enjoyed all that, but I also started to feel very uncomfortable being in a swimsuit. And I'm not sure why. I've NEVER been overweight. I didn't have any scars or birthmarks or anything that would be embarrassing. So I couldn't explain it, but as I got older, being shirtless felt more and more like being naked. And I couldn't understand why I felt that way, and I couldn't understand why my friends clearly DIDN'T feel that way. But eventually one day as I was getting ready to head over to a friend's house to go swimming, I asked my mom if I could swim with a t-shirt on. At first she seemed skeptical and was worried that the chlorine would bleach my shirts and ruin them. But she ultimately agreed to let me swim in some of my older t-shirts, which I thought was a fine compromise. My friends also didn't really comment about it, that I can remember. If anything, I probably just made an excuse about being worried about sunburn. But as time went on, I started preferring to also swim in my shorts and underwear. Usually I just wore gym shorts and underwear. Gym shorts look close enough to a swimsuit, that I doubt anyone ever really noticed. Once, when I was feeling adventurous, I "forgot" my swimsuit and swam in cargo shorts are a polo shirt. I loved it, and my friends didn't seem to care about it one way or the other.
Once puberty came along, that just seemed to make me feel ever weirder. This maybe sounds like a cliche, but everything about my body felt out of proportion. My arms and legs got longer, but I never gained any weight. I also never really got muscular, even though I exercised and stayed in shape. Sorry if this is too much detail... I've always had light brown hair, but everywhere else that hair started appearing was a weird copper color. My finger and toes seemed too long, thin and bony. Meanwhile, my friends were showing off their abs and biceps and suntans. As for me, I still hated being shirtless - but now I also was getting uneasy about wearing shorts. And forget about flip flops or sandals - I tried a few different types, and to me, literally everything looked incredibly dorky on me. So, while my friends are lounging by the pool in their swim trunks, or working out shirtless, or even just wearing summer-standard shorts and flip flops on the weekends, I found myself always wearing a shirt, always wearing jeans or sweatpants, socks and shoes, year round, all in the time. And I couldn't understand why I was so insecure compared to everyone else.
I started skipping my friends' pool parties and other events, which made them either worry about me, or even be offended that I'd skip out on them. I mean, I don't think people cared if I swam in a shirt - but trying to go to the pool in long pants and socks was a bit more unusual. Sometimes I'd force myself to go, but end up so nervous and uncomfortable I'd have a miserable time. Like, we all went to the beach one day, and I did change into shorts and took my shoes and socks off and even swam in the water - but when I was sitting on the beach I'd bury my feet in the sand so no one would see them.
Another event - my sophomore year of high school, every male student was required to take a unit of swimming in PE class. I think it was just four total classes - but it was completely mandatory, there was literally no way around it. And you had to wear swim trunks, and I absolutely hated it. I couldn't understand, because, no offense, but I was/am objectively not bad looking. But even the overweight kids didn't seem half as self-conscious and stressed as I felt.
I'll add one last story here, if you're even still reading my rambling babbling: The summer after my sophomore year of high school, my family moved from a suburb of a major city, to a small town in the literal middle of nowhere. My dad is an engineer and the small town had a major power plant - so that's why we moved, he got a job there. And my job is a nurse practitioner, so easily got a job in the hospital there. And, sorry for how this sounds, but the reality was, my family was making A LOT of money in a VERY low cost-of-living town - and I'd be lying if I said that didn't have some advantages. But, also, at this point I was still not out to anyone, but I was well aware that I was gay. And I was also well aware that a gay teenager might not have the best experience in a small hick town in the middle of nowhere. On top of the usual trauma around moving away from all my friends halfway through high school. Luckily it worked out better than I expected, and I was lucky to get in with a group of friends who I got along well with. The new school was good and there were some advantages to the small-town lifestyle. I wouldn't move back there, but it wasn't a complete disaster like I was worried it might be.
Anyway, my family lived in a small subdivision where the "rich people" lived (sorry, I hate to say it like that, but it was kind of the truth.) Our house had a very nice pool in the backyard, that was completely secluded and there was no way it could be seen by any of the neighbors or from the road. So, when my parents were both out and I had the house to myself, I started to take advantage of the opportunity to swim fully clothed. It was the first time in my life I really had the freedom to wear anything I wanted in the water, and experimented with all kinds of clothing. I was just careful to be out of the pool and have my clothes in the laundry before my parents got home. That part of the arrangement - the pool and the privacy - was probably the best part of the two years or so that I lived there.
Next to our subdivision was this huge open plot of land - I'm not sure if it was park or private property or what, but it was massive, and mostly forests with a couple of streams and ponds around it. There were various paths for hiking and biking going through it, and some old railroad bridges and a tunnel where occasionally us teenagers might get up to no-good. But the fastest way to get to the high school and the main part of town was to cut across this forest on one of the dirt paths.
So one day, my group of friends is walking back towards my house on this path through the forest - a few of my friends lived near me in the "rich people" neighborhood, and we must have been heading back to one of our houses after school. One of my friends was this guy named Gabe. And, I was crushing HARD on him - but I was also desperate to keep it a secret. The last thing I wanted to do was get kicked out of my group of friends here - because it was a small town, so it was pretty much the ONLY group of kids my age (unless I wanted to try to fit in with the jocks or with the hardcore drug users, neither of which seemed like a good option.) To make things more complicated, I kind of suspected that Gabe sometimes looked at me the way I looked at him. It was stressful and confusing, but my priority was to avoid outing myself and getting kicked out of my friends group. But anyway, on this particular day, we're walking down this path, kicking a soccer ball between us. And as we pass one of the ponds, Gabe accidentally kicks the ball into the pond. The kid who's soccer ball it was tells Gabe to go get it. Gabe agrees - the pond was clean and in the summer people would swim in it, so it didn't seem like a big deal to wade in to fetch the soccer ball. So Gabe is pretty chill and takes off his shoes and socks and rolls up the legs of his jeans. Someone - thankfully - reminds him to empty his pockets, "just in case," which he does. Then he wades into the water and plods towards the soccer ball. From there, it just turned into a comedy of errors. The water is colder than Gabe expected, and then one of his pants legs falls down and gets wet. Then he slips and soaks his butt, then the other pants leg slides down into the water, then he trips again and gets soaked up to his waist. This whole time, the ball keeps floating further and further away from him. We're all standing on the shore doubled over laughing at the scene. Finally Gabe says F It and just dives forward, getting completely soaked in his jeans and hoodie, but finally gets his hands around the ball, and gets it back to shore.
So we're all laughing hysterically - and Gabe is being a good sport, but its definitely too cold to be swimming, so we had to get moving. I'm VERY interested in how Gabe looks in his soaked clothes, and since my house was closest to us, I offered that he could come back to my place to get cleaned up and I could lend him some dry clothes. To my delight, he agreed, and we scurried back to my place, planning to get the whole group together a bit later once Gabe was dried off and warmed up. And well, I'll say that my suspicions were right, and Gabe WAS looking at me the same way I looked at him :-) But that's for another story.
So, sorry because I know this story rambled on and covered a lot of ground. But in conclusion - I like getting my clothes wet. I love the way it feels and the way it looks. But there's also part of me that knows that it keeps me in my comfort zone. I'm still awkward about being shirtless, or wearing shorts, and flip flops in public. And, honestly, I don't like that. I'm tired of feeling awkward and uncomfortable. So I'm wondering - does anyone share this feeling? Any advice for me?
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