Many have read and commented on the recent announcement by the Arena Group that it planned to layoff of the entire Sports Illustrated staff. So many have commented on it that I figured, what the heck, it won’t hurt to shove my oar in, too. After all, the more the merrier. So buckle up and let’s get this show on the road.
For years, Sports Illustrated was an unashamedly masculine publication merely by virtue of its primary subject matter: professional and collegiate sports in America. It covered everything: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, boxing, track and field, heck, even bowling, you name it. And participation in sports, whether it be as a player or spectator, is primarily masculine. Yes, I know, there are plenty of women in sports and plenty of women who are sports enthusiasts, but for every woman either in the game or watching, there are dozens or hundreds more men. Men like to watch other men play sports. They get to live vicariously through their teams and heroes. The professional athlete represents part of the masculine ideal; strong, skilled, and successful. Men laud their heroes knowing that they, themselves, the average Joes, will never be like their heroes, but accepting that knowledge and enjoying the sports anyway. Most of us will never be Emmett Smith and play pro ball, but we don’t need to be. It’s enough to love the sport and enjoy watching or listening to the games.
Once a week for 52 weeks every year, Sports Illustrated celebrated the athletic masculine ideal by covering the men and the teams who were at the pinnacle of their respective sport. Coming of age in the late 70s and early 80s as I did meant that names like Staubach, Bradshaw, Spinks, Irving, and Bird dominated the coverage. The names have changed over the years, but the ideal has not. SI was SI. God bless America.
But Sports Illustrated was not limited to the celebration of the male athletic ideal. SI also celebrated the feminine ideal. They did this once a year in a special issue called the Swimsuit Issue. The first one debuted in 1964 and featured model Babette March on the cover.
HOW IT STARTED
Since then, many beautiful women have graced the pages of the SI swimsuit issue. In my youth, names like Kathy Ireland, Elle MacPherson, and Cheryl Tiegs appeared on the covers. As with the male athletes, the female models changed over time, but the aesthetic didn’t.
HOW IT LOOKED IN THE 80s
Until recently, that is.
In 2019, Sports Illustrated, along with so many other large and well known corporate entities, decided they needed to join the latest corporate fad by hopping on the diversity bandwagon. The powers that be at SI chose to use that year’s swimsuit issue to focus on body image and age issues, bringing in “plus size” and older models to challenge the stereotypical ideal of feminine beauty.
HOW IT LOOKED IN 2019
It’s no secret that when a company makes decisions based on diversity and inclusivity that their product suffers, and Sports Illustrated was no exception. Plus size models in tiny bikinis are not appealing to most men. If only they had stopped there, but no. Worse was still to come.
In 2020, Sports Illustrated doubled down on diversity and inclusion by including a man going by the name of Valentina Sampaio dressed in a woman’s bathing suit. Then, in 2023, another man, this one going by the name of Leyna Bloom was featured on the cover.
HOW IT’S GOING NOW
If an obese woman in a bikini is unappealing*, a skinny dude with a boob job in a woman’s swimsuit is absolutely revolting.
Why? It is a truth universally acknowledged that men look at pictures of beautiful women in bikinis primarily because they find the women in those pictures attractive*. The female form is an object of aesthetic contemplation* that men have found pleasing since God created them male and female in the garden. Artists have been depicting the female form visually since man first took up hammer, chisel, pencil, paper, brush, paint, and canvas. The female form has a been a primary topic of conversation among men, and a primary subject for artists in every medium for millennia.
For years, the photographers at SI were no exception. Models were selected based on their appearance; their beauty, elegance, and grace. Men opened the SI swimsuit issues in anticipation of seeing beautiful women wearing swimsuits of various kinds in various exotic locations. No man ever opened a swimsuit magazine in anticipation of seeing a man wearing a bikini. Such a thought would never have entered his mind. But in spite of the universal truth mentioned above, and in the face of all wisdom and common sense, SI pushed ahead with their agenda and featured pictures of men wearing bikinis. Men who had been snipped, augmented, and made up, but men nonetheless.
Surprising no one but the powers that be at SI, sales fell and controversy rose. Why? Because men who have been snipped, augmented, and made up do not look like women. They look like men who have been snipped, augmented, and made up. Dylan Mulvaney looks like a dude in a dress and make up. Leyna Bloom looks like a dude with boob implants, make up, and a woman’s swimsuit. Bruce Jenner looks like a muscular dude with boob implants, make up, and a dress. They are not women. They do not appear to be feminine. They are sad parodies of femininity. They have entered the uncanny valley and the vast majority of the men in the world do not find them appealing and do not want to look at them. And if men don’t want to look at snipped, augmented, made up men in women’s swimsuits, they are not going to buy the swimsuit issue.
Now I haven’t read any issue of SI in a very long time, including the swimsuit issue, but it seems likely to me that the mindset behind the swimsuit issue probably reflects what was going on at the rest of SI. In other words, it appears that the entire organization went woke. And just as a man does not want to open the covers of the swimsuit issue and see a skinny dude with boob implants in a bikini, he doesn’t want to read about intersectional politics along with the sports stats. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have no place in reporting on sports. Add in the AI controversy from November 2023 and, though correlation does not imply causation, it seems more than coincidental that SI went from a weekly release from 1954 to 2018, to bi-weekly between 2018 and 2020, and finally a monthly release beginning in 2020.
Sure, there are many other contributing factors. No one needs to go to SI to lookup their team’s stats and standings anymore. Sports journalism, like everything else, is only a mouse click away. But other sports publications have made the transition to the Internet without laying off their entire staff. The Sporting News, for example. But the Sporting News hasn’t gone woke, to the best of my knowledge. Therefore, though it may be a bit early to write the eulogy for Sports Illustrated, things aren’t looking good. It’s beginning to look like “get woke, go broke” may have claimed another victim. I can’t say that I’m disappointed.
*A few notes in no particular order. First, this opinion piece does not address the moral question of whether a man should buy and read the SI swimsuit issue. There are some who argue that the SI-SI is a gateway drug to outright pornography. As a Christian, I share their concern, but I am neutral on the swimsuit issue itself. It is a matter of conscience. All men should know their faults and weaknesses. If the swimsuit issue is a stumbling block for you, avoid it, but don’t beat your brother over the head with your scruples. If it isn’t, go ahead, but don’t parade your scruples in front of your brother.
Second, Women are far more than mere objects of aesthetic contemplation. They are, with men, created in the image of God and are inherently worth all the honor, dignity, and courtesy men can bestow on them. Having said that, Women are not less than objects of aesthetic contemplation. We wrong them by reducing them to mere objects, but we also wrong them if we deny their aesthetic appeal. Every woman wants to hear that she is beautiful.
Third and last, in more rational times I would include verbiage that might temper what looks like a harsh perspective, acknowledging that plus-size women can be and indeed are beautiful, that not every woman can look like a supermodel, that not every man can look like or perform like a professional athlete at the top of his career, blah blah blah blah blah. Not this time. It is time to stop catering to the perpetually aggrieved, those who are looking for a reason to be offended. You want to be offended by what I wrote? Go ahead, throw your hissy fit, hold your breath, swear and curse at me. Guess how much your being offended hurts me. Not one bit.
When I was a teenage girl long ago, Twiggy was the standard of how women should look. No more Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield, women were supposed to be boobless, hipless, androgynous drones. This belief in turn led to an era of bulimia, anorexia and addiction to cosmetic surgery for women to achieve this unattainable “perfection.” Women and girls in dance, figure skating and gymnastics were starved to an impossible standard in order to achiever. Look up the book “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes” which reveals and condemns this pattern of societal abuse. I’ve always thought that the primarily gay male designers of the haute couture lines were designing for young men, not women. This attempt to make males into females via surgery is just more of the same. Please understand, I am not promoting the unhealthy overweight models, but normality.
I couldn’t agree with you more. The “waif” look popularized through the 80s and 90s was very damaging to women, and there’s no denying the perverse impact homosexual men had on women’s fashion. We might be presented with idealized versions of femininity and masculinity, but it’s important to remember that even the representations aren’t ideal, and even what comes close lasts a brief time. Models have a short shelf life, as do most professional athletes. We can look at them and admire them, but we should not try to be them. Instead, we should and can be happy with who and what we are. What we must never do is celebrate perversion.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment!