Let us gather together today to mourn the death of the Modern Male. We have regressed into a Cro-Magnon civility. Our barbarism has forced our womenfolk into a sort of reverse flapperism, undoing all the sexual liberation of the last hundred years.
Our only hope is to quarantine the most heinous contaminate in this cultural plague: swimsuit editions.
Culturally speaking, the 2004 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is the equivalent of a jizz-rag. What’s that, you say? SI’s SE is boorish — old news?
Perhaps you are right. But let us remember this is the magazine that has for the last 50 years pioneered quality writing on the human drama of sport. It has featured writings from literary giants such as the equanimous George Plimpton, the kamikaze Hunter S. Thompson and the braggadocious Ernest Hemingway. And for the last 40 years, the swimsuit edition has been the best smoke and mirrors show in town.
Sporadically, its swimsuit editions have gracefully maneuvered between art, fashion and pornography. Past issues were creatively developed under a congruent theme and read like travel logs, fashion critiques or unapologetic experiments in erotic photography.
But there is little artistic concept and hardly any writing at all in this year’s edition. All the cultural justifications have been abandoned. Without these justifications, the magazine is just that, unjustified. In fact, it has potential to be incredibly detrimental to the tropical ideals it promotes.
“Would you ever wear any of these swimsuits?”
“No — never,” a female friend said. “They’re not even wearing the suits in some of those pictures! They’re idealizing the bodies, not the suits.”
“Well, would you ever hang out without your bikini top on?” I pressed.
“Not without a body like that,” she said.
I’ll be damned. I never thought these sorts of things were about body image or swimsuits. I used to love swimsuit editions because they were a bunch of talented photographers and writers joining together to create a balmy and phantasmagoric tropical fantasy, for profit, of course. Annually, the SISE is itself a holiday, dropping at precisely the perfect seasonal moment: nestled between the sensuality of Valentine’s Day and the ensuing madness of Fat Tuesday, Spring Break, St. Patrick’s Day and the NCAA basketball tournament.
I love them no longer, my friend. The 2004 entry seems to be an apex in the medium’s decline. The hips are impossibly boyish and the tits are impossibly grand. The men of America must realize that by clinging to these impossible ideals, they are possibly decreasing the amount of actual female flesh they will see. The idea that media representation of the female form would influence women’s actual body images is unreasonable and unexplainable. But they are women, after all.
It is the terrible fact that women feel uncomfortable in their own bodies because the Molly Sims and Veronica Varekovas of the world have set the standard of physical beauty impossibly high.
Gentlemen, it would seem you have a choice: would you rather have a glossy 8-x-11 of the latest starlet each week in Maxim, or an afternoon of summer skinny-dipping with a nubile blonde coed? I will gladly abandon all media representations of supermodels in hopes of more women becoming inspired to prance about the woods like wood nymphs and water sprites.
Perhaps it is fitting that this year’s issue is the “All-American” issue, shot entirely in the States. The mammary fixation is the most infantile — and most American — of all the sexual fetishes. Bosoms abound, but ingenuity is lacking. Does this symbolize the state of our nation? All style and no substance?
The tropical troubadour Jimmy Buffett was offered the opportunity to write the volume’s only literary piece. Buffett is a talented lyricist and accomplished author, but his entry falls flat. After briefly teasing with a tale of legendary Sports Illustrated writer Marty Kane lecturing the advant garde bums in a Key West bar, Buffett slips into a snoozer about his fishing exploits.
That was the best the mayor of Margaritaville could come up with? What about speculating on the “Mexican cutie” who appeared in tattoo form after a drunken blackout? What about the last tango in Paris? There actually is no substance and little style in the cross-marketed CD-ROM included in newsstand issues featuring his collaboration with Kenny Chesney, which features the line “So damn smart and cute / I can’t believe what they pass off as a bathing suit.”
We can do better as a culture. The primordial instinct to look at scantily clad demure women should be embraced, but not if it deters women from actually being demure and scantily clad.
Let us take for example the story of Kurt Vonnegut’s brief career at Sports Illustrated. In an attempt to punch-up the sporting news, an editor demanded he write on a demonized racehorse jumping the rail and terrorizing an infield of spectators. Vonnegut stared at his typewriter for hours. Instead of catering to the lowest common denominator, Vonnegut wrote only “The horse jumped over the f-cking fence,” and permanently left the building.
