COMMENTARY | Just when you thought the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue couldn’t get more sexist, it manages to hurl yet another insult toward women that would make even Bobby Riggs cringe.
According to Slate.com, Sports Illustrated has come up with the brilliant idea of providing several pages of beauty tips within this year’s swimsuit issue so women can look like the models in their magazine. This way women can have just as much of a reason to enjoy the swimsuit edition as men. Or as one SI editor put it, “Why not deliver more to them [women]?”
I’m not even sure how to respond to that insipid comment without hurting someone. But I digress. My primary concern is with how publishing these beauty tips within the pages of a sports magazine insults female athletes and sports fans.
Today’s female athlete is making more money than ever (though still not as much as her male counterpart.) She’s gaining more prime time exposure in the media and she’s stronger than at any other time in history. But most certainly, she is not aspiring to be stick-thin with a boob job. She’s a lean, muscular powerhouse who can outrun, outserve, and outswim the average male. She looks like the healthy Serena Williams, not the skinny supermodels who grace the pages of SI’s swimsuit edition. When will Sports Illustrated publish a yearly issue that honors women in sports and not women in bikinis? Aren’t there enough magazines on the stands that do this?
And what about female sports fans? Although the majority of SI’s subscribers are male, women still account for a decent percentage of their audience. And not all of them are awaiting the swimsuit issue so they can lament how they do not look like those women. Many of them want to read about … wait for it … sports! Yes, there are women who enjoy reading about NFL draft picks, college basketball and the World Series. If they want beauty tips, they’ll pick up Cosmopolitan. Not all women are that obsessed with their looks.
It’s embarrassing enough that Sports Illustrated still publishes a swimsuit edition four decades after the landmark Title IX guaranteed women equal access to high school and college sports. But why set women’s achievement in sports back even further?
