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EDITOR'S
NOTE: This year's Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue is out. But who cares, anyway. Afterall, last year
on NRO, Dave Shiflett said the issue is a has-been. The piece is
reprinted here.
 he Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue is out, and some of us are feeling
pretty low about the whole thing.
It's not that the gals aren't doing their part. They're knockouts,
as always, and their "come-hither Jethro" looks are perfectly capable
of warming even the deepest thickets of the hetero soul (among others).
Besides that, it is nice seeing some good-looking humans after a
week of gazing at that heaving carbohydrate sculpture named Hugh
Rodham. What a taco habit he must have. That 400K would have only
lasted him a few weeks. By contrast, these magnificent women remind
us that if life is indeed the result of a random collision of atoms,
it has been one hell of a wreck.
Yet there is a deep sadness, and that sadness results, at least
for some of us, from realizing how very passé the swimsuit issue
has become. For younger readers, a history lesson is probably in
order.
Not too far in the distant past, the unveiling of the Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue was a major event in the male world.
These were, after all, world-class beauties, scantily dressed and
provocatively posed. While the photos were not quite Playboy-explicit,
they exuded that raw sexuality that has led men to states of high
excitability, and total war.
The effects were not entirely pleasant, to be sure. It would
take a very high-speed computer to calculate the number of empty
sexual fantasies that swimsuit issues of yore have launched among
adolescent males, which in turn resulted in massive tissue attrition
in some households. There is also the issue of older men to consider.
Life's ledger no doubt contains a large number of cases in which
middle-aged husbands glanced at the issue, glanced at their wives,
and headed for the exit.
Be that as it may, the attraction of the issue was not only
that it featured world-class beauties, but that it was delivered
to homes where Playboy was forbidden, at least in open display.
Young men could actually glance at hot chicks while mother hovered
nearby, baking muffins (or swilling sherry). This openness was a
hint of grander days to come in a young man's life.
Some will argue that National Geographic provided the
| “If the arrival of
the swimsuit issue was once comparable to the delivery
of the beer ration to front-line troops, its arrival in
modern times is comparable to the arrival of a can of
Miller Lite at the Jack Daniels distillery.” |
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same service
and even more so, because it carried pictures of women who were actually
naked, thus rivaling true skin mags. Yet there was a cultural bias
at play. National Geographic's naked women tended to hail from
regions where Western modes of beauty had not taken hold. Some of
us were therefore convinced that the gravitational pull was much stronger
in those regions, as reflected in what appeared to be premature sagging.
There was also the question of props. Western pin-ups tended to pose
with things like sofas, champagne bottles, a can of whipped cream,
the occasional whip, and in action shots could be seen sliding down
a firehouse pole. The gals in NG tended to have large pots
on their heads and often were photographed while beating laundry on
river rocks. Their ability to inspire lust was limited.
In any event, the days just described are very much behind
us. If the arrival of the swimsuit issue was once comparable to
the delivery of the beer ration to front-line troops, its arrival
in modern times is comparable to the arrival of a can of Miller
Lite at the Jack Daniels distillery.
The fact is, we're up to our noses in babes these days. One
can see hot mommas — and their daughters — in more profound
states of undress every day and night on network television. Television
also allows us to watch these chicks jog on the beach, demonstrate
exercise machinery, and roll in the sack with their soap-opera stud-muffins.
Besides that, we get to hear them deliver dramatic dialogue and,
in some cases, discuss policy issues in which they boast considerable
expertise, such as vegetable versus canola oil, etc.
Then there's the Internet, where one can see exponentially
more hot mommas, and their daughters, and their horses and geese,
all doing things that would probably spook the Marquis de Sade.
The social effects of all this remain in dispute. Some argue that
the vast quantity of available material threatens to make human
skin as humdrum as the human liver. That may turn out to be true.
Yet there is no doubting that the utterly passé nature of the swimsuit
issue reminds some of us of what miserable dinosaurs we have become
— children of the paper age overtaken and stomped silly by
the age of electrons.
The good side of this, of course, is that you can read the
issue in church and no one will raise an eyebrow. That is progress
of a sort.
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