Not So Swimmingly
SI’s swimsuit issue has become passé.

By Dave Shiflett, a writer living in Midlothian, Va.
February 24-25, 2001

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 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.