Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, senior citizens, and transgender women
The first, scariest, and most important detail I need to note about this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is the fact I am closer in age to Martha Stewart than I would be if a 20-yearold model — like Paulina Porizkova, in 1985, hubba hubba — graced the cover.
Yes. I am closer in age to an 81-year-old woman than I am to a 20-year-old woman.
As a result of this first, scariest, and most important detail, I will now pause this column to go scream into a pillow, followed by some weeping, and finish it off by standing in front of a mirror and counting the gray hairs in my beard while I try and convince myself it makes me look distinguished.
Gah, I’m old.
OK. That’s enough of that. Let’s complain about the fact there’s an 81-year-old woman on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. (Well, there’s four choices: Stewart, Megan Fox, Brooks Nader, and Kim Petras. An older woman, a star actor, model, and a German transgender singer, which is also causing plenty of people to complain.)
See, here’s the thing: I’m old enough to remember when the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was a huge deal. Seriously: That 1985 Porizkova cover, followed by 1986’s Elle Macpherson cover, are burned into my brain. It’s not a coincidence I was 13 and 14 years old at the time.
But for those of us of a certain age, that swimsuit edition was pretty much the gold standard when it came to seeing beautiful women nearly naked, something kind of important to 13 and 14 year old boys.
Basically — and not to sound like too much of a perv here — it was the swimsuit edition, Macy’s Sunday circular, and scrambled signals on Cinemax after dark. A few of us were lucky enough to discover our fathers had a Playboy stash (not my dad, sadly). And that was pretty much the extent of our ability to drool over two-dimensional women.
Today? Welllllllll … things have changed just a bit. The internet and all. It’s taken a lot of the oomph out of the ol’ SI swimsuit edition.
“What do you think of Martha Stewart being on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition?” I asked my 14-year-old son the other day.
He looked at me like I asked him the this instead: “Bliglity gobbeldy schnook berune, huko kiove robka libbe?”
He had no idea who Martha Stewart is, and seemingly less of an idea of what something called the “Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition” is.
I then asked him what he thought about the idea of a transgendered person appearing on the cover.
He shrugged his shoulders. Didn’t care.
It’s interesting how these things go. There was a time people got angry at the SI swimsuit edition for objectifying women. Now the internet is littered with porn sites of every stripe, and the “stop objectifying women” crowd has much bigger fish to fry.
But incredibly, people are still angry about the swimsuit edition — it’s people who still romanticize what it used to be and are aghast at the idea of senior citizens and transgender people being featured.
You know what? Shut up. Women come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties, and if you absolutely must see them in various stages of undress, there’s a website for that. As far as the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition goes? It may have lost some of its cultural cache, but good for them for featuring women who aren’t all perfect 20-year-olds.
I guess all I’m trying to say here is Martha Stewart is a stone fox. This could’ve been a much shorter column.