A day before the 2018 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue dropped, the official SI Swimsuit Twitter account tweeted âOne dayâ above a photo of a womanâs midsection, cutting off her head and her feet. It felt almost too on the nose â an image of a womanâs body meant to tease an audience, erasing the parts of her that allow her to communicate and move about in the world.
Thatâs the image to remember as you look over the issue, âthe First Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of the #MeToo Era,â as a Vanity Fair article put it. In it youâll find a set of images of gymnast and Larry Nassar survivor Aly Raisman, posed nude with words like âEvery voice matters,â âSurvivor,â and âAbuse is never OKâ written on her body.
The shoot is affecting and powerful, in its way. It also exists alongside the sort of photos suggested by the teaser tweet, photos closer to what SI managing editor AndrĂ© Laguerre had in mind, in 1964, when he asked fashion reporter Jule Campbell, âHow would you like to go to some beautiful place and put a pretty girl on the cover?â
A beautiful place and a pretty girl. The swimsuit issue may have evolved over the years, shifting with the cultural winds. The models may have gotten (ever so slightly) browner and blacker and occasionally bigger while the swimsuits got smaller; the presentation may have moved away from the blithe Lycra colonialism of its older shoots. But even with these new trappings of wokeness, the issue is still ultimately about those two things: beautiful places, and pretty girls who donât talk or move, who are ultimately present for the pleasure of men.
Once a cultural juggernaut and a launchpad for models from Kathy Ireland to Kate Upton, the swimsuit issue has become somewhat of an anachronism, albeit still a highly profitable one. Best known for its just barely SFW titillation, SI has successfully packaged and monetized the male gaze for more than five decades.
As of 2013, the issue made up about 10 percent of Sports Illustratedâs yearly revenue.
In 2018, its editors decided the magazine needed an update â to, as Vanity Fairâs Erin Vanderhoof wrote, âmake a magazine where models were as much participants as objects.â The cover of the issue is still as conventionally sexy and tropical as ever, featuring model Danielle Herrington, the third black woman to land a solo swimsuit issue cover, posing in a hot pink bikini in Aruba. But the magazine also includes a nude spread titled âIn Her Own Wordsâ in which models chose descriptors like âTruth,â âProgressive,â âArtist,â âStrong,â âWomanâ and âNurturerâ to be written on their bodies. âIn Her Own Wordsâ was shot by a woman photographer, Taylor Ballantyne, with an all-woman crew â a first for the swimsuit issue.
The women featured in the series include models Paulina Porizkova, Robyn Lawley, Hunter McGrady, Ebonee Davis, Myla Dalbesio, Georgia Gibbs, Kate Wasley, Olivia Culpo and Sailor Brinkley Cook (daughter of Christie Brinkley), as well as Raisman. The photos are paired with in-depth, honest essays written by Porizkova, Lawley, Brinkley Cook and McGrady. (However, online readers looking for those essays might have had a hard time on Tuesday. The link was not featured on SI Swimsuitâs front page, nor was it tweeted out by the brandâs account by mid-afternoon.)
Taken on its own, the âIn Her Own Wordsâ spread is good. The photos are pretty and the words are nice â the magazine equivalent of a friendâs unobjectionable but ultimately forgettable new significant other. But SI Swimsuit editor MJ Day seems intent on positioning the issue as something that means more.
âItâs about allowing women to exist in the world without being harassed or judged regardless of how they like to present themselves,â Day told Vanity Fair. âThatâs an underlying thread that exists throughout the Swimsuit Issue.â
Indeed, no woman should fear being harassed (or worse) for the way she presents herself. But in the world of the swimsuit issue, the answer to a very real problem â that women, no matter how they present themselves, do have to worry about being harassed, belittled, overlooked and assaulted â is to photograph scantily clad, mostly white, almost exclusively thin women and sell those images to hordes of straight men. The 2016 nod to body positivity was to put plus-size model Ashley Graham on one of three covers. The 2017 nod to sex positivity was a sexy photo of model Nina Agdal, wearing bikini bottoms and a very cropped tank top which read âA woman doesnât have to be modest to be respected.â The 2018 nod to an international reckoning is to give a woman the camera and her subjects four to 10 phrases.
In Vanity Fair, Day comes off as almost comically self-congratulatory about the project. She laments that the media still propagates the idea âthat thereâs just one type of person thatâs worthy of being celebrated,â and that âno one ever gives models a real opportunity to be who they areâ â the implication being that the 2018 SI swimsuit issue represents strides in both arenas.
After all, Sports Illustrated gifted these beautiful, accomplished women the ability to speak â via words inked onto their naked bodies. How magnanimous! The messaging just falls a bit flat when those photos are sandwiched between more sexy photos of all those pretty girls in those beautiful places who have yet to be given the commercial chance âto be who they are.â
Just weeks ago, the world watched as Raisman stood in a room in front of cameras. Her clothes were on, but she was stripped down. She looked her abuser in the eye. âThis group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time, are now a force, and you are nothing,â she said, in her own words. Millions heard her.
This is not to dismiss the individual âempowermentâ (a word used so blithely and frequently that it has almost lost all meaning) that the women who participated in this or any other Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo shoot may feel. Brinkley Cook told E! News that the project made her feel âsexy,â but also âmore emotional.ââIt helped me accept myself,â she said. Raisman had similar praise for the project. âFor me, âIn Her Own Wordsâ serves as a reminder that we are all humans, we are all battling something, and it is OK to not be OK,â she said. âWe are not alone and we need each other.â
The production of âIn Her Own Wordsâ may very well have been a powerful, even life-altering, experience for those involved with it. Thatâs beautiful and special. The fact that it happened within the context of an exploitative and demeaning project isnât a contradiction; thatâs basically the American story in a nutshell. But to conflate an individualâs positive feelings with an âempoweringâ end product is counterproductive and shameless, even by the standards of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
As Jill Filipovic put it in a piece for Cosmopolitan in March 2016, âfeeling good is criminally underrated, and making a bunch of money sounds cool â but feeling âempoweredâ is not the same as real, actual power.â Actual power means economic, political and social access. It means your words will be heard, even if they arenât splashed across your naked body.
The 2018 SI swimsuit issue seems to have made the women in it feel really good, and certainly made a handful of people a bunch of money, but did it bestow any âreal, actual powerâ on women as a whole? Absolutely not.
Women learn early on that their greatest and primary value lies in their appearance, and whether that appearance is deemed desirable enough by men. The #MeToo movement is, in part, about exposing the ways in which womenâs bodies are objectified and then weaponized against them. SI has spent decades making big money off of that objectification, and a handful of artful nudes and big block letters does nothing to counteract that. As the New Yorkerâs Alexandra Schwartz put it, Sports Illustrated is simply âfighting fire with fire.â
But this is a tightrope the brand has always been comfortable walking, delighting in its own naughtiness, begging its critics to expose themselves as prigs while also winking about its own chauvinism. Either way, people are talking. Either way, the money rolls in.
From its inception, the swimsuit issue has courted and basked in its own controversy â both real and imagined. After the original swimsuit issue ran in February 1964, the magazine published a letter from W. Frank Caston, of Columbia, South Carolina. âI most certainly do not want such pictures coming into my home for my young teen-age son to ogle,â wrote Caston, âmuch less myself.â
According to a 1989 Sports Illustrated history of the swimsuit issue, this reaction âamusedâ Laguerre.This kicked off a decadeslong tradition of publishing letters to the editor from people who were prudishly âscandalizedâ by SI Swimsuit.
The magazine largely treated feminist critiques of the issue with similar mockery and disdain. In that same 1989 piece, SI reporter Frank Deford argued that âtoday ... some zealots paint anything sensual with the broad brush of sexism,â before using a purported increase in breast augmentation surgeries to prove that if the swimsuit issue became a relic or disappeared altogether, it would only be because women had parroted its aesthetic.
âThe real threat to the swimsuit issue may not be that womenâs protests will bring it down,â he wrote. âNo, the threat is that women will co-opt it. Instead of taking offense at the swimsuit models, women may have become more inclined to identify with them and to look like them. ⊠More than 400 women a day get breast enlargements, lifts or reductions, and according to Self they tell plastic surgeons that the desire to change â to look more like an SI model â is their own, not some manâs, idea.â
In 2018, things are working in reverse. The swimsuit issue is trying to co-opt those aforementioned womenâs protests, not the other way around.
On Tuesday morning, the official SI Swimsuit account tweeted about Raismanâs inclusion in the issue. The tweet contained no words, just a âpraise handsâ emoji, paired with a link to a gallery of images and a featured photo of Raisman laying out on a sandy beach in a black swimsuit.
Another pretty girl in a beautiful place.
HuffPost reporter Emma Grayâs book, A Girlâs Guide to Joining the Resistance: A Feminist Handbook on Fighting for Good, is out Feb. 27, 2018.