Once upon a time, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue was a puzzlement to me. I was 12, and I didn’t understand why there was a women’s swimsuit issue in my sports magazine.
Then I figured it out, and like millions of Americans, I put up with it. For years, women were denied their rightful place on the cover of SI, unless they were wearing almost nothing at all, in which case the cover was all theirs. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but it was just the way it was. I smiled as people wrote in cancelling their subscriptions. I would never do that.
Megan Rapinoe is the first openly gay woman to be featured in an 'SI' swimsuit issue. (Photo: Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)
Then top female athletes started showing up in SI photo shoots, some of them posing more like those scantily-clad models than the terrific athletes they were.
I wrote a column about this in August 2000. People who can’t recall what they had for lunch yesterday somehow still remember it. I pointed out that a picture of Olympic swimming champion Jenny Thompson, who appeared topless while clenching two strategically placed fists, sent girls "the insecure message that an old stereotype still lives and thrives.” When you looked at the picture, you didn't focus on her stunning biceps or abs or quads. No, your eyes went “right to her chest.”
LATEST SI SWIMSUIT COVER: Tyra Banks sizzles on the cover in a bikini at 45
I asked Olympic icon and women’s sports advocate Donna de Varona what she thought. “I guess I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “I want them to keep their clothes on.”
Still pretty good advice all these years later. But times have changed, and more and more of these young athletes believe they are striking a blow for empowerment, not succumbing to sexism’s lowest common denominator, by appearing in various stages of undress.
They do it for SI, as four members of the U.S. women’s national soccer team just did. And they have done it for years in ESPN’s The Body Issue. There are far more athletes who do not appear in these issues than do, of course. But those who do are now so numerous, it’s certainly not the headline-grabbing story it used to be.
And it’s not just female athletes, but some males too. The split is nowhere near 50-50, and likely never will be, which is of course a problem, because if this really is all about empowerment and showing off your muscles, the guys would be as interested in participating as the women.
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That said, something very interesting appeared in the latest issue. U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who is responsible for the most famous pass in the history of the American game (to Abby Wambach’s forehead in the 2011 World Cup), became the first openly gay woman to be featured in an SI swimsuit issue, while Somali-American and Muslim model Halima Aden became the first woman to wear a hijab and burkini.
If we are to assume that SI readers (i.e. men, mostly) would have written in cancelling their subscriptions had they been subjected to such things in a swimsuit issue a few decades ago, then, yes, this is progress.
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