SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Swimsuit Issue: Porn, porn, porn. Just porn.

I worry for her future.

So I was sitting in the urologist’s office the other day waiting to discuss my husband’s latest pee-pee scope with the very young doctor who has issues looking folks in the eye—and I guess if all you did was fiddle with folks’ urethras all day long, it’s understandable—and there on the top of the magazine pile was the latest Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Issue. Or I should say, there were Kate Upton’s smashed-together “melons,” as my husband called them.

Unless you’ve been in a coma, there’s no way you missed the news that “the lovely and talented” Miss Upton has been selected for the coveted spot on the magazine’s cover. Yes, yes. Miss Upton is lovely in the magazine-model kind of way. But “talented?” How is frolicking nekkid a talent? I’ve seen her acting, and drift wood has more substance. Now, I appreciate that she is no stick figure, so that she more closely resembles mainstream Americ…wait. What the fuck am I saying?!  

There is nothing that I appreciate about SI or any other publication hawking gratuitous nudity and pretending it’s anything other than porn. The shit SI printed has nothing to do with swimsuits, it is not family-friendly, and it does NOT belong on the magazine table at the doctor’s office. There’s no way that you’d find Playboy or Hustler mingling in the same physician’s office stack with People and Golf Digest, so what the hell?

I read a report last week that said the sales of the annual swimsuit issue are five or six times the normal weekly circulation, and that almost 20 million women peruse the pages of swimsuit models. I understand why. Women like to compare themselves to standards. It’s a stupid practice, of course, because the average woman hasn’t been photographed a bazillion times to get the right shot and then photo-shopped to boot. Real women don’t have skin that looks like a Baby Alive doll. The average woman looks like a dwarf next to a swimsuit model. 

And for some dumbass reason, swimsuit models tend to wear shoes that add an extra 5 inches to their Amazonianness. Who walks in the sand in those fuckers? But women—myself included this year—look at the photos to see what all the buzz is about, to see what we’ll never be. It’s a shame that even for a second we compare ourselves to an impossible, plastic standard. The thing is that women can look at the photos in SI without the usual scrutiny because the magazine pretends it’s not porn.  

The truth: SI gets away with publishing and selling porn once every year in the guise of a “swimsuit” issue. The magazine is on the check-out stand racks with regular magazines at WalMart and the grocery store and all kinds of places where kids can see it. Most of the pictures have very little actual swimsuit in them. I guess as long as there is the hint of swimsuit material, say, slung on a nearby rock, that counts as a swimsuit picture. There’s one picture in this year’s edition that features the cover girl in a pair of snow boots and a knitted scarf. That’s it. There is no swimsuit anywhere near that photo. And the scarf is a very, very open knit, if you get my drift. I mean, come on! It’s fricking porn. Period.

I don’t particularly care for pornography, but people have the right to do what they want to do as long as it’s not illegal or hurting anyone. My jury is still out on the objectification-of-women issue because I’m not convinced that all women who participate in porn do so unwillingly. But whatever. I don’t want porn in my house or staring at me from the magazine rack at Wally World. I don’t need Kate Upton’s boobs so prominently at eye-level. 

I don’t have to—and I won’t ever again—check out what’s inside the swimsuit issue. But the mag should just own up to what it is and quit shoving it in our faces and heralding its women who are deluded into thinking they’re doing something “important.” Just because these girls prance practically naked in exotic locales and generate millions of dollars and appear on the talk-show circuit doesn’t make them any different than their sisters who writhed around on dirty sheets in seedy backroom beds for generations. SI simply shoots its girls in prettier places. No matter how they package it, it’s still fucking porn.