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I never imagined I would be writing about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But last month a controversy erupted when Sports Illustrated published its annual swimsuit issue that depicted people of color as ethnic props and exotic extras.
My initial reaction to this story was “What else should we expect from SI’s swimsuit issue.” But then I observed that there was hardly any controversy or uproar regarding SI’s brazen display of highly sexualized images of young women’s semi-clad bodies.
Sexualized Images and Rites of Spring
With “210,000 Likes” on the Facebook page for the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, the evidence is quite clear that we continue to accept almost nonchalantly that women's bodies are objects of sexual display.
One of our culture’s momentous events is the much-awaited arrival of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition in spring, where semi-nude, bikini-clad bodies of young women are exhibited in spectacular visuals.
This year SI has managed to simultaneously make gender, ethnicity, and race as objectified commodities and fashion props.
The images of women in SI’s swimsuit issue are not a singular phenomenon. We continuously interact with a broad spectrum of toxic images that spew out of the colossal media landscape. We gaze at these images, consume them, and also act on them.
We have to be wary of the images that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue peddles out every year, but we also need to be very vigilant about media’s cumulative power to shape norms about gender, race and ethnicity.
Gender and “The Princess of the Desired Norm”
This year’s SI swimsuit edition has 99 pages of advertisements and its launch supposedly conquered all types of media within a relatively short period of time. The message of the SI swimsuit edition is simple: As a society we should be quite comfortable with the idea that one of the purposes of women’s bodies is to sell perfumes, cars, clothes, and other products and make profit.
Young girls and women’s bodies are brushed aside as collateral damage that occurs while we are in the pursuit of buying and selling commodities and luxurious goods.
We are, however, missing the point if we only single out SI’s swimsuit edition for its hold on our imagination and for its ritual display of women’s bodies. Our media landscape—internet, magazine, television, films, and social media—is filled with airbrushed and photo-shopped visual images of women as unattainable eye candy.
Kathleen Sweeney, a media studies scholar and the author of the book, Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age (2008), captures how media images of women shape beauty norms. She writes, “The ultra thin body of the Teenage Girl-Woman often serves a Model Citizen with the fresh face and the ‘new look’ against which women and girls measure beauty standards. That she is a long limbed, bony anomaly of nature is often beside the point, her ubiquity in Image land makes her a Princess of the Desired Norm.”
Power of Images: “You Too Can Possess Her”
The power of media does not lie in the SI swimsuit issue’s brazen exhibit of women as objects, but in it ability to create flawless fantasies and desires for both men and women.
For men, the images are meant to titillate and for young women these images act as a guide to having desirable bodies. The media sends the message that an ultra slim body equals success and a ticket to healthy self-esteem. The pervasive mantra in the media is: ”Looking good equals feeling good.”
Kathleen Sweeney writes that these images tell young girls, “You too can possess her. You can be young like her. You can be mysterious like her. You can own her.”
How do these images impact girls and women? The 2011 award winning documentary Miss Representation notes, “While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.”
Framing Minorities: The Pervasiveness of People as Props
Dodai Stewart writes that the pictures SI shot for the swimsuit edition in China and Africa retain a “centrality of whiteness.” You can look at the images at the Jezebel wesbite. She further reminds us that those magazines such as Nylon, the Free People catalog, British Vogue and J. Crew have also regularly used ethnic minorities as fashion props.
The editors at SI were actually doing old-fashioned colonial anthropology. By pitching their tent in a traditional village and photographing half-naked locals who were walking around with spears and sticks, the SI’s creative team were engaged in capturing images through the voyeuristic western gaze. So what did SI observe and record?
SI photographed images of a scantily clad model posing with a group of young Chinese girls in traditional garb, a bikini-wearing model is shown sitting on a raft while a Chinese man is steering it with a pole, and in yet another picture SI shows a bikini-clad model holding a spear and posing with an African man who is also semi-naked and holding a spear.
The Others: Role Models in Search of Exotic People and Cultures
Apparently, the SI models don’t have culture to show off so it seems they went in search for authentic culture, foreign others, and native locals in Namibia and China who inhabit these so-called exotic cultures.
These images reinforce colonial imaginations of western superiority and non-western subordination, and play out the old stereotypes of colonial rulers versus submissive subjects and primitive locals versus the civilized westerners.
The models have global and cosmopolitan identities while the natives are framed as living in a bygone era with simple, innocent, native customs and traditions.
SI’s swimsuit edition is a popular culture text that is widely consumed and it has some valuable lessons to offer us in understanding: a) the psychology of media and b) how media shapes gender and cultural identity.
