Let it be known that I am not the biggest Sports Illustrated fan. Mostly because I'm not a sports fan, but secondly because, since I was a child, their infamous Swimsuit Issue has given me body insecurity like nothing else could. Year after year the magazines would pile up at my childhood home and I was unable to resist peeling back the cover to see what was inside, or rather who was inside.
The Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated is objectifying women, let's not pretend it has any literary value. There is no reason for those women to decorate those pages rolling about in the sand in their bikinis, as unlike in women's magazines they're not actually selling anything. Their soul purpose is for the titillation of the subscriber. The models are literally objects to be admired and nothing more. In fact, the issue's inception came about as a way to sell magazines during a particularly slow month when the motivation was less about the content and more about pushing sales. I mean, who cares about articles when there's scarcely dressed women inside?
I get it, sex sells and the women featured in the Swimsuit Issue are nothing if not sexy. However, as a woman I can't help but wonder what value this magzine actually has, as all it seems to do is perpetuate a very specific type of beauty. A very singular idea of sexy. Since 1964 the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has featured stunningly beautiful women modeling swimwear, but they've always been of a similar shape, size and even color. Tyra Banks was the first black cover girl and that wasn't until 1997, 33 years after the first issue went to print.What a shame.
However, over recent years Sports Illustrated has began to widen the scope, ever so slightly of what they consider beautiful by allowing Kate Upton to grace their cover for the past two years running. Yes she's still blonde and yes she's still a size 8US/10UK, but in the modeling world that's plus sized. So Ms. Upton is a slightly different size of beauty and that's progress. Now I'll never be a subscriber to this publication, but I always give credit where it's due and I have to admit, that if I saw Kate's soft, curvacious body on the cover of my dad's magazines as a kid, I might have felt more positively about what was going on underneath my own clothes.
Kate Upton has changed the conversation. Especially about what men find attractive, what kind of a woman men want to look at and what will get them to open their wallets. As a result Sports Illustrated is being patted on the back again for featuring a plus size woman in their most recent Swimsuit Edition. Joining Kate Upton in the 2015 issue, Ashley Graham is all set to break the internet with her shoot weighing in at a size 14US/16UK. Each nation's average, I'd like to point out. Graham is an accurate representation of what most women look like in the nations that buy the most issues of this magazine, so it's about time that she and other women who have other body types joined the Heidi Klums and the Rebecca Romijns on the sandy pages of Sports Illustrated.
We need to change the conversation about beauty because it's not going away. Modifications need to happen. Every size, every color and every shape is beautiful. But it's going to take a lot more than the voice of this blogger to change the beauty narrative. We need more body types to be visible and accessible to young women, so they can feel more comfortable in their own skin. We need more publications pushing a body-positive initiative and I never thought I'd say this, but some magazines could learn a thing or two from Sports Illustrated.
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