Across women’s basketball, I have sensed an incremental increase in the amount of praise and attention people and institutions are willing to openly bestow upon athletes’ looks. What is less clear, and more discomfiting, is what the league hoped to achieve with this spread. Whatever nonsensical line they’re trying to walk between empowerment feminism and the commodification of women’s bodies finds a perfect fit in women athletes, who are both often hot (they devote their lives to working on their bodies, after all) and have, broadly speaking, embraced their role as “inspirational women.” Through that lens, including WNBA players makes all the sense in the world - for SI Swim. (Amy Odell explored the “Changemaker” initiative thoughtfully here. Their name for these advertisers? “Changemakers” - funnily enough, the exact same mealy-mouthed term the WNBA has chosen to use for its sponsors. They’ve even started a new initiative among their advertisers, only accepting “ brands who are helping drive gender equality forward” - whatever that means - into the swimsuit issue (one brand, for example, is Maybelline). Never mind that the usual rail-thin 18-year-olds staring coyly at the camera are available on the ensuing pages, once the requisite “diversity” and “#feminism” boxes have been checked by people digging deep to find something, anything that could count as a “first.” (Stay tuned for the first….non-profit president? First congresswoman? First woman not wearing mascara? The sky’s the limit.) It is unbearably patronizing to see the inclusion of a pregnant woman and a woman with a C-section scar (both women are thin, white and blonde, because of course they are) framed as “groundbreaking” when Sports Illustrated cemented the same ground it is now claiming to single-handedly break. The way they’ve elected to modernize it is to widely publicize a laundry list of “firsts.” As they celebrate “making history,” the magazine conveniently ignores that their own systematic discrimination and exclusion are the only reason that things like including Black and trans people are “historic” and not the status quo. There must still be enough money in printed photos of hot women wearing little to try to bring the magazine back into the zeitgeist. Why, exactly, they think an institution (and it is an institution) that has long been shorthand for society’s unrealistic expectations of women’s looks is worth trying to redeem - years after the internet ate its market share on semi-respectable smut - is unclear. After spending decades crowning mostly white and blonde supermodels as the hottest of them all via photo shoots just risqué enough to be titillating, SI Swim is trying to blend its standard-issue objectification with a small dose of identity politics. Their inclusion is one piece of a broader pivot the magazine has been trying to execute over the past few years. This year’s magazine features five WNBA players: Sue Bird, Breanna Stewart, DiDi Richards, Nneka Ogwumike and Te’a Cooper. Įarlier this week, Sports Illustrated announced one spread in its 2022 swimsuit issue - and fans of women’s sports were, seemingly, the target audience. Every week in her Good Form column, Natalie Weiner explores the ways in which the sports world’s structural inequalities and injustices illuminate those outside it - and the ways in which they’re inextricably connected.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |