Tanaye White and Kathy Jacobs are the newly minted rookies for 2021, meaning I didn’t get my wish.
However, Tanaye was one of the girls I was rooting for in last year’s model search, so let’s consider it a delayed victory.
In fact, here’s a fun photo. Two future model search winners, Class of 2020 and Class of 2021, in their black-bikini’d glory.
Tanaye seems to have slimmed down and muscled up a bit since her 2019 model search photos, which is a bit of a shame. But that magnificent sphere of hair is new too, and I very much enjoy that.
Kathy is good looking. Pretty amazing body, regardless of her age.
This is a tired complaint I keep making, but we’ve discarded so many wonderful models after one year, or two years, or even zero years if they’re not selected from their model searches. Chase Carter, for example, grabbed me immediately, so that years later I’m still pining after what might have been.
None of this year’s candidates grabbed me like that.
The thing is, I don’t think they’re supposed to anymore. There’s clearly been a shift in what the swimsuit issue is trying to be.
Five years ago, in a post that touched on (then-)potential rookies Robin Lawley, Ashley Graham, and Marquita Pring, I wrote “I don’t think SI necessarily has a responsibility to change standards of beauty (they’re more in the business of harnessing those standards for profit).”
But now they seem to have taken up the cause of changing those standards of beauty. Trying to nudge the Overton window a bit.
As Tyra Banks said in this Fashionista article:
“Of course, it's male gaze. Duh. … But, it's not just that and so what I love about what's happening now is the woman looking at the swimsuit issue can see all of these different myriads of beauty that can possibly reflect her. … And the man can look at it and see not just what he was trained to like [by society], but go, 'why am I tingling when I'm looking at this photo of Hunter [McGrady] or Tara Lynn?' It's digging deep into what he truly is attracted to, but hasn't been trained to like."
And part of me, let’s call it my superego, thinks that’s good. I’m in favor of inclusivity, I’m in favor of opening up the standards of beauty so people don’t feel ostracized or inferior.
But there’s another part of me, let’s call it my id, that says “Why can’t the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue be the realm of impossibly beautiful women? That’s what the swimsuit issue is for. We all know it’s for fantasy purposes only. Fill it with Sara Sampaios and Chase Carters and Rose Bertrams and Raven Lyns and all the other girls we didn’t get enough of.”
I want my little island of unrealistic hotness.
MJ Day said in this Bustle interview:
"Kate [Upton], when she was on her first cover [in 2012] — people straight up called her fat. With this issue, people are coming after SI saying, 'Oh you're all about body diversity, but why is Kate Upton on the cover again?'" Day says. "I love that, because you know what that means? It means we have come so far in just five years."
This is a little different from my memory of Kate Upton’s arrival on the scene. I do remember people from the fashion world voicing the opinion that Kate wasn’t thin enough for their shows. But the red-blooded American hetero men of the world, the magazine’s ostensible audience? They immediately hailed her as their new bikini queen. I mean, it was unanimous. Everybody loved Kate.
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Her Highness. |
I’m not sure Kate Upton was really a swimsuit issue trailblazer. Robyn Lawley, introduced in 2015, was a significant step, though I felt that she had a very Ashley Richardson body.
Ashley Graham, 2016 — she was an iconoclast.
Anyway, I’m torn. I don’t want to be one of those “OH NO THE SJWS ARE TRYING TO MAKE BONERS ILLEGAL” idiots. But I do kind of miss the yearly injection of plain-old message-free hotness.
The “good clean dirty fun” of the swimsuit issue was what inspired this blog in the first place. There was something retro about it, not just as a throwback to earlier years of the swimsuit issue, but as a throwback to pinups in general, on teens’ bedroom walls and WWII fighter planes. Maybe I liked that it was something we as a society were “getting away with” to some extent, kind of a naughty alcove of old-fashioned cheesecake, with its smiles and sand and cleavage peeks.
This is a great post, and notwithstanding your official anonymity, I would say it's a courageous post too. I'd just like to add that there are three things that bother me about SI's "body image evolution" of the past few years:
ReplyDelete1) It's misleading to suggest that the SI Swimsuit issue deserves full ethical credit for evolving towards more "inclusive" body types because you're comparing apples to oranges. The Swimsuit Issue of my late 80s/early 90s youth was a quasi-monopoly and an economic juggernaut: It managed the nearly unheard-of feat of getting the eyes of every single single post-puberty heterosexual male in the country in the same place at the same time, for the purposes of selling extremely lucrative advertising. I'm sorry to be blunt but if the Swimsuit Issue enjoyed the same kind of economic power today, and targeted the same demographic, with essentially no competition, the models would look more or less the same as they did in my youth.
2) It's ever so slightly unnerving, in a Clockwork Orange kind of way, for Tyra Banks and others to pseudoscientifically suggest that teenage boys can and should be "trained" or untrained to find certain women sexually attractive. When I was eleven years old, I had no training in what was attractive one way or the other, and yet for some strange mysterious reason, the sight of a wet Elle Macpherson emerging from the water in the 1989 "Making of" documentary had a profound effect on me. Could I have said the same about Hunter McGrady or Tara Lynn? Speaking for myself the answer is a blunt no. Should I be made to feel that I'm in need of "untraining" because of this? According to Tyra Banks the answer is yes. Like I said, it's a bit too Clockwork Orange for my taste. And for the record, no one ever seems to suggest that women should be trained/untrained to find certain men attractive—when it comes to their own tastes, for some reason women are quite content to let nature take its course!
3) Finally, it bothers me that the "Swimsuit Issue progressives" are allowed to speak out of both sides of their mouths, and to claim a moral high ground that they don't quite deserve. Tyra Banks and MJ Day and Ashley Graham all want the Swimsuit Issue to be more inclusive—but their love of inclusivity only goes so far. Are they in favor of including models with obvious facial asymmetries? Are they in favor of including amputees? Are they in favor of choosing the Swimsuit Issue cover model by picking a woman at random off the street? All of those changes would represent progressive improvements in inclusivity...but something tells me Tyra Banks isn't talking about THOSE types of women, nor would she be happy if that type of woman had her career instead of her.
Everyone with any common sense knows that swimsuit modeling is a fundamentally amoral, fundamentally elitist, and fundamentally exclusive profession. The whole point is to single out and reward a tiny elite in a straightforward, yet restrained way (nobody back in 1989 ever suggested that 24-year-old Elle Macpherson should run the world, or be entitled to five votes instead of one in our democratic elections. Society simply accepted that for a few fleeting years, she should be allowed to earn fame and fortune from her extraordinary physical beauty). So when the Swimsuit Issue progressives speak in support of inclusivity, what they're REALLY supporting is the precise combination of "benevolent inclusivity" and "ruthless exclusivity" that happens to benefit them. There is nothing wrong with this, but they're not entitled to claim quite the moral high ground they think they are. And they're certainly not entitled to guilt-trip those heterosexual men who prefer a different inclusivity/exclusivity combination.
Rant over! Thanks again for a great post and a great blog—please know that we're out there reading and paying close attention!
Ha — thank you. I don't know if I consider myself courageous for saying I want my traditionally attractive swimsuit ladies. But I do have a lot of ambivalence about this.
ReplyDeleteIn defense of Tyra's quote, "trained" is probably not quite the right word. Even the attractions we develop "on our own" are reflections of what is in vogue at the moment we hit puberty, so we're being nudged by forces we'll never fully pinpoint. I think she has a point that with a wider range of body types to look at, some observers might be like "Hm, this does something for me I might not have expected."
The thing is, my personal tastes are pretty well cemented in place, as puberty is long behind me. For me, there's Elle, and there are concentric circles around her that every other model can be placed in. That's at least part of why I find it more difficult to make the adjustment.
If the swimsuit issue sticks around long enough, maybe the next generation of viewers might have a more inclusive range of tastes, and none of this will seem out of the ordinary.
I don't know. I want a magazine full of women I find attractive, but I also know that, as wide a range of models I imagine I'm into, there's more variation that might deserve the stage.
I feel myself getting real wishy-washy about this.
Anyway, I'm not in charge, and I can't help but be interested in what they do next.
Thank you for the response, I appreciate it.
I'm in the same boat as you. I have no patience for the people that bitch about this person or that person being in the issue. I'm an adult. I understand I won't like every model in an issue. I doubt I ever have, even in the glory years. Are there more models in the issue these days that I don't personally get? Probably. But is that strictly based on size? No. Ashley Graham undeniably has that "it" factor. She's an SI girl. If anything, I'd probably prefer a model that's a little too big than a little too small.
ReplyDeleteWhat I guess I question is the overtness of it becoming an issue by women for women. And the way in which it is done seems to indicate there was something wrong about the way it was in the past. The magazine had a male readership, and the issue was oriented to that. But, at least in my opinion, it wasn't exploitative. The models never gave the impression they were subservient or helpless or anything but they were confident and in control. AFAIK, there's nothing wrong with a little flirtation or seduction.
I assume this is all down to physical subscriptions and newsstand purchases not mattering anymore, and SI no longer being under the wings of Time, Inc. Maven just seems to want to license the property, and men aren't going to buy buying SI branded women's swimsuits (btw, why is SI having non-SI "influencers" model their swimsuits on SI's instagram?), or drinking coconut water. So women are the audience and we're just along for the ride.