Swimsuit Issues REVEALING THE TAME TRUTH BEHIND SI'S SI by Professor Eric Lott Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue has never made any sense to me. Sure, SI shares its audience with the soft-core stalwarts, and so caters once annually to the male sport more regularly handled by Playboy and Penthouse. And swimsuits do suggest swimming, which is a sport. Ducks in a row so far. Sports and sex, for most straight men, are interchangeable enough for publications centered on one to logically call up the other. But if you actually look at the Swimsuit Issue, rather than submit to its idea of self-serving slackjawed stupefaction, you begin to notice the weirdness of it all. Young women in revealing swimsuits -- now there's a radical idea. Forget the fitness rags, the swimsuit illustrateds, the Victoria's Secret catalogues -- even the bra ads in the Swimsuit Issue are more risqué than the photo shoots. This is surely the tamest purveyor of stupidguy adolescent sexuality now going. So what's the point? Why bother? In this and other peculiarities lies the meaning of the SI SI. There's a loony kind of nostalgia in SI's sexual vision: none of that vulgar, brutal anatomical fetishism, you almost hear them say, as though the labial particularities perfectly apparent in half the SI images weren't a principal obsession of the Swimsuit Issue's photographers. This fairly transparent cover-up ought to be seen for the lie it is, of course, but to fully capture the SI worldview we ought also to try and figure out why the lie seems necessary. A sort of chaste, sporting horniness is the idea here, pretty much the pathetic male norm, and if that idea's masculinist corruption isn't totally obvious -- despite SI's cover-up -- this year's Swimsuit Issue makes that corruption wonderfully plain. This year the Swimsuit Issue "goes global." Global is today's watchword, from Wall Street to worldbeat, and in different hands it means strikingly different things. SI takes it to mean putting U.S. blondes in foreign locales for the visual pleasure of North American men. This imperialist nostalgia -- foreign cultures make good backdrops! -- comports perfectly with its sexual nostalgia. While SI dresses up the issue with the theme of "following the equator" -- from Kenya to Indonesia to the Maldives, complete with responsible scientific glosses -- this year's issue is little more than SI on safari, with white women the catch. From the beach-creature-with-cleavage on the cover to the numerous mammalian women within, SI's supermodels are wild-as-in-animal. One memorable shot rhymes a black-suited model with the two seals next to her; much of the rest feature animal-skin suits on models posed as global fauna. Get your gun out, the photos cry, this option tempered only by the aforementioned photographic chasteness that is essentially cool and abstract in its approach to potentially, um, explosive matters. The strange thing about the equator, SI writes, is that it's imaginary, there and not there at the same time (like the suited model who lies along its circumference in the accompanying photodescription). The "hunting for chicks" theme chillingly captures the there-and-gone aspect of both the equator and the models themselves: there -- shoot! -- not there. Even without this context, pictures of women for male pleasure are there/not there in the sense Freud termed the "uncanny." There in a way that entices but also threatens male desire -- what if Mr. Bill comes too early or too late? -- the photos require a complementary "not-there-ing" of the women through gauzy softness or posed submission. The safari only makes explicit how much women's own activity, agency, and even appeal has to be carefully tamed in the conventionally "sexy" swimsuit shot. Male viewers here become hunters, baggers, gatherers of girls -- even, in the African shots, imaginary Africans. Ever the most flattering of the prowess-stories white guys like to tell themselves, the theme in SI's hands acquires a couple of new wrinkles. Racial difference and variety in general seem a bit of a high hurdle for SI; their recent story lamenting the decline of the white athlete was more baldly conceived than even I might have expected. In the Swimsuit Issue this difficulty is managed by the convenient but not disarming solution of featuring only two black women and one Asian woman in the entire magazine, and in appropriately racialized fashion. A black woman apparently able to converse with seals, an Asian woman draped in spiderly inscrutability over wet rock, that sort of thing. The key feature of this train of thought, though, is the shoot with a leggy blonde sporting among the Maasai of Kenya. Virtually the only non-Western people pictured in the issue, the Maasai are splendidly garbed and strikingly beautiful, quite diminishing the sparkle of the designated supermodel done up in an undistinguished bleach job. Do the Maasai face paint and ritual attire cunningly reveal for the photographer the peculiarity of Western costumery in the form of swimsuit and make-up? Anglo-European whiteness and African blackness made out to be complementary rather than hierarchical components of globality? If you're letting me judge, I say no fucking way. The racist exoticism of the feature is captivating in its fossilized naivete. It's so clichéd by now that I'd guess it's banal even for the people who are supposed to like it. Which is not to say that certain odd things don't happen against the photograph's will. Just having the Maasai there, in their various gazes and glances, unsettles the imperialist geography. They stand there apparently captured, stalled, but their stern looks askance or their sheer indifference to what is going on makes it hard to get with the program. In one image the sexual and racial claims come precisely together: blonde with stick crouches at the head of a poised Maasai group, the blonde venus of white men's dreams; her dark one-piece cast in a shadow that accentuates her blonde whiteness, the model has become not the complement to but the bearer of Africanness -- her crotch in your face is a "dark continent," as Freud once lamely termed female sexuality. Just behind the model, as if to stare you out of this delusion, appears the astonishingly cogent and beautiful face of a Maasai man apparently wise to the whole frame-up. In another shot appears the interracial desire that the "global" theme intimates all along. Eye to eye, blonde and Maasai come together in a moment that would be sexy if the concept weren't so absurd. Supermodel fiddles with the straps of her top -- adjusting, putting on, or taking off is unclear. Amid the phoniness there's an intimation of active desire suffusing the encounter; and all parties to it seem aware of the way in which currents of desire involve imaginative staging or sexual personae as their distinguishing human characteristics, making sensuous human contact elegant and mindful as well as animal. But in the shot I'm describing you see the scene from behind the Maasai man's head, obscuring his own look, stance, and feeling and putting the viewer in his place rather than in his head. The resulting imaginary Africanization of the viewer is offensively usurping where it isn't simply corny, and the whole thing falls apart. It's kind of sad to imagine all those guys out there getting off on such limited fare. It's not that I don't have sympathy for people who are turned on by sometimes embarrassingly retro fantasies -- that's the mess most of us are in. And I don't believe that SI's hunting fantasy is in most cases continuous with a desire to literally hunt down and harm women. Sexual fantasy is much more indirect and mysterious than that. Sports Illustrated, however, like its soft-core mates, sucks the sweet imaginative unruliness out of fantasy and desire, settling for boring scripts and feeble icons and mocked-up moves. Sports fans everywhere ought to do better.

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