By Nadine Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 7, 2012
Does using sex as a marketing tool violate any ethics? CNN and Sports Illustrated (SI) certainly don’t think so. After a look at SI’s one-sided representation of women, it’s easy to arrive at a different conclusion.
You’d be hard pressed to find a single article about women’s sports on their homepage. SI is the most popular sports magazine in North America, yet women’s athletics are remarkably underrepresented in the magazine. Out of the 44 people on the editorial board, 40 are men.
So SI is a magazine written primarily about men by men and targeted at men. There’s not much of an issue there. Women get magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman’s World, after all. The question is why CNN—one of the most popular news sources in the United States—takes all of its sports news from a magazine that to a large degree excludes women from its coverage?
Of course women do dominate one facet of SI. “Swimsuit” is apparently a popular sport these days, a feature that has really picked up readership for SI. Having images of beautiful women in a magazine might not be a crime against morality or feminism, but when the publication selectively represents women not focusing on their athletic feats, but solely on their appearance, it becomes offensive.
These women are competing for a cover shot of themselves in the annual swimsuit edition of SI. Each model (they are models, not athletes) is given about a minute in front of a camera on the website. Model Anna V says that “women really look up to women who are in Sports Illustrated because they are in different shapes.” While it is true they are not skeletal, each is thin, tall and remarkably curvy. No images of power and strength are portrayed, simply the stereotypical standard of western beauty and sexuality.
“An SI girl,” model Adaora explains, “has a great personality, is spontaneous, fun and just amazing.”
Another model, Cintia Dicker, explains the role of an SI girl. “In this job we can show who we are, we can put on our bathing suit and just walk around and be ourselves,” she says. According to Dicker, an SI girl must “be able to wake up in the morning at 3 a.m. and be beautiful and always be happy and laughing.”
There is no mention of personality (except being fun and laughing), intelligence or athletic interest in any of the videos. They are simply scantily clad bodies writhing in front of a camera to entice the consumers of a man’s magazine.
Eleanor Barkhorn, in an article in The Atlantic Monthly writes that in SI’s 57 years of weekly publishing, a woman has appeared on the cover “on average, just over once a year.” This is not including the annual swimsuit issue. “Years have gone by without a female athlete making the cover,” Barkhorn writes, “but every winter since 1964 without fail, there’s been a woman in a bikini.”
SI is enforcing some very demeaning stereotypes of female sexuality. The women are not pictured wearing athletic bathing suits or in positions of athleticism. The value given to them is appearance and appearance only. It’s really a form of soft porn disguised. It gives the reader the impression that no matter how skilled a woman athlete is, the value given to her depends on how she ranks in a lineup, wearing a bikini.
Is it ethical to use sex to boost subscriptions? Sexuality can be a powerful and empowering thing, especially when paired with other positive attributes. But using such a narrow version of female sexuality, a version that caters solely to the tastes of a specific type of readership, is misleading and harmful. CNN is subscribing to an unethical representation of women.
Swimsuit is not a sport.
