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Striving for Equality in Exploitation. Or Something.
Sports Illustrated is in the business of selling magazines about sports to sports fans. The fact that many sports fans are men probably explains why SI’s most popular issue of the year is their swimsuit issue. It has nothing to do with sports, but sells well to SI’s clientele, because these male sports fans also enjoy looking at attractive women who are nearly naked. This is not really in line with SI’s business model (sports), but they publish it anyway because it makes money. Which made me wonder why SI is featuring pictures of this new swimsuit model, wearing what is promoted as Muslim-friendly swimwear (described as a “hijab and burkini”):
This lovely young lady is Halima Aden – described as a Somali-American who was born in Kenya and moved to the United States at the age of 7. She is obviously beautiful. But there are a lot of beautiful women out there. Why was she selected to pose in the SI Swimsuit Issue? Believe me, her picture will look a lot different from the others in that magazine. So why did SI include her in their top-selling magazine of the year?
I don’t think this picture will help them sell magazines. But it cost money to produce. So why?
Virtue signaling? To whom? I’m fairly certain that male sports fans who enjoy pictures of nearly naked women will not be impressed with the virtue signaled here. They really, really, really don’t care about Muslim swimwear. To be fair, they don’t care about any other type of swimwear, either — they just like the pictures of nearly naked girls. And no one buys the SI Swimsuit Issue to expand their understanding of foreign cultures.
Virtue signaling to themselves? I don’t see how this helps their self-esteem – they make money by selling pictures of nearly naked women for Pete’s sake.
Is this just SI trying to make Muslim women feel better, or more included in modern society? How many Muslim women seek equal exploitation as SI bikini models? Some, I suppose, but how many Muslim women read Sports Illustrated? Enough to generate subscriptions among the Muslim demographic? Man, I don’t know…
I guess SI did get a headline on FoxNews. They got exposure for their magazine to those who don’t normally read it. People like me. Maybe that will generate some subscriptions? There’s no such thing as bad press, right? You just want publicity.
Maybe that makes sense. I guess.
But I don’t get it.
People don’t appreciate having their meaningless escapes — like watching sports or looking at beautiful women — to be infused with preaching about social justice. They could be reading the New York Times. But no. They picked up the SI swimsuit issue to get away from that stuff.
I don’t read Sports Illustrated, so I don’t really care what they do with their publication.
But I suspect that they would be better off if they tried to be really good at being Sports Illustrated, instead of really bad at being The New York Times.
Published in General
Nothing personal, but I think it best if they kept these values in their own countries.
They also beat women in the street for showing a little ankle. The SI swimsuit issue shows more than a little ankle.
Her head may appear soon in an ISIS bowling alley.
I think it is an effort to get buzz and to confuse people who would otherwise decry the magazine for being sexist by having it appear to be pro-diversity. Or something. Worst case scenario, people who forgot there was a Swimsuit Issue are now aware that there is a Swimsuit Issue.
More and more I am thinking that consumer befuddlement is the goal.
Like Nike making a poster boy out of Kaepernick.
Why is the swimsuit issue out now? It was always published between the end of the playoffs and the Super Bowl. Irrelevant.
FIFY
Saw this tonight on the Awful Announcing website on SI’s pending sale and looming budget cuts, which sort of makes the “virtue signaling in order to snag another job elsewhere” explanation for this sound about right. The ironic part, when it comes to the full body suit and the burkini, is what the magazine’s new parent company already owns:
The Fredrick’s of Hollywood burka ought to be interesting to see in the year-end holiday shopping catalog.
Hard to put one’s finger on those reasons, though, isn’t it?
Dr.,
Allow me to write the caption for this photo.
Regards,
Jim
Lot of great, funny comments but the sad thing is that what you are seeing on this SI Cover is likely the future. Submission to Islam is a must for our most fashionable Progressives even if it means no more bikinis. The Politically Correct Nannies and Ninnies will be all over this.
SI has a long history of publishing preachy, eye-rolling stuff that seems calibrated to alienate your average sports fan. I gave up my subscription decades ago because of it.
I have no idea what their business model is; however, in the internet age, selling hard copies of pictures of girls with some clothes on is surely not paying the bills.
What Islam and Leftism have in common is their demand for total submission. Failure to submit will result in dire consequneces, if not death.
What are they signaling?
“We are just a sports magazine trying to survive; please don’t hurt us!”
That is the funny thing about the Progressives. They are actually Puritans without God, so they bow to other gods, such as inclusion and correctness.
If Islam ever gets to compete with political correctness, the politically correct will turn on them like they turned on Catholic conservatives. Right now, Islam is like the Christian faith of black-Americans. Pro-life black-Americans vote democrat so they can be ignored. If blacks start leaving the democratic party because of infanticide, then the left will attack black Christians.
Bob Dylan said that, “You gotta serve somebody.” I say that you gotta worship somebody. In modern America, that is either G-d or government. As for me, I am trying to worship virtue and Truth without G-d. It’s a weird thing.
Mankind’s record on this is poor. Good luck.
Well Confucius was pretty good. But Confucius believed that people had a nature and that they had a soul. There is also a high probability that he believed in the afterlife. He started at a very different point than modern Communists, socialists and atheists. I’m no Confucius but I’m no Lenin either.
I think this is an important point.
I think at least part of the motivation is to try to preemptively hold off criticism from / boycotts by / social media smear campaigns from the “woke” crowd. In other words, not to be a positive, but to reduce the probability of what could be a very expensive negative from a powerful group.
No doubt there’s probably a little pre-emptive action going on here, especially in a feature that’s always been a nod and wink towards being about actual sports and more about a little toe-dipping in Hefnerland — you can avoid attacks over ‘objectifying’ women if one of the gals is dressed in a burka, thereby showing your sensitivity to the problem of Islamophobia. But that goes to another problem in how the people running SI or other media outlets view criticism.
They’re far more likely to shrug off any criticism for their actions from conservatives than they are from the woke intersectional progressive crowd, and that’s not just in the selection and outfitting of swimsuit models. If a major news outlet gets attacked for being in some way too conservative, unless it has some ties to the Murdoch empire there’s generally a huge amount of soul-searching that goes on within the organization about where they went wrong and how they can avoid having the same thing happen again (i.e. — The New York Times would have collectively been far more disturbed over the past week if it were being attacked by progressives for running and anti-Muslim cartoon than it was for having run that anti-Jewish one, where the paper had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even the most perfunctory of apologies and explanations).
Can we get more pictures of girls in swimsuits here?
They could give up the whole SI and leave their readership to get their jollies on the internet like civilized people.
This is by far the best comment on this post. Huzzah Arahant.
I respect Christina Hendricks because she is a good actress on top of being endowed with great beauty. That being said, I would have watched the later seasons of mad men if they had lifted the cameras a little higher.
Congratulations everyone!
I’m impressed that it took 56 comments to reach that point.
Don’t really see points, more like globes.
FIFY.
I think I just threw up in my mouth, a little bit.