SI's Annual Issue Is a Washout

And once a year, I get this suspicious nausea. I've pushed it down, grinned and calmly flipped through SI. But this year, I've decided to just get sick.

Yeah, I'm a girl and I'm bitching about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I usually hate going along with the crowd; it's more in my nature to embrace the thing because most women think it's horrible.

But hell, I'll conform this time.

SI's annual issue is dismal and archaic. Well, that's how former SI senior writer Tim Crothers described it. Crothers, who now teaches a sports journalism class at UNC, worked at the magazine for more than a decade.

The issue actually doesn't bother Crothers' wife, UNC Assistant Director of Athletic Communications Dana Gelin, much. She was a writer/reporter at SI for four years.

And it didn't always bother me. My sister bailed on the swimsuit issue after the whole body paint thing, but I soldiered on. Until now.

I just don't see how it's justified. It's SI dressing itself up and whoring itself out. Serious journalism winces at the idea of giving free press to brand names. But in the swimsuit issue, SI reverses fields and puts the name, brand and cost of the suit in question next to the photo. There's even a "Where to buy it" section.

So, SI's selling swimsuits. OK. Then why are a bunch of these women wearing only half a suit? If you're trying to sell them, let me give you a hint. No woman is going to buy a bikini if she doesn't know what her breasts are going to look like in the top.

So maybe SI's not trying to sell the swimsuits. Then, how the hell is this sport? Despite Rick Reilly's wink-wink, nudge-nudge protest that supermodels really, really are like professional athletes, I haven't noticed competitive catwalk on my local listings. I'm not saying it's not difficult, and I'm not saying I don't think the women are athletes, but it's not a sport. You can put Molly Sims in boxing gloves and take her picture, but you're not putting her in the ring with Laila Ali.

It's a bunch of hot, scantily-clad models lounging in various locales pretending they want to be SI's readers' sexual fantasies.

SI does make an effort to include women who aren't Klum-esque. Chi Chi Rodriguez and Javier Lopez's wives are pictured with their fully-clothed husbands. They're not supermodels, although, according to SI, "Behind every great athlete is a great swimsuit model."

The issue just makes most women feel uncomfortable. My roommate said she felt weird having the magazine in the house when she spied Yamila Diaz-Rahi's breasts prominently displayed on the cover. In fairness, she loved the bikini made entirely out of bottle caps.

I think my real issue with the swimsuit issue is in the larger context of Sports Illustrated's publications. SI for Women might be the worst magazine I've ever seen. I'd seen exactly one issue before, but for the sake of bitching accurately, I bought the Olympic preview.

OK, good thing -- UNC's own Katie Hathaway makes an appearance. Bad thing -- everything else. There are more pages telling women about stylish work-out clothes than pages of poorly written stories about female athletes. It's like, Cosmo meets ... actually it's not even that. It's a fitness magazine with the Sports Illustrated logo slapped on it.

And every so often there's something that really bothers me in the real SI. About Gonzaga's Dan Dickau: "He's engaged to a blindingly gorgeous Portland Trail Blazers dancer."

I'm not going to jump to conclusions about sexism at Sports Illustrated. I don't want to stoop to the level of knee-jerk feminists who cry "sexism" so often the word has lost its meaning.

Fifty-one weeks a year, SI is one of the most respected forms of sports media. But that 52nd week, the magazine makes Maxim look like Good Housekeeping.

Rachel Carter can be reached at racarter@email.unc.edu.