Why the Left Destroys Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue

Sports Illustrated unleashed the latest salvo in its crusade against masturbation this week by placing Gayle King in a bathing suit on its cover.

Call it penance for when SI allied against the prudes in the war on masturbation by dropping such bombshells as Vandela Kirsebom and Paulina Porizkova in mailboxes.

Does a 69-year-old King on the cover of the swimsuit edition motivate you to buy a copy?

No? Well, it inspires nobody else, either. But if you lie and say that it does, then very powerful people will approve of you. We must collectively pretend or individually become pariahs. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 92: Look for Beauty in the Salons and the Ballot Box)

Drew Barrymore reacted to her CBS colleague becoming a cover girl by declaring, “It is a moment of true empowerment.” For whom? Certainly not the “readers” who enjoy magazines featuring barely covered models.

Another of the four covers features Hunter McGrady, a plus-sized model who weighs well north of 200 pounds. Before a decade ago, when this mania insisting that any woman in a bikini grabs the same attention as Cheryl Tiegs in a bikini started, seeing a 240-pound woman posed in a swimsuit on a magazine cover would seem a type of comedy or a cruel joke. In less than a decade, it has become normalized by producers if still rejected by consumers. Sports Illustrated says of McGrady: “She is unapologetically herself and is constantly moving the needle for true equality throughout all aspects of the fashion and modeling worlds.”

In those two words, “true equality,” one grasps just why woke cultural guardians feel it necessary to destroy such things as beauty contests and swimsuit issues. “Modeling” and “true equality” cannot coexist. To acknowledge beauty means to admit the utter farce of equality. A swimsuit issue trips the mental circuits of the woke. (READ MORE: The Anti-Woke Counterrevolution Is Spreading)

Some women look better than others. This simple truth blasphemes the social religion of egalitarianism. The mere vision of past cover girls Elle Macpherson, Christie Brinkley, and Tyra Banks offends the modern insistence that “all women are tens.” Sports Illustrated placed them in bathing suits on the cover precisely because they represent not sameness but the exception, not equality but elitism.

We’re not supposed to notice what is impossible not to notice. Woke demands of us that we suppress biology to embrace the ideological. This does not work. It forces the oversocialized to lie and the inner-directed to marginalize themselves by uttering uncomfortable truths. Society is worse whenever it rewards lies and punishes truth. Just as a progressive society must squelch jokes that rely on our inequalities for punchlines, they need to ruin the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition as a means of protecting their harebrained dogma.

A beautiful woman turns not only men to mush but we-are-all-equal notions to it, too.

The same impulse that provoked Pol Pot to dress Cambodia in black pajama uniforms compels the woke to highlight transgenders and fatsos and octogenarians as swimsuit models. Beauty strikes ideological neat freaks as unfair. Perhaps they get that right. But the assumption that this “problem” — as though the sight of Hannah Davis represents a problem — requires a fix (thankfully not yet one of intentionally scarring and uglying up goddesses) seems rather presumptuous given how much people appreciate beauty. It also strikes as incredibly damaging to Sports Illustrated as a commercial endeavor. (READ MORE: Netflix Takes Liberties With Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full)

Recall that Sports Illustrated laid off almost every employee earlier this year and that this followed putting transgenders Leyna Bloom and Kim Petras, Elon Musk’s elderly mother, and overweight Ashley Graham on the cover of the swimsuit issue that traditionally served as a great moneymaker for the magazine. Like the aforementioned compulsion that an 81-year-old Martha Stewart in a bathing suit aims to curtail, the ideological tic that imagines Gayle King and Danielle Herrington as equally appealing to connoisseurs of women in swimsuits seems a delusion so deeply ingrained that even bankruptcy cannot cure it.

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