If you click on Sports Illustrated
right now, you’ll be treated to an eye-full—a preview of the annual swimsuit
edition, which comes out in February.
Oh! But they’ve made it fun and
interesting for you!
They’ve chopped off the models’
heads, so you can guess who they might be.
And because, hey—it doesn’t really
matter what face is attached to those bodies.
Chop them off, so you can have
more control over your fantasies. Now you can imagine any beautiful woman’s face appearing there atop that body.
They’ve pre-dehumanized their models
for your enjoyment.
Now, she is a sex object, but one
that is not allowed to use her sexuality for power because when she doesn’t
have a face, guess what else she doesn’t have?
She doesn’t have a bothersome mind
to get in the way!
And even better—no mouth to speak
with!
I am so excited to live in a world
where men expect women to be willing to turn their face aside and let men take
control.
I am so thrilled to see women
become objects placed on display.
I suppose it’s not surprising that
we as women allow ourselves to be seen like this, because in fact this is how
we see and treat ourselves. We are always aware of how we look and are usually
presenting ourselves to the world in a way that assumes the ideal spectator of
us is male, therefore our image is purposely designed to flatter the male
species.
Why is it really that her face is
not visible to us?
She is not only de-humanized, but
also depersonalized. We don’t get to see who she is as an individual; it’s like
it doesn’t matter who she is, without her face in view she could be anyone.
For women seeing these faceless
bodies, we also get to look and imagine our face there! We get to imagine what
we could have been, but weren’t. We get to see what we should aspire to, what
we should reach towards.
As a society, must really be
invested in what this image shows. If we weren’t, we would take a stand against
corporations so blatantly fragmenting this whole image from our female history.
Who cares what women have fought for, instead let’s laugh at our small voices
asking for equality.
Could it be that a sexist concept
like this could be used as a wake-up call to us as a gender, or hopefully as a
nation? Corporations assume this is how we want to be treated because we don’t
speak loudly enough against it, otherwise these publicity stunts could not exist.
I may be accused of being a
man-hater or a prude because of my stance, but that is not the case. I may be
called a hypocrite for having been a part of the actual problem, and I will not
deny those who say it, in fact—I will agree.
I will agree that I was raised in
a society where the only women I saw fighting the issues were those labeled as
“feminists” in a demeaning voice. The only admired female icons were
supermodels in bathing suits adorning sports magazine covers in grocery
stores.
Is it a surprise that I grew up to
be a woman who saw female power as equivalent to how good she looks in a
bikini? Is it any shock that so many women suffer from a desire to be perfect,
which has resulted in many self-image problems and more dangerous physical diseases
like anorexia and bulimia?
I am a woman. I feel anger at the
stereotyping that we as women have learned to accept.
We are still being represented as
a “faceless” gender, which Yves Sports Illustrated quite unabashedly points out
to us. Until we stand up and say there’s something backwards going on, until we
cry out at the inequality…nothing will change. I want things to change. I want the next generation of women to not be
confused by the double, fragmented, world they live in.
