Columnist Dean Juipe: SI offers separate swimsuit issue

Dean Juipe

Friday, Feb. 20, 1998 | 1:49 a.m.

DEAN JUIPE is a Las Vegas SUN sportswriter.

THESE GUYS are clever.

They're shallow, they're sexist and they're manipulative, but they're clever.

They've found a way to at least partially diffuse the yearly criticism directed their way, while, at the same time, increase their profits.

Pretty slick, pretty Madison Avenue-ish.

Pretty transparent.

Pretty vulgar.

How does Sports Illustrated continue to get away with it? How can the world's largest and best-read weekly sports magazine continue to treat women as mindless pawns?

Obviously, its new swimsuit edition is out. It arrived Thursday in all its bare-breasted glory, slapping decency in the face as it has now for 20-some years.

But this year there's a catch.

Instead of having the annual presentation of semi-clad women as part of its regular weekly issue, SI is bowing somewhat to public pressure. It decided to have two issues this week, one with the regular sports coverage that makes the magazine so successful, and another, separate, issue with nothing but swimsuits and glossy, expensive ads.

The latter runs 200-plus pages. And here's the clever part if you're Time/Warner, SI's parent company: Now the swimsuit edition has an unlimited shelf life. Now it can be on newsstands all year and not just a single week in February.

Don't be fooled. SI didn't make this change solely to appease its many once-a-year critics, the ones who habitually write in about having to withhold the swimsuit issue from Little Johnny. It did it to make even more money.

The SI eds will say otherwise and they'll trumpet the two-issue approach as a novel solution to their novel problem. They'll put on their straightest face and say the move to separate issues -- one for sports, one for cheap thrills -- solves a crisis for anyone concerned about inappropriate material being delivered to their doorstep.

They'll say if you don't want the swimsuit edition, just toss it away.

Yet, in truth, by the swimsuit edition's mere existence it's obvious SI is just as ambivalent as ever toward anyone who has ever written to the magazine in protest. It remains oblivious to complaint.

This year's change was a business decision and nothing else.

Same thing with adding men to a few of the pictorials and having a handful of male athletes pose with their bikini-bound wives. It broadens the edition's potential market while leaving the impression, at least tacitly, that the situations and the settings are less offensive now that the spouses are involved.

It's a subconscious ploy and it's clever -- even if it's patently phony, sort of like the drooling men who ogle at the SI swimsuit edition because they're too embarrassed (or too restricted by their wives) to buy Penthouse or Playboy.

But men, including those in decision-making positions at SI, aren't the real crux of this complaint. It's women.

Women have allowed Sports Illustrated to use them and women have, to date, been intimidated by Time's corporate power. It's women who could have -- and still could -- put an end to this yearly charade, if only they chose to exert their power.

Where's the National Organization of Women on this? Where's the militancy it once showed? Where's its conscience?

NOW, or any women's group for that matter, could impede the swimsuit edition's development if not threaten its very existence with an organized and concerted effort. Protests, after all, aren't completely passe, based on the riotous conditions that greeted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen at an Iraqi-themed town hall meeting Wednesday night in Columbus, Ohio.

Albright and Cohen, there on behalf of President Clinton, were confronted with zealots who shouted, screamed and demanded to be heard. They were extremists who decided to take action.

But you don't have to be a zealot, an extremist or a prude to take offense at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. You can be a normal, red-blooded American -- male or female -- who feels protruding busts and crotch shots just don't belong in a sports magazine.

It's exploitation, pure and simple. It's sordid and it's an afront to women and to dignity no matter how cleverly the magazine wraps the package or skillfully conceals its motives.

Undeterred, SI goes on using temptresses' tops and bottoms to bolster its bottom line, a practice that's revealing but not the least bit cute.