The Swimsuit Issue Issue

For the last 40-some years, I’ve been enjoying America’s most spectacular bit of cheesecake: the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which always sets off a mini firestorm in February.  Puritans, some feminists, and some athletic purists get riled about young women modeling swimsuits at beach resorts around the globe. I never had a strong opinion about the matter, until this past year when some “genius” at Sports Illustrated (SI) decided that, since they had conducted photo shoots with models on six different continents, they would do one on the seventh — Antarctica. 

I would like to point out that I know something about extremely cold weather.  I spent 5 winters in Alaska and 1 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (where the temperature frequently stays below 30 degrees F for weeks on end).  I was genuinely horrified to learn that SI asked Kate Upton to pose in a bikini on an Antarctic beach where, even in the summer time, can be 30 below.  I was further horrified to hear Ms. Upton report that, at times, she felt dizzy during the shoot.  I will refrain from any smart-aleck comments on how dizzy she had to be to agree to the shoot in the first place.  It sounds to me that Ms. Upton was in danger of suffering from hypothermia.  In the first place — and I realize that I might get some ribbing at expressing concern for Ms. Upton who is by now a millionaire dozens of times over — anyone who asked a another human being to subject herself to that kind of cold while only partially dressed should either be publicly horse whipped or subjected to that same treatment themselves. 

At the beginning of this month, I went shopping to get my father a 2014 calendar and I very pointedly avoided buying the one that SI published.