On Tuesday I wrote a piece condemning the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue for its sexist smut. The responses were mixed. Some readers agreed that the commodification of women’s bodies is insulting. Others argued that they’re just beautiful women showing off being beautiful. It’s art.
Allow me to disagree. A magazine full of bikini-clad women marketed to men is not art, and its subjects are not empowered.
The wisdom of Pope John Paul II helps make the case. I’m not Catholic, but John Paul’s Love and Responsibility has influenced me more than most books I’ve read. Its explanations for the dignity of the human person are not primarily biblical, but philosophical.
In this treatise on sexual morality, John Paul argues that the most damaging attitude we can adopt toward another person is to see them as merely an object, rather than an active person, a subject.
Whenever we interact with someone, they become an “object” in the sense that we are acting toward them (the “object of our affections,” for example). But just as we see ourselves as a subject, we have to recognize that every other person is always a subject as well. In short, no human is ever “just” an object, the way a beautiful sunset or river is.
There is a difference, then, between naked or barely clothed bodies as art (think “The Birth of Venus” or Michelangelo’s “David”) and naked or barely clothed bodies as exploitation and prurient stimulation. Great art encourages us to look beyond a beautiful form to its accompanying story. Smut and porn just show bodies upon which viewers can impose their own fantasies.
“There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person,” John Paul said. “In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.”
In an article for the Huffington Post, Haley Halverson of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation writes that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue encourages the view of women as objects.
“Research shows that when someone is being objectified the objectifier is viewing them as if they do not possess a real, individual mind and as if they are less deserving of moral treatment,” she says.
So no, the swimsuit Issue is not art, it’s a way to make money exploiting women’s bodies and men’s baser appetites.
I don’t expect to convince anyone with this article. If someone enjoys treating women’s (or men’s) bodies as objects to be paid for and possessed, then no amount of reason will stop them from defending channels of exploitation such as the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But I do hope to encourage some people that opposing creepy magazine issues isn’t about being puritanical or simply bowing to religious strictures. It’s about affirming the dignity of the person. That end, I hope, is one toward which we can all aim.
