My bride and I were strolling through the magazine section of Barnes & Noble last Sunday, once again doing our part to keep the doors of our local bookstore open. Over the years, we have learned much about each other by perusing books or periodicals together, in this case "Cooks Illustrated". As she was thumbing through the recipes, I started around the corner, only to stop and turn back.
"Can't go that way," I said. "It's the annual porn edition of Sports Illustrated."
She knew exactly what I meant. Every year, in the dull sports news cycle between the Super Bowl and March Madness, Sports Illustrated puts out what is undoubtedly their most popular issue: the annual swimsuit edition. And, every year, Barnes & Noble has a special display or two just for that issue. Granted, there are lots of magazine covers that feature scarcely clad women in B&N, but I generally know where those are and how to avoid them. The cooking section is not a problem. Normally. Except in February-March. Then you can never quite know where the land-mine of the SI swimsuit edition will be stationed.
I wonder, could Cooks Illustrated publish an edition once a year that has nothing to do food?
Here is why this matters. Over 40 years ago I became an avid sports fan listening to radio station KFI-Los Angeles: the Dodgers, the Lakers, USC Trojans football. About that time I subscribed to Sports Illustrated and still recall my first issue: A picture of Jim Ryun winning the 1500 meter race at the US Olympic Trials. I also vividly remember the edition that came some months later with a scarcely clad young woman on the cover -- the annual swimsuit edition. I was taken. At that crucial time of biological change from boy to man, Sports Illustrated began warping my understanding of feminine beauty. I had the SI subscription for a few more years. And the swimsuit editions were unforgettable, in the worst sense.
Many writers and researchers have addressed how images insidiously corrode my manliness by appealing to my unthinking maleness, how it affects the way I see the real women I encounter. The struggle has never ended. In that, I suppose, I am like every man. One thing I learned. Lust affects more than me. After seeing first hand a family destroyed by a man's addiction to pornography, I read "Affair Of The Mind" by Laurie Hall (published in 1998, now out of print but available used). Then I began to understand the rest of the story. The movie Fireproof captured the essence of how it demeans a wife to know she is competing with hordes of virtual women. In addition to my wife, I have a houseful of daughters. I have seen their growing awareness of the inescapable female images on magazine and book covers, in movies, decals affixed to cars and trucks, billboards. I have seen how it disturbs and saddens them, snatching bits of innocence prematurely. And God awakened in my heart a truly manly desire: to protect and preserve feminine beauty of and for my girls. Though it has not made it easy, it has made it possible to strive to keep those ancient words of Job:
“I have made a covenant with my eyes;
How then could I gaze at a virgin?
...Does He not see my ways
And number all my steps?
…Let Him weigh me with accurate scales,
And let God know my integrity.
Especially when Sports Illustrated publishes their swimsuit edition.
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