"Tell The People What They Like"

Some time ago (call it two decades, give or take), when I was still eyebrows-deep in the restaurant world, our chef came out of the kitchen one morning to grab a cup of coffee. He joined me at the boss's table (every diner has one) with a look of disgust on his face. He then shared his previous afternoon's sojourn to some department store with his wife. While browsing, he heard another man ask his wife, "Honey, do I like this?" while holding a shirt or sweater up.

This bit of history popped into my head as I pondered the demise of the fabled Sports Illustrated magazine. In case you missed it, SI's management recently fired everyone after defaulting on a $4M licensing payment.

The easiest conclusion is that SI is another victim of the rolling demise of print journalism, but that doesn't seem to tell the whole story. A look at the history of its iconic swimsuit issue (first issued in 1964, the Swimsuit Edition was a major event across the 70s and 80s, at least) offers up both revelation and caution. Through 1993, one (usually big name) fashion model would claim the cover each year, with wild speculation as to who it might be leading up to the big reveal. In 1994, they started going a bit off-script, with three now-iconic models on the cover. They broke the color barrier in 1997 with Tyra Banks, then broke the "model" paradigm by featuring Beyonce in 2007. Some signs of desperation emerged in 2016 when they ran three separate issues and three models, but things went off the rails in 2021. The traditional "hot women" paradigm was set aside in favor of wokeness, with a couple trans models, a septuagenarian and an octogenarian, and a plus-size model gracing the covers from 2021 through last year.

Trans-acceptance, age-is-just-a-number, body-positivity, and other culturally progressive values were suddenly prioritized in a publication whose readership is 77% male, and who, lets be frank, buy the swimsuit edition because it's full of gorgeous-hot women.

Get-woke-go-broke on full display, but more fundamentally, this is yet another example of a company deciding what its customers should like (and think) rather than giving them what they want (a Kinks song comes to mind here).

Or, in Bud Light's case in its notorious Dylan Mulvaney blunder, in dismissing its base as it sought to capture "woke" consumers.

Some might be inclined to accuse me of fat-shaming, but flip the script for a moment. Women, would you think that putting a photo like this, or the article’s cover photo, on the cover of a magazine intended to celebrate the male form is a good marketing play?

If big is your thing, go with it, but the body positivity movement ignores basic realities regarding health and human attraction.

Take a step further, and this all feels born of postmodernist subjectivity. Not only in the "gender is a construct" narrative, but in "beauty is a construct" as well. It is absolutely true that tastes vary, but that only works up to a point. I once read a rebuttal to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" that noted if true there could never be a consensus. And not just regarding swimsuit models. What makes the Mona Lisa, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or the Girl With A Pearl Earring so universally admired, if beauty is subjective? Do people really believe that it's only because we've been conditioned to think so?

Apparently, some do. The various acceptance movements, if they limited themselves to "treat everyone with respect, no matter if they are old or heavy or short or differently skin-colored or LGBTetc," would be unqualified good things for society. But, the activists have corrupted these movements into something else - something that demands we somehow override our biological wiring.

There's a reason that five decades of SI swimsuit edition covers had remarkably consistency - what men are physically attracted to is not simply a construct. That holds true for what women are attracted to, as well. I won't delve into the biology of attraction here, but it certainly does exist.

For further evidence, consider how gay men and lesbian women are being informed (harangued, TBT) that they should be attracted to trans persons who haven't altered their private bits.

Companies forget that their success, and indeed their survival, relies on pleasing their customers. I covered that here not long ago. Companies can be edgy and controversial and achieve success, but there are limits, and when bosses forget themselves and decide to push rather than heed, they put even the most established brands at risk.

All over present-day culture, we find instance after instance of people telling others what they should like and what they should hate. The early signs of this were the scolds who'd declare a comedian or a TV show "not funny," rather than simply saying "I don't like this." That sort of arrogance would be astounding were it not so common, and with the emergence of social media echo chambers, people who make such declarations find enough simps and sycophants to validate their "better than thou" behavior that they don't get how abrasive it is to the rest of us.

When Sports Illustrated went woke, "broke" wasn't far behind. Why? Because its core audience didn't want woke. It's as simple as that.