Harrison Bergeron on the Cover of Sports Illustrated

Stuffing an obese woman into a swimsuit doesn’t make her beautiful any more than stuffing a dude with a beer gut into a Speedo makes him handsome.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and how it is incorporating obese models as some attempt to redefine beauty.

It is true that “beauty” is a historically and culturally flexible concept – but one aspect of it has not changed – beauty is celebrated because it is unique in some way.

Before SI flipped the script and focused on what society defined as beautiful and began to try to redefine it, I enjoyed the Swimsuit Issue for that reason. I found it pleasurable to view females of unique beauty.

I used to subscribe to the magazine – but I no longer do and the change in perspective as evidenced in the Swimsuit Edition is largely why. I can get sports news faster today than ever before. The Internet changed that but when SI began its campaign against beauty in favor of celebrating average, that was the end for me.

Look – in a totally non gay bro-like perspective, I appreciate unique handsomeness in men as well.

My wife one asked me who I would be if I could be anybody and I chose Brad Pitt’s character of Tristan from the movie “Legends of the Fall”. To me, Tristian is the idealized model of a real man – the way a man is supposed to look, act, and leave a legacy behind.

Stuffing an obese woman into a swimsuit doesn’t make her beautiful any more than stuffing a dude with a beer gut into a Speedo makes him handsome.

Shoehorning “plus-sized” Yumi Nu onto the cover of SI does not make her attractive.

I’m with Jordan Peterson on that.

It doesn’t make her ugly, either.

It is just that absent of her swimsuit, if I walked past her in a mall, I would notice nothing remarkable about her. She looks like pretty much every overweight woman in America. There are literally hundreds of men I see who generate the same “meh” reaction.

It’s not misogynist or misandrist, its just their appearance is average and therefore unremarkable.

I’m not interested in average – I can see average at any mall in America without paying for it. As a matter of fact, I see average every morning when I look in a mirror.

But as with everything these days, there is a deeper meaning to a seemingly superficial situation.

SI trying to normalize average as unique is the same process communists use to subdue the masses. Nobody can be special or unique, nobody can perform better than anyone else and most certainly, nobody can stand out – because standing out is standing over.

It’s madness and represents a complete denial of what we are as humans.

Peterson is right about another dimension of this discussion - it is a classic authoritarian move.

It’s actually the same blueprint as in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”.

In the 2081 world of Harrison Bergeron, everyone is “equal” in every way—physically and mentally. The United States Handicapper General and her agents ensure compliance by forcing people to wear various devices and “handicaps” to assure no one performs better than anyone else. The strong or graceful are burdened with extra weight, the intelligent have their thoughts interrupted with jolting sounds, musicians wear an unstated handicap to limit their abilities and the beautiful wear hideous masks.

The original mission of the SI Swimsuit Edition was to celebrate the unique beauty of the female form.

Now it seeks to channel Vonnegut’s Handicapper General, a woman called Diana Moon Glampers, who eventually shoots the Harrison dead during a televised ballet performance with a double barreled 10-gauge shotgun.

Glampers then orders the musicians and the ballerinas to get their handicaps back on and the people are ordered by the media to forget what they just saw.

And they did.