Time & Life Building
Rockefeller Center
New York, N.Y. 10020
Dear Sir:
I am writing with regard to your so-called annual "swimsuit" issue (Feb. 20). Like many good Americans, I find it appalling, in bad taste and also drooled on by my mail carrier and possibly others.
Therefore, I must ask you, with some regret, to cancel my subscription.
Unfortunately, you're not the first magazine I've had to cancel on account of unnecessary pulchritude. I've also canceled Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Utne Reader and Family Circle (which, in its annual knitting issue, had Kathie Lee Gifford making a see-through pot holder).
What has happened to the America that Phil Gramm and I used to know, when a young man, if he wanted sexy pictures, was basically restricted to National Geographic and the "foundation" section of the Sears catalog?
Things started to go bad around the time when Playboy was introduced with its Playboy philosophy, which, I believe, you can sum up in two words: Hubba, hubba.
On the SI cover this year is a woman named -- hubba, hubba -- Daniela. (The trend in names seems to be one word, like Roseanne or Charo. Or like Socrates, who, by the way, refused ever to be photographed in a two-piece.)
Daniela's wearing this bikini bottom and this striped, semi-see-through top that she looks like she's about to rip over her head and just scare the hell out of normal Americans like myself.
Yes, I admit it, I looked inside.
I'm human. I'm a male. I paid my $4.95.
And, yes, I was flipping through the pages, looking for Vendela, who was on the cover a couple of years ago, and who they said when she wasn't posing semi-nude, was volunteering her time helping the homeless, possibly by distributing SI swimsuit videos.
As it happens, Vendela is back. She's wearing what's described as a stretched fishnet tank top. Believe me, it's stretched like the Mexican peso.
When I show this picture to a friend, who happens to be a philistine and who also boasts of a lifetime subscription to the SI swimsuit calendar, he says: "Is this a great country or what?"
I feel compelled to point out that the particular country he's looking at is Costa Rica, possibly a great country in its own right. But why does SI feel the need to go to foreign countries when we have great beaches here in the U.S. of A.?
My problem is that when I pick up a sports magazine, I expect maybe something on, well, sports. If I want sex, I can read the political pages.
In your magazine, before you can even get to the 42-page swimsuit spread, there's an ad for a men's cologne in which the man and woman share a single bathrobe, with the woman not getting very much of the fabric herself. I just hope she's not too chilly.
This is typical. In 1995, you can't find a perfume ad or a jeans ad or a breakfast-cereal ad without seeing a significant naked body part. That's what America has come to.
That's why I wasn't surprised by the story in the paper the other day about a local Catholic college where there's a course on human sexuality. Which doesn't sound that bad until you read the syllabus: explicit videos of intimate sex acts involving heterosexuals and homosexuals and, as Joycelyn Elders might advise, videos of heterosexuals and homosexuals all by themselves.
Meanwhile, down in the nation's capital, at George Washington University, a student group is planning to show John Wayne Bobbitt's new video called -- I swear -- "John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut." The group claims it just wants to raise the issue of pornography for discussion.
Hey, I went to college. I know what's going on.
You should have seen the bio class the day the professor discussed human reproductivity. They had to use the gym to fit everybody in.
Nowadays, of course, they have co-ed dorms and condoms that sit out in the hallways in a bowl like they were so many M&Ms.; And right in the college library, they've got Sports Illustrated, and you know which issue.
You can bet nobody's checking it out for the articles.
They're checking out Vendela.
Sincerely,
An ex-looker