So what’s the deal? Monday, Catherine Conover criticized the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and even had the gall to call it pornography. She then continues to gripe about how “SI [has] lacked sufficient coverage of women’s sports over the years…”

Now, I’m not an avid reader of the magazine, or even a sporadic one for that matter, but it’s been my impression that Sports Illustrated was a magazine (at least when it started) created by men, for men.

Finally, in the 90’s, women have come to be more in the spotlight — they’re fighting for equal pay for the same jobs men have and yet get more money for, they’re playing ice hockey for the first time in the Olympics, they’re becoming more independent of needing men to support them — but all of this isn’t happening overnight.

So anyway, it’s my impression that the magazine is created with male readers in mind. If this were so, it makes sense to put pictures of scantly-clad dripping wet supermodels in its pages.

Maybe it’ll provide a little motivation to the readers to get off their fat butts and go to the gym to work off a little bit of that beer gut they get when they’re sitting around watching football all winter and baseball all summer, so that when the guys go to the beach to catch some rays, they don’t look so offensive to all the slim, tone women who are there for a little sun also. I ask you, Catherine, do you want to see a whole bunch of fat sloppy hairy guys at the beach when you go to get a tan?

It’s a proven fact that sex sells (hell, I’m a living example of that!) If you asked some of the big-wigs at the head offices of Sports Illustrated what the basic purpose of SI magazine was, they’d probably tell you how they strive to provide a comprehensive coverage of a wide variety of sports, giving their readers full, in-depth reports of sports they want to read about, and even those that may not be so well-known.

But if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, you’d find that the company is there simply to make money. Seeing as how well sex sells, this is why they make desktop calendars, wall calendars, computer screen savers, special one-time issues about the history of swimsuits, videos, etc., all which are based on photographs of women in skimpy swimsuits. “Why?” you ask — to make money.

Besides, there are plenty of magazines out there that could quench your thirst, Catherine Conover. There are more than 12,000 different magazine titles in print in this country. I’m sure there’s one that covers sports and not what swimsuits the supermodels are wearing.

If you don’t want to see this so called “pornography,” I ask you, why don’t you just throw your issue away? And, if you think this is pornography, why don’t you pick up an issue of Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler? Would those be okay by your standards because they’re not sports magazines that don’t fairly cover women’s sports, but because it’s already understood what their purpose is — to “arouse sexual desire?”

Also, I want to thank you, because your article motivated me to go out and buy one hell of a magazine!

Alex Pollitt

Freshman

Computer science