SI swimsuit issue drips with sleaze

MEMO: To Sports Illustrated

SUBJECT: My history with the swimsuit issue as a female and the mother of five sons

Ah. It's that special time of year again. The time of year when my boys and I engage in a friendly competition to see who can get to the mailbox first and find your glossy magazine chock full of girls wearing (sort of) bikinis. If I win (and I always do) I take the magazine and deep-six it. Then I wait around to see if my sons will summon up enough nerve to ask if the swimsuit edition has come yet (they never do).

This has become such a grand game, such a late-winter ritual at our house, that my kids would be sadly disappointed if they went to the mailbox and actually FOUND this year's issue (featuring topless cover girl Veronica Varekova busy making "America just a little more beautiful" by nibbling her thumb on the shore of Montauk, N.Y.). They'd start to worry about me and say to each other, "What's happened to our mama? She ain't got no game!"

We've been getting Sports Illustrated at our house for years now, even before we had kids. I can still remember thumbing through the swimsuit issues devoted to those golden goddesses Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley — America's answer to Botticelli's Venus on the half-shell. Not being the target audience, I didn't care much for the issue, but I never felt the need to hide it.

Until I had kids.

When they were little, I thought looking through the swimsuit issue would confuse them, frankly. I could imagine them pointing and saying in their sing-song voices as though they were identifying baby ducks in a picture book: Right foot! Left foot! Half-naked mommies! Hopping on the beach!

So I hid it because they were innocent.

Later, when my boys were older, I hid the magazine because they were curious, which is as it should be. Nothing wrong with curiosity. But SERIOUSLY now, what mom wants to watch her son satisfy his healthy male curiosity while reading a magazine in her living room?

I will also confess that, as my sons matured, I began nursing a marked grudge toward the issue. At the risk of sounding like just another joyless feminist who looks crappy in a bathing suit, I started resenting the way women are portrayed by SI.

Take this year's issue. In case someone out there doesn't know what huge naked breasts or tanned lean buttocks look like by now, well then, all he/she needs to do is pick up a copy of SI and get educated.