The title of this piece is not accurate. Hannah Davis is the cover model for the 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But every single headline I saw lead with Derek Jeter, look at Yahoo!, CBS Detroit, and the Huffington Post. In other news, Pierre Curie’s wife won the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Oh, and in 1955, Raymond Parks’ wife was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus.
I don’t just find this annoying because I find everything about Derek Jeter to be annoying (I do find Jeter’s very existence to be annoying, see here). It’s annoying because Hannah Davis has apparently reached the top of her chosen field and America’s mainstream news sources can only talk about it in relation to the man she happens to be dating. I know next to nothing about modeling and slightly less than that about swimsuits, but I know that if this is a newsworthy story, the story should be about Hannah Davis. Congratulations Ms. Davis.
While we’re on the subject of the SI Swimsuit Issue, there’s apparently a plus size model named Robyn Lawley in this year’s edition. According to Time magazine, she is a size 12, which is only two sizes smaller than the average woman. God forbid they use an average woman as a point of comparison. Apparently, the average model is a size 2 (Does that mean Ms. Lawley is 6 times bigger than the average model? I don’t understand how this works). The picture they have doesn’t look even a little plus size to me. Don’t get me wrong, she looks much less like a pre-pubescent boy than most models and that’s nice. But, if she’s plus size, what are all of the real women I see every day?
