The Swimsuit Issue
Beauty is indispensable. Our souls crave it.
We are made in the image of God who is stunningly beautiful such that we lack sufficient adjectives to describe it. As His created beings we have a beauty from Him — a muted form of His full beauty — which is intended to remind us of Him.
We also see glimpses of His beauty in the created world of nature and in countless other expressions of goodness. We never tire of beauty. We want as much of it as we can get.
That insatiability has a divine aspect to it.
No beauty other than the beauty of God can ever quench our thirst for beauty.
In our fallen world, we have often attempted to quench that thirst for beauty in ourselves. We have a culture that obsesses about beauty. We have entertainment that promotes certain types of physical beauty. We have a culture of increasing pornification that takes a craving for beauty and intimacy off the cliffs of insanity and twists it into something very dark.
Soon, Sports Illustrated with release its swimsuit issue, and it will play its part in fostering the insanity.
Technically, it’s not porn. But it is pornified. This year’s cover is a good example. In the world of porn you will see three women in thongs touching each other, but that is still not common behavior at most beaches — for now.
See this article in The Guardian for humor — and some insight — about why this complete anomaly of a sports magazine, will play its part in further misleading us about beauty. The magazine is the equivalent of giving a thirsty man a bag of salty popcorn rather than a drink of cool water. It cannot quench our thirst for beauty.
On the one hand, everything about the swimsuit issue makes sense. We so crave beauty and a return to Eden that we publish photo after photo of beautiful young women in Edenic locations looking very inviting. This is primarily for men, but i have heard many women express positive attitudes about swimsuit issues and the like. A visit to Pinterest will confirm this as you look at what many women pin as “fitness motivation.”
On the other hand, everything about the swimsuit issue is a devastating assault on the true beauty of authentic femininity.
i know many beautiful women. i don’t know any swimsuit models.
It’s time to step back from the cliffs of insanity.
Intentional Warriors 
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