This all started with Jordan Peterson, as Jason Whitlock reports:
Dr. Jordan Peterson misspoke when he proclaimed via Twitter that Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Yumi Nu is “not beautiful.”
We all know beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Peterson should have said the extra-plus-sized model is “not healthy. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” He undermined a fact with a personal opinion, and by doing so, he allowed the woke to once again dodge responsibility for their real evil agenda.
On Monday, North America’s most honest public intellectual reacted to Sports Illustrated’s decision to place an obese woman with a strikingly pretty face on the cover of its formerly iconic Swimsuit Issue. He retweeted a New York Post story picturing the blubbery Asian beauty beneath his proclamation: “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”
Twitter, of course, erupted in faux outrage. A white man impolitely aired his truth about a flabby Asian fashion model. Twitter’s social justice army accused Peterson of unloading a toxic vat of white privilege and white supremacy.
Unafraid of a brawl, Peterson engaged his critics. He doubled down on his contention that the left wants to redefine beauty standards.
“It’s a conscious progressive attempt to manipulate & retool the notion of beauty, reliant on the idiot philosophy that such preferences are learned & properly changed by those who know better.”
I say this respectfully. Peterson missed the mark again. He botched this issue. Beauty is an opinion. And we all know opinions are like booty holes. Everyone has one and they all stink. The left doesn’t want to retool the notion of beauty. They want to retool the notion of health. They want to reclassify obesity as healthy.
Virtually everything the progressive left promotes is related to normalizing a culture of death, destruction, and despair. Abortion is about the right to kill babies in the womb. Liberalizing drug laws is about freeing people to self-medicate themselves into zombies. Defunding the police is about normalizing violent chaos within communities. Hostility toward religion is about removing hope, the lifeblood of civilization. Transgenderism is about the mutilation of God’s creation.
Jordan Peterson is known for speaking uncomfortable truths. He passed on an opportunity in this instance. The platform of the modern left is built on early 20th-century satanist Aleister Crowley’s “do what thou wilt” philosophy. Crowley argued the purpose of life is for humans to align themselves with their true will.
It sounds great. Why wouldn’t you want to align yourself to your true will?
Well, for those of us who believe in a higher power, who believe our inalienable rights come from God, who believe that Jesus died on a cross for our sins, we’re taught the purpose of our lives is to align ourselves with God’s will for us. His vision for us is spelled out in the Bible.
We’re taught that our nature is sinful and we should avoid a “do what thou wilt” mindset and set of behaviors.
Specifically, among other things, we’re taught that gluttony is a sin that will harm our lives and lead to death.
Phillipians 3:19: “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.”
Proverbs 23:2: “And put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”
Proverbs 23:20-21: “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.”
For those of you who are nonbelievers, you don’t need the Bible for evidence of the dangerous impact of gluttony and obesity. Check with any doctor. Punch it into Google. You can call me. Gluttony and obesity have been my weaknesses.
The effort to normalize obesity is evil and satanic. Sports Illustrated is promoting death with its glorification of rotund runway models. Yumi Nu foolishly believes her ascension to SI cover girl is a symbol of necessary progress.
“I feel like we’re in a place right now where people are making space for more diversity on magazine covers,” she said. “It’s a big time for Asian-American people in media. I know I play a big role in representation in body diversity and race diversity, and I love to be a role model and representative of the plus-size Asian community.”
Nu is a disciple of the D.I.E. religion of diversity, inclusion, and equity. The D.I.E. religion is just Aleister Crowley’s satanism rebranded in a way that makes it palatable for the masses. It’s do what thou wilt. It’s the seeking of your true will.
Yumi Nu is a 250-pound glamour girl. She has aligned herself with her corpulent true will. She’s no different from Lia Thomas, the young man who decided his true will was to be a swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team. Nu is no different from Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. secretary of transportation who hopped in a hospital bed to pretend he delivered a baby.
Yumi Nu feels like she’s the Asian Christie Brinkley, Heidi Klum, or Tyra Banks. The reality is Nu is more Lizzo or Jason Whitlock, a pretty face seated atop a grossly unhealthy body. The people lying to and about Yumi Nu want her and others to die an early death smothered in gravy, fried chicken, and Kool-Aid.
What made America great was when we collectively sought to align ourselves with God’s will for us. That’s what compelled us to end slavery and Jim Crow. Men and women who wanted to be on the right side of God fought for freedom and equality of opportunity.
Men and women who want to be on the right side of a history leftists plan to write will end up standing alongside Aleister Crowley and blubbery beauties.
Michael Smith:
There’s been a lot of discussion about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and how it is incorporating obese models as some attempt to redefine beauty.
It is true that “beauty” is a historically and culturally flexible concept – but one aspect of it has not changed – beauty is celebrated because it is unique in some way.
Before SI flipped the script and focused on what society defined as beautiful and then began to try to redefine it, I enjoyed the Swimsuit Issue for that reason. I found it pleasurable to view females of unique beauty
I used to subscribe to the magazine – but I no longer do and the change in perspective as evidenced in the Swimsuit Edition is largely why. I can get sports news faster today than ever before. The Internet changed that – but when SI began its campaign against beauty in favor of celebrating average, that was the end for me
Look – in a totally non gay bro-like perspective, I appreciate unique handsomeness in men as well.
My wife one asked me who I would be if I could be anybody and I chose Brad Pitt’s character of Tristan from the movie “Legends of the Fall”. To me, Tristian is the idealized model of a real man – the way a man is supposed to look, act, and leave a legacy behind
Stuffing an obese woman into a swimsuit doesn’t make her beautiful any more than stuffing a dude with a beer gut into a Speedo makes him handsome
Shoehorning “plus-sized” Yumi Nu onto the cover of SI does not make her attractive.
I’m with Jordan Peterson on that.
It doesn’t make her ugly, either.
It is just that absent of her swimsuit, if I walked past her in a mall, I would notice nothing remarkable about her. She looks like pretty much every overweight woman in America. There are literally hundreds of men I see who generate the same “meh” reaction.
It’s not misogynist or misandrist, its just their appearance is average and therefore unremarkable.
I’m not interested in average – I can see average at any mall in America without paying for it. As a matter of fact, I see average every morning when I look in a mirror.
But as with everything these days, there is a deeper meaning to a seemingly superficial situation.
SI trying to normalize average as unique is the same process communists use to subdue the masses. Nobody can be special or unique, nobody can perform better than anyone else and most certainly, nobody can stand out – because standing out is standing over.
It’s madness and represents a complete denial of what we are as humans.
Peterson is right about another dimension of this discussion – it is a classic authoritarian move.
It’s actually the same blueprint as in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”.
In the 2081 world of Harrison Bergeron, everyone is “equal” in every way—physically and mentally. The United States Handicapper General and her agents ensure compliance by forcing people to wear various devices and “handicaps” to assure no one performs better than anyone else. The strong or graceful are burdened with extra weight, the intelligent have their thoughts interrupted with jolting sounds, musicians wear an unstated handicap to limit their abilities and the beautiful wear hideous masks.
The original mission of the SI Swimsuit Edition was to celebrate the unique beauty of the female form.
Now it seeks to channel Vonnegut’s Handicapper General, a woman called Diana Moon Glampers, who eventually shoots the Harrison dead during a televised ballet performance with a double barreled 10-gauge shotgun
Glampers then orders the musicians and the ballerinas to get their handicaps back on and the people are ordered by the media to forget what they just saw.
And they did.
I have been an on-and-off subscriber to SI since 1982. The first issue of my first subscription was the 1982 Swimsuit Issue, back when the swimsuit issue was part of the issue before the Super Bowl. Later it became a separate issue.
SI, truth be told, has been floundering for several years as a print product, and in fact there is probably little reason to subscribe to the print edition anymore. The magazine went from weekly to biweekly, and is now a monthly. How a sports magazine can cover sporting events (which has always been central to SI) when coming out every month … well, that explains the “floundering” part.
It is reasonable to ask how swimsuits are part of “sports.” The swimsuit issue dates back to 1964, back when SI was 10 years old and its definition of “sports” was broader than now. Swimwear has usually been worn by models of the day (Cheryl Tiegs, Chrissie Brinkley, etc.) than athletes, and swimwear has waxed and waned in, well, skin coverage, including photos where models have held, though not worn, swimwear or anything else. For a few years those appearing in the swimsuit issue for the first time also were photographed in body paint and nothing else.
Why? The answer should be obvious: Money. To what should be no one’s surprise the swimsuit issue has been one of SI’s most lucrative, as you could tell given the previously gargantuan size of that issue. (With a lot of ads whose content rivaled the editorial photos.)
One of the more entertaining reads of SI has been the letters to the editor section following the swimsuit issue, which have, as all media should, included criticism of the swimsuit issue more from the left (objectifying, oppressing, exploiting, etc.) than the right (impure, sinful, etc.).
(I had a momentary involvement in this sort of thing, though not in SI. Back in 1988 a high school classmate of mine created what she called the Women of Wisconsin calendar, which was the focus of a story in the Wisconsin State Journal. Not long afterward a letter-writer condemned the calendar from the left — ironically, someone who had been a model for a fitness studio ad in the first newspaper I worked for in college. I then wrote a letter defending the calendar and asking how someone who agrees to do something and gets paid for it can be considered exploited. That was followed by another letter from where I was living that criticized the calendar from the sin perspective, written by the daughter of a local minister.)
SI started to lose the plot a few years ago when one of the models, who apparently is Muslim, wore neck-to-ankle swimwear. (That might be the ultimate mixed message — using a model from a religion whose excessively conservative adherents are famous for oppressing women for a project accused of exploiting women.) The plus-size models are not new, and their inclusion is less debatable than including a man wearing women’s swimwear. (No, not Caitlyn Jenner.)
Readers are, of course, free to read, or not, the SI swimsuit issue or anything else. (SI even went so far as to offer to not deliver the swimsuit issue to subscribers on request, such as libraries or schools.) Attempting to censor someone because you don’t like their views and don’t think anyone should be able to read those views (including photos of women wearing little or nothing) is a sign of low character.
SI is dealing with the same problem nearly every print publication faces — the Internet. Playboy Magazine’s response was to go bimonthly in 2016 and then quarterly in 2018, while briefly no longer showing the obvious reason to buy the magazine in the first place. Playboy stopped printing in 2020. SI has a vast website, but SI also has vast sports news competition online.
SI’s response has been an attempt at the woke business model, celebrating athletes’ progressive social awareness (see Kaepernick, Colin, and Thomas, William “Lia”) when the evidence that that’s what SI’s readers want is not being backed up by increasing print advertising. That’s not the reason for its slow-motion demise, but SI’s attempt to broaden its readership isn’t working. (The most recent issue, whose theme is women in athletics, is no bigger than SI issues were in its weekly days.)
SI seems destined to follow Sport, Inside Sports and ESPN The Magazine (whose attempt to emulate the Swimsuit Issue was the Body Issue, showing off the unclothed bodies of athletes, including those who don’t really have athletic bodies — this means you, Prince Fielder) into print memory. (I know something about that, as you know.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 