MH - What Kind of Sports Are You Illustrating?

Just jumped over to the si.com site, which is where I get a lot of my sports headlines. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a young, nubile, half-naked female body. Well, let me clarify that: she was only shown from the waist up, so I can't even say for sure that she's only half-naked. The only thing I'm positive she had on were a couple of very strategically-placed arms, if you get my drift.

Now, I don't want to come off here as a prude. But do we have to be assaulted with these soft-core images at every turn? I can understand that SI wants to publicize their swimsuit issue. They've had smaller pictures of these "models" on their website for months, and that was bad enough. But now we've got a picture that runs the width of the page - there's no way to miss it. Pleasing as it might be, it's not what I'm looking for when I go to si.com.

And I don't think it's what we want our kids to see when they look at si.com, either. Kid goes to check on the scores, sees this instead. Suddenly he's thinking about a different kind of scoring. Do we need to put a filter on our Internet sites just to find out who won last night's game?

Now, there's nothing wrong with the human body. There's also nothing wrong with beauty. But I can't help thinking that the main point of pictures like this are to provoke lust, and there you're getting into very dicey territory, as the CCC points out:

2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

2530 The struggle against carnal lust involves purifying the heart and practicing temperance.

And I could go on and on. Point is, as 2530 states, it is a struggle to fight carnally lustful thoughts. It's one thing to avoid the adult bookstores. But you shouldn't have to stay away from si.com. This isn't a surprise to anyone who's followed Sports Illustrated the last few decades - which doesn't mean it still isn't a disappointment.