Let's All Enjoy Michael Knowles' Despair Over Martha Stewart's Sports Illustrated Cover

This is a great victory for our culture.

Once upon a time, back in 2009, much of the country (or the media, at least) was disgusted and outraged by a picture of pop-star Jessica Simpson performing at 99.9 Kiss Country's 24th Annual Chili Cook-Off. At the time, she was about 28 years old, 130 lbs and a size 4.

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Page Six ran a story titled, for serious, "Jumbo Jessica Simpson: Packin’ On The Pounds In Photos." The copy on one of the pictures read "Jumbo Jessica Simpson prepares to sing at the 99.9 Kiss Country Chili Cookoff at C.B. Smith Park in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The corpulent country star looks very different from her 'Dukes Of Hazzard' days."

Embedded into this "discourse" was often the question of whether or not, at the ripe old age of 28, Simpson had simply outlived her usefulness as a pop starlet.

Now, if you are very cool or very deep, you can roll your eyes at this because "Who cares about Jessica Simpson? I don't even own a TV! And I only liked her first album, before she sold out!" But the whole incident really did do a lot to capture the practically fascistic terror women were living under during those years, even those of us who were too cool or deep for it all. We lived in a world where we were constantly reminded that anything less than perfection would cause men to throw up all over us, where we were encouraged to live off of Special K (and, let's be real, Adderall) for two weeks to lose weight in hopes of getting to a size 00, a world of Girls Gone Wild and Tucker Max rape jokes and in which it was insinuated that aging was one of the worst crimes a woman could commit so we'd better start getting that preventative Botox right away. (This turned out to be a bad idea, actually!) 

I think a lot about how, in 2000, 30-year-old Nia Long was considered "too old" to star in Charlie's Angels .

At the same time all of this was going on, you also had purity culture. You had purity balls and purity rings and blonde teenage pop stars (like Jessica Simpson) looking all sexy while talking about how they planned to remain virgins until marriage. You also had websites that counted down the days until the Olsen Twins were "legal."

This is a very long lede to get to our main point, but I bring it up because it's almost too easy to block out exactly how fucking horrible that time was for women. It's not clear what the tipping point was (I maintain it was when they came out with "thigh gap" as the new beauty standard, as if we could all just become bow-legged at will), but partly due to the hard work of feminists and partly due to the fact that it was just a truly exhausting and unpleasant way to live, things have changed. Most of us are happier for it, we are happy to see models of all ages and sizes on the runway and in magazines, larger mannequins in stores, and more inclusivity all around. It's not perfect, but it's not literal hell, so that's nice.

It's going through that time, you see, that really makes me appreciate just how upset and angry the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles is about Martha Stewart's Sports Illustrated cover. 

We have earned this. We have earned every one of his sad little man tears.

“Michael Knowles complains about Martha Stewart's Sports Illustrated cover: "We should not be sexually desiring an 81 year-old woman"”

— Jason S. Campbell (@Jason S. Campbell) 1684334703 

Let us be clear here — Martha Stewart looks amazing on that cover. She looks great. Hell, I wish I looked half as good as 81-year-old Martha Stewart on that cover.

But Knowles is unhappy. He's angry that Sports Illustrated is "trying to stay relevant" by getting with the times and putting Martha Stewart and trans pop star Kim Petras on two of the four covers instead of, I guess, just Megan Fox and Brooks Nader. It's not enough for half of the Sports Illustrated covers to be designed to appeal to him — it's all or nothing.

He explains that the reason he is unhappy is because looking at Martha Stewart looking hot in a bathing suit is literally against his religion. Because some saint somewhere said "It is not good to look at what it is not licit to desire" — and that means that only people Michael Knowles wants to fuck should be allowed to wear bathing suits, on or off the pages of Sports Illustrated . He is very upset about the idea of people lusting after an 81-year-old woman. Boy, is he ever going to be upset when he finds out about a little show called "The Golden Girls."

To be clear, this is not about his religion. This is not even about who he personally finds sexually attractive (and frankly I think it very well might be Martha Stewart). It's about power.

This is far from the first time the Right has gone bananas over a magazine cover. They were mad at the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition last year when it featured plus size model Yumi Nu . They were mad about Elliot Page on the cover of Esquire. 

Because what this tells them, what so many other brands are telling them these days, more than anything, is that no one gives a fuck what they think. No one cares about their arbitrary standards. No one cares what they, personally, find attractive or sexy, because they are no longer the target audience. They are no longer relevant. And they are aware that what this lack of relevance is, ultimately, is a lack of power.

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They no longer get to live in a world where they get to exert social power over anyone at all. They can't get women to starve themselves the way they once did or to feel worthless if they're not a size double zero, they can't make women go away once they hit 30, they can't make trans people stay in the closet, they can't really be shitty to LGBTQ+ people without looking like jerks, they don't get to see young women walking around advertising their intact hymens with jewelry, beer companies are advertising to people other than them, and they're fucking pissed off about it. Not just because of their precious boners, but because of power.

As bad as things seem sometimes — and they do seem really bad, what with all the white nationalists and Christian nationalists and incels and professional misogynists and the Intellectual Dark Web and transphobes and culture warriors and vigilantes and Proud Boys and Moms For Liberty and forced birth enthusiasts and insurrectionists and Marjorie Taylor Greenes ... and where was I going with this? Right, sorry, there are just so many of them. And it's so hard sometimes to have hope that things are not going to get much worse. But as bad as things and people seem right now, I have to believe that part of the reason they are so awful is because they know their power is slipping away and they are grasping furiously and hysterically at any last vestiges they can hold onto in hopes that they can claw their way back to power.

Which, you know, makes you feel kind of badly for them, because it's actually pretty awesome to live in this new, kinder world, where more people get to feel good about themselves and where Martha Stewart and Kim Petras get to be on magazine covers. At least compared to the bad old days.

I am so, so incredibly glad that Michael Knowles is unhappy with the cover of Sports Illustrated . In fact, I would go so far as to say that his tears over this cover taste exactly like freedom and liberation. The more Michael Knowles and others like him are unhappy with the culture, the more we can be sure that we are headed in exactly the right direction.

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