Women everywhere are celebrating the release of Sports Illustrated's 2017 Swimsuit Edition, for squeezed in among the innumerable images of slender young models is an aberration: a picture of a voluptuous woman wearing a bikini which doesn't conceal the stretch-marks blooming across her stomach.
This is Denise Bidot, a so-called plus-sized model, though probably average-sized in reality, posing in swimwear designed by the plus-size clothing brand Lane Bryant.
At first glance, this image is significant, for though 'bigger' women have featured in the magazine before, their flaws have been airbrushed into oblivion. The image of Bidot represents womanhood in all its flawed, natural glory: soft belly, broad hips, and those silvery stretch marks, the calling card of pregnancy.
Women, most of them long excluded from advertisers' narrow concept of 'beauty', have rushed to compliment Bidot on her gloriousness, on her rebellious brand of sexiness. They are part of a movement that is speaking out, and often disrobing to prove their point, against the marginalisation of women who don't fit into the dictatorial confines of what society has determined to be attractive.
It's understandable that these women are rejoicing at the inclusion of an un-retouched, representative body in a magazine as iconic as this, given the slew of one-dimensional, provocatively posed, heavily photoshopped models used to represent them in the media.
And it is remarkable that a 63-year-old woman — the preternaturally youthful Christie Brinkley — has also posed for this edition, for she does so amid a sea of almost unvaryingly youthful faces and bodies.
But this response is highly problematic, for it salutes a publication that objectifies women for widening the definition of those it is willing to objectify. It suggests that women accept without question — indeed, encourage — the idea that their most important attribute is their body.
It forgets that the apparently subversive image is really just a clever marketing tool employed by Lane Bryant: the company's #IMNOANGEL campaign — a dig at Victoria's Secret's hyper-sexualised 'angels' — aims to redefine society's notion of 'sexy' by declaring all women sexy — and so earning undying loyalty from women who've been told for too long that they are not.
"As deliciously subversive as body acceptance campaigns are, they perpetuate the idea that women are, fundamentally, objects to be assessed. They keep women focused on their physical being — and the response of others to it."
In expanding its repertoire of women's bodies (which must still adhere