…Probably could have drawn the conclusion posited by Nicole M. LaVoi on Women Talk Sports, that — hold on to your butts — Sports Illustrated objectifies women!

Well yeah, no shit.

The subject is Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, who I’m told is very good at skiing and who is also quite attractive. She’s featured on this month’s cover of SI in a “sexualized position“. Which also happens to be the stance one takes on the downhill. Therein lies, as they say, the rub.

Now, I realize, as a blogger, its not merely my right but my responsibility to deploy excessive zeal in everything I do. But does everything, even something like this, which, in the long term, is a pretty innocuous quip, have to turn into a game of spin/backspin? Here’s a sampling of responses to LaVoi, from your one-off “you’re stupid” response, from Business Insider:

But how else are they supposed to feature her, exactly?  That’s how skiers ski.

To the age old classic “your fault” from Mediaite:

Is this maybe a case of the viewer seeing what they want to see?

Isn’t there a middle ground here? You’d have to be a bone head to think that Sports Illustrated doesn’t take into account the sexual component of every cover (at least the ones with women on them — SI is predominently a men’s mag, remember), but I also have a hard time picturing the photographer asking Vonn to stick her ass out.. just a little… bit… more. We have to assume that the hint toward sex wasn’t “unintentional,” simply by virtue of the magazine we’re talking about, but at the same time, I’m not certain it was necessarily deliberate. It is, after all, how skiers ski.

The thing that gets under my skin about this is really a symptom of blogging in general: relevance. There’s simply no reason to write copy that merely takes note of an established status quo. That Sports Illustrated likes babes isn’t exactly breaking news. And while this could very well be an important contribution to dialogue about women, sports, sexuality and so forth, LaVoi blows that opportunity by putting next to no intellectual material around it. Then Business Insider picked it up solely to take a swipe at it, which was picked up and fleshed out by Mediaite, who probably did the best job of the three covering the whole thing.

Still, who among us is better off for reading all of that? The answer might very well be nobody.