Southwest is two-faced for sporting the SI One

Coffee, tea or hypocrisy?

Southwest Airlines recently unveiled a jet featuring a giant photograph of a bikini-clad Sports Illustrated swimsuit model along the side. Two of her prominent features – and I'm not talking about her sultry eyes – appear to be, oh, about 5 feet wide.

The perplexing thing is that this happens to be the same airline that nearly ordered a young San Diego woman off a flight in 2007 because she was wearing what one flight attendant considered too revealing: miniskirt, tank top, cardigan.

See the problem?

Personally, I have to be careful here in offering my take.

It's partly because I have four – count 'em, four – female editors. Land mines everywhere.

And it's partly because I believe Southwest has one heck of a hot-looking plane.

And it's not my fault, either. A recent study found that men who look at women in bikinis have a biological tendency to see them as sex objects.

Really?

I had hoped to get Kyla Ebbert's opinion on the matter, because she was the young lady busted by the airline's wardrobe police in 2007. She had to pull the neckline of her top up and the hem of her skirt down. She covered up with a blanket. She felt humiliated.

Later, she posed for Playboy.

I had zero luck reaching her. And my editors – remember, all women – said I couldn't go to the Playboy Mansion on one of my crazy hunches that she'd be there.

It's hard for me to get too outraged about this. A woman in a bikini seems tame these days, particularly when such lofty endeavors as “Girls Gone Wild” videos are easily available.

And even though I do think Southwest treated Ebbert shabbily, I don't think the airline has a habit of tossing women for showing too much skin. If so, I haven't seen them in Playboy.

(Memo to my editors: I don't subscribe.)

The airline has its own, fairly predictable reasoning for what I like to call The Babe Plane. “We were looking for a fresh marketing approach,” spokesman Chris Mainz told me.

The Boeing 737 jet is called “SI One” and features Bar Refaeli, the cover girl of this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

The Ebbert fiasco was an “isolated incident,” Mainz said. “It's unrelated as far we're concerned.”

At least with Ebbert, the only danger was offending other passengers. The Babe Plane has me more worried about other male pilots preparing for takeoff.

Air traffic controller: “Um, Northwest Flight 287, why are you taxiing toward Interstate 5?”

Pilot: “Um, sorry. I got a little distracted by a Southwest plane.”

Air traffic controller: “Roger that. We've been having that problem lately.”

There is a chance that the plane, which will feature the supermodel photograph for a couple of months, could stop in San Diego, Mainz said. So far, the reaction from passengers has been “mostly positive.”

Some women among Southwest's 34,000 employees are grumbling, he said, but many applaud the company for its innovation.

Laurel Davis-Delano, a sociology professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts, isn't surprised that some are offended.

Author of a book called “Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sports Illustrated,” Davis-Delano thinks the plane “is linked to a troubling societal trend.”

That would be the increasing sexualization of women in popular culture. Magazines (even ones targeted to women), TV shows and movies all do it. Women are portrayed primarily as sex objects, and The Babe Plane merely fits that pattern.

If Southwest featured a female soccer player kicking a ball, Davis-Delano said, that would have broken the mold.

Instead, it's same old, same old.

Sports Illustrated said the use of a Southwest plane was part of “multi-platform” launch of the swimsuit issue. Models and invited guests flew from New York to Las Vegas. The models did not wear bikinis, an SI spokesman noted, so I guess they didn't have to cover up with blankets.

As many as 24 million women read the swimsuit issue, either in print or digitally, SI reports. About 42 million men check it out.

Not me, though.

I have four women editors, remember.

Michael Stetz: (619) 293-1720; michael.stetz@uniontrib.com