Would it surprise you to learn that Lady Gaga’s meat dress has a connection to sex testing? It definitely surprised me! That link exists by way of a former Sports Illustrated cover model named Ann Simonton.
You’ll hear Ann in the third episode of TESTED, talking about Maria José Martínez-Patiño’s activism. Ann is a dedicated activist in her own right — you only hear a short clip of her in the series, but we wanted to dedicate a bit more space to her work.
In the early 1970s, Ann graduated high school and went straight into modeling. Soon she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, wearing a bikini beside the caption “What’s New Under the Sun.”
Ann started to have doubts about the modeling industry as soon as she noticed the disordered eating of most of her coworkers. Over time, those doubts grew to encompass the whole way women were portrayed in the media. By 1989, Ann was actively campaigning for Sports Illustrated to end its annual “Swimsuit Issue.” That year, for the swimsuit issue’s 25th anniversary, a Sports Illustrated reporter interviewed Ann about her activism.
“I want to change the fundamental attitudes we have toward women, including women in sports,” Ann told Sports Illustrated. “As a society, we’re obsessed with male-dominated sports. We devote too much airtime and too many printed words to football. If long-distance swimming was covered as much as football, then our whole concept of sports might change, because we’d see women outdoing men left and right.”
Ann remembers seeing magazines like Playboy and Sports Illustrated cover Olympic women athletes — but in a way that was sexualized, and focused on how little clothing they were wearing. It seemed to her like no matter what your job was, if you were a woman, media coverage was going to sexualize you.
Ann did all kinds of things to try to change the way women were portrayed in the media. She told me she’s been arrested 11 times for civil disobedience. Which brings us to the meat dress! At one 1982 demonstration, Ann protested the Miss California beauty pageant by showing up in a garment made of cold cuts.
Ann continued to wear meat dresses as part of her activism for several years. In 1985, she was arrested at the Miss California pageant wearing a beef bathing suit. In 1987, she wore an outfit of turkey slices with a chicken drumstick necklace. That year, she told the Chicago Tribune that pageants “treat people like meat.”
When Lady Gaga wore a meat dress to the 2010 VMAs, commentators threw out all kinds of ideas about where she might have gotten the idea. We have no idea if Gaga knew about Ann or not, but Ann’s 1982 protest is the earliest documented example I could find of an activist wearing a meat dress specifically to protest the objectification of women. (This is an idea Lady Gaga herself referenced when she said in an interview, “If we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones. And I am not a piece of meat!”)
In 1984, Ann started her own organization, Media Watch. The group ran a newsletter that was mailed out nationally, and each issue came with three form postcards that subscribers could mail in to express support for a cause. In 1996, one of those postcards was addressed to Prince Alexandre de Merode at the IOC, above the caption “Stop Sex-Testing Female Athletes — or Start Testing the Men!” You can hear Ann read more of this postcard in episode three.
Ann continues to do feminist work — these days, Media Watch has its own YouTube channel. “We’ve always worked to try to improve the image of women in the media and try to also, basically, get rid of the binary,” Ann told me. “Because I don’t think it’s healthy for any of us to be pegged one way or the other. We should celebrate our diversity, and also consider doing more coed, more competing together.”
Sports Illustrated still publishes a swimsuit issue every year. For the 60th anniversary this year, they ran a media package that describes the issue as “Empowering Women Around The World.” I asked Ann what she thought of this framing.
“The term empowerment is definitely male-induced,” she said. “The swimsuit issue basically grooms men and boys to see women a certain way, and to allow it because they’re willing, they’re empowered, they love it.”
