MIAMI – Get it clear, fast. I am not outraged or offended.

Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue is too quaintly benign to conjure either emotion. In an age when hard-core porn is as accessible on the Internet as corn flakes in a supermarket, young women with pouty lips in exotic locales modeling bikinis in a magazine checks in closer to Norman Rockwell than Larry Flynt on the scandal scale.

So please don’t mistake my argument as one of prudishness.

My argument _ applying to any magazine or any form of entertainment – is entirely one of context: What fits, what seems out of place, what’s as advertised.

I love the very name: swimsuit issue. As if what the magazine is selling is beachwear, right? A magazine selling sex is fine if it’s Playboy or Maxim or any number of other mags that are up front in zeroing in on the libido.

However, this is Sports Illustrated. So give me sports.

Sports are inherently sexy enough (hence Anna Kournikova’s worldwide celebrity despite tennis mediocrity) without Sports Illustrated degrading itself with its annual parade of professional anorexics.

It would be like Ted Koppel’s Nightline devoting one week of shows per year to Victoria’s Secret models cat-walking in lingerie.

Or Mechanics Illustrated devoting an issue to cake recipes.

Or a Jeff Miller column turning up in a collection of fine sportswriting.

Out of place, that’s all.

For 51 weeks a year, Sports Illustrated aims admirably high and usually hits its mark. If ESPN has become the voice of sports, SI would still lay claim to being its conscience.

Except for once a year.

That’s when SI becomes a frat house, essentially turning itself into that Miller Lite commercial in which two models in bikinis mud-wrestle.

That’s when SI becomes Maxim, trading in its conscience for a leer and a wink. The magazine’s editor that week might as well be Hugh Hefner in a crushed-velvet smoking jacket, a pipe clamped into a crocodile smile.

Sports Illustrated’s 2003 cover model, Petra Nemcova, is pictured wearing a bikini top that tries valiantly but narrowly fails to cover the full underside of her left breast. I’d describe her as wearing a matching bikini bottom, except she isn’t. Not quite. She is pictured preparing to tie the strings upon her bare left hip.

Straining for a link to actual sports, the issue includes a photo of Roger Clemens, prone in his Yankees uniform, being straddled by his bikini-wearing wife. Gawd!

Again, this stuff will lead no prepubescent teen to ruin. It will more likely make him yawn, and head for the Internet.

The point is, titillation is so everywhere in our society, I’d like somebody _ perhaps the supposed conscience of sports? – to be above it, apart from it. Sports Illustrated should be Sports Illustrated.

Hey. If you buy Playboy, do you really want to see photos from an NFL game accompanying a piece on the two-deep zone?

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.