There is actually a league for a full-contact sport in which the female athletes are explicitly dressed in revealing outfits for the benefit of their male audience. Are we really still doing this?
FULL-CONTACT FOOTBALL ‘LEAGUE’ EXPOSED TO CANADA
The Legends Football League last month announced a new uniform deal, which would include “sleeker designs” and “more engaging colours.”
The deal will also lead to the introduction of something you wouldn’t normally expect a football league to have been without: pants.
You probably have not heard of the Legends Football League, but you might be vaguely familiar with its 2004 predecessor: the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view special aired during halftime of the Super Bowl that was exactly as shameless as it sounds. After a few of those, the enterprise turned into an actual league and four years ago the word “Lingerie” was replaced with “Legends,” although the outfits became only moderately more demure. The women essentially wear bikinis and the uniform’s signature design is a pair of shoulder pads that somehow provide protection while also exposing a lot of cleavage.
And now, it is coming to Canada. Super Channel, a premium pay channel based in Edmonton, this week announced a three-year deal with Legends Football League, around which it will launch the Super Channel Sports programming block. The third year of that deal, 2019, coincides with the league’s planned date for an LFL Canada, with teams based in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina and Toronto.
It seems worth noting, at this point, that none of this is satire. There is actually a league for a fullcontact sport in which the female athletes are explicitly dressed in revealing outfits for the benefit of their male audience. If one of the LFL’s outdoor games was played in heavy rain, it would be mudwrestling with helmets. Are we really still doing this?
Mitchell Mortaza, t he league’s founder and commissioner, says concerns about exploitation are overblown. People have accused him of such things for years, he says in an interview from Los Angeles, “and nothing I’m going to say is going to sway them.”
“I think if people have that reaction, it’s because they haven’t seen the athletes,” he says. “They really just have to see the sport, see the athletes.”
So, I did. The LFL has a YouTube channel that includes game broadcasts alongside the obligatory LFL Hottest Athletes of 2016 collection. There’s no disputing that the sport, a sevenon-seven version of football on a 50- yard field, includes talented athletes. Mortaza says most of the current athletes played Division I sports in the NCAA, where in the past the league recruited “model-actress types.” There are runs, throws, passes and hits. The spirals can be as tight as the uniforms. Mortaza says this is part of the evolution of the sport toward something mainstream. “It was primarily sold on sex appeal back in the day, and now we are pushing athleticism.” He notes the introduction of pants this season as evidence of the focus on performance over titillation. Yes, about those: the pants are to be worn once in the coming season, and they look like leggings, with nothing in the way of pads to disrupt the curves. It is hardly a bold step toward typical football wear.
Don McDonald, the chief operating officer of Super Channel, says of the reasons to bring this sport to Canadian airwaves: “It’s ideal for pay TV. It’s edgy, it’s unique, it’ s skewed to the male demographic.” The first season on Super Channel Sports begins in April.
As for the uniforms, he pivots to the players: “They are incredibly athletic” and they “have a passion to play.”
“They certainly are uniquely dressed,” McDonald allows.
He also offers a common response to questions about those outfits, which is that an Olympic sport like beach volleyball also has revealing clothing for its female competitors. Whatever one’s position on the appropriateness of those beach volleyball bikinis, there is one key difference: that sport is played on a literal beach.
It’s not quite clear why the Legends Football League wants to have it both ways. Mortaza can claim that the sport is no longer primarily about sex appeal, but the league’s marketing suggests otherwise. Players are spritzed with water and posed with come- hither looks and those league- produced YouTube videos describe its athletes as being, for example, “a real-life Pocahontas” and having “rockhard abs and a backside that could rival Kim K.” Again: not satire.
The dispiriting reality is that other than tennis and golf, there are few opportunities for women to play noncollegiate sports, and those that do exist are on the fringes. Pro hockey and soccer leagues for women are fledgling, but they attract a small fraction of the attention that the same athletes get when they play for national teams in an Olympics or World Cup.
The LFL offers a chance for female athletes to play a competitive sport in front of a paying audience — the women themselves are unpaid — as long as they are OK with wearing a chest protector that does not cover their chest. Sports remains the tail of the equality curve, where it’s still often thought that the best way to get exposure is to expose more.
The LFL experimented with some trial games in Canada a few years ago, which convinced Mortaza that the market for his product here exists. He learned, for example, that two teams in Saskatchewan was too many. It takes a big market to find enough women willing to do this, apparently.
Mortaza insists that the brand has changed, and that by the time the LFL debuts in this country, it could be even more about athletics.
“It has evolved quite a bit,” he says. “Absolutely it is going to continue on that trajectory.”
But it has a long way to go before it will stop being depressing.
(CYNICS) REALLY JUST HAVE TO SEE ... THE ATHLETES.