More skills and less skin
Airing of Lingerie League an insult to struggling sportswomen
IF proof were needed that a lot of the blokes who run TV channels have got their knuckles dragging along the ground, do yourself the opposite of a favour and set your VCR for Tuesday nights at 10.30 when the Lingerie League makes its debut on Channel Seven.
Like a lot of things in popular culture that are, well, crap, the Lingerie League is an American invention which combines two popular forms of entertainment. Sport, and looking at women’s breasts.
It takes a special level of genius to make two pleasant things so remarkably unappealing. The Lingerie League achieves that. It’s one of those concepts which is so desperately stupid that you can feel your IQ falling the moment you start watching it.
In the course of research for this piece I spent an unrewarding three minutes watching it on YouTube. As a sporting spectacle it is not even close to being compelling. As a form of erotica, it’s about as arousing as an episode of Gardening Australia, yet the people at Seven’s male-skewed channel 7mate think they’re on to a winner.
Just to be clear from the get-go, I have no issue what- soever with the idea of goodlooking women getting around in not that much. Equally, I am sure that most women with a pulse would happily cop more than a passing look at a handsome guy wearing a pair of Calvin Klein boxers and showing off his six-pack.
Certainly the number of requests we had from female readers for us to run that photo of the towering North Melbourne forward Majak Daw having a swim at St Kilda confirmed that women are no slouches on the perving front themselves.
The orthodox feminist line against a concept like the Lingerie League is that it objectifies women. That is, it turns them into passive objects for the lascivious amusement of men. Indeed it does, or at least it tries to.
I would argue that the bigger problem is that it confirms the screwed- up programming appetites of men in television, particularly on the issue of women’s sport. It’s part of a TV culture which lets blokes with beer bellies and wrinkled faces prosper into their seventies as reporters and news readers, but where chicks on the wrong side of 40 are lined up for redundancy lest the viewers be horrified by the vis- age of a woman with laughter lines or boobs that are starting to head south.
I wouldn’t have that big a problem with the Lingerie League if it came on after three matches in a row of women’s netball and before the replay of the women’s college basketball from the US, on the night before the weekly one-hour roundup of the footy results in the nation’s female Aussie Rules leagues. You get absolutely none of this programming on commercial television — ever — but they have found a precious hour in a good time slot for girls running around in their jocks chasing a gridiron ball.
You can imagine the type of conversations among the programmers, sitting in a bloke-filled room, guys with names like Chook and Wazza and Browny talking about how a few hairy-legged feminazis might arc up about it but it’s all a bit of harmless fun. The decision to air this rubbish is a reflection not just on their intellect but on their misreading of ours.
OVER the years and especially as an editor I have been challenged several times by women about the lack of editorial support for women’s sport.
The reason, we argue, that men’s sport gets almost all of the coverage is because it also gets almost all of the audience. When there have been opportunities to go big on women’s sport — as we did this year with the victorious netball team the Thunderbirds in my home town— we have done so with great enthusiasm. If we are honest though, there are definitely more opportunities to throw similar editorial energy at women’s sport, not just on the eve of a grand final.
It is pretty weird that at a time when our cricketers couldn’t buy a win, and were making headlines instead for being sent home after refusing to do their homework or decking a Pommy batsman in the small hours at an English pub, our women cricketers were quietly going about the business of becoming world champions, again.
Couldn’t name one of them.
Even as a sports- mad bloke, there are times when I find myself watching one of my preferred codes and come to the realisation that life is slowly ebbing away, and I’ll turn it off and do something else.
As great a game as Aussie Rules is, does anyone really give a toss about a Hawthorn vs Greater Western Sydney game? Are you going to sit glued to your set watching the Gold Coast Suns play Melbourne? If you can’t stand Essendon and Collingwood — and a lot of us can’t — there are plenty of other ways to commemorate Anzac Day, all of them are better.
Almost every weekend has several games which are dead boring.
Having made my debut as a spectator at the netball earlier this year — belatedly enough at the age of 44 — I’d say that a good netball match is vastly more exciting than a non-marquee AFL or NRL clash.
Who knows. Maybe the reason women’s sport doesn’t get better crowds and TV audiences is that it doesn’t get the coverage in the first place. Worth thinking about.
Unlike the Lingerie League, which adds insult to injury for great female athletes by becoming the only women’s ‘‘ sport’’ on commercial television.