Lingerie Football League is a demeaning, pathetic spectacle
There’s a reason B. C. Lions quarterback Travis Lulay or receiver Geroy Simon don’t play football clad only in jock straps, shoulder pads and helmets without faceguards.
Football is a full- contact sport, rife with injuries from broken bones to concussions to scrapes from sliding on artificial turf.
It’s why, over the years, the equipment has evolved from leather helmets and knickers to helmets and body armour.
From peewees to professionals, players don’t want to get hurt and nor does anyone who cares about them or the game itself.
Except if they’re women in the Lingerie Football League, which makes its B. C. debut this summer with the B. C. Angels playing in the Abbotsford Entertainment & Sports Centre.
Football helmets are forbidden. They protect players, but hide their faces. The women wear hockey helmets with clear plastic shielding their eyes.
Their uniforms are skimpy bikinis, garters and shoulder pads so unsuited for a contact sport that the standard contract includes a clause acknowledging that “accidental nudity” on the field is part of what the players sign on for.
Google the league and you’ll find that accidental nudity is the most- reported feature of the league among the teams whose names — Vegas Sin, Dallas Desire and LA Temptation — sound like soft- core porn titles.
In mainstream media — this newspaper included — the most frequent references to the LFL poke fun at it with such knee-slappers as T. C. Chong writing that his season tickets are in “Section DD” and R. J. Currie calling it “football 36D.”
In the very few stories about the games, writers note the play is rough — “no pillow fight” says Businessweek in 2009 — and the players are talented athletes.
Those stories also usually note that the players would prefer not to be so exposed, but they love the game and would do almost anything to play.
And that’s what they’re doing: Wearing virtually nothing and playing for virtually nothing.
LFL’S founder Mitchell Mortaza brags about its popularity. Profits reportedly increased 260 per cent from 2009 to 2010. But no one has yet reported a 260- per- cent increase from what — $ 1? $ 1,000?
Recently, Mortaza mused about hiring Paris Jackson as a spokesperson. No, not the one who plays for the B. C. Lions; the 13- year- old daughter of deceased pop star Michael Jackson.
If Mortaza is raking it in and has the cash to hire celebrity spokesmodels, he’s not sharing with the players, who reportedly earn $ 1,000 or less per season.
Players don’t have health coverage and Mortaza has threatened some women with lawsuits if they complained about it.
It’s pathetic, really. As Janet Austin, CEO of the Vancouver YWCA says, it’s such an extreme manifestation of sexualization of women and so at odds with Canadian societal values that it seems impossible to believe that the lingerie league could last.
I’d like to believe it’s an aberration. But I fear it’s a symptom of a long- standing trend to demean and devalue female athletes.
The prevailing wisdom is that women’s sports can only be marketed and are only profitable if female athletes are sexualized, infantilized or disempowered.
Yet last month, 25,427 fans crowded into BC Place for the final game of CONCACAF — the Olympic qualifying event for women’s soccer — that pitted Canada against the U. S.
For more than 100 years, female athletes have fought for accommodation and acceptance. In the early 1900s, some argued against the YWCA offering physical activities. They said exercise could damage women’s reproductive organs. Discomfort with strong, athletic women lingers.
It’s not that long ago that the International Olympic Committee required all female competitors to submit to gender testing.
Female boxers make their debut at the 2012 Summer Games and the International Boxing Association wanted them to wear skirts.
Yet while female athletes have on occasion gone to court to force their way in, beach volleyball vaulted into the Olympics.
It’s due in no small measure to the marketability of tanned, bikini- babe competitors.
“My profound wish is that we could focus on women’s athleticism, their skill and the time they have taken to reach that level and not their physical attractiveness,” Austin said in an interview.
And along with respect, maybe female athletes would be allowed to play in the protective gear they deserve.