In Defense of Lingerie Football

It didn’t take long for the Lingerie Football League to live up to the low expectations of its critics. All spring long, LFL personnel had been promising serious hard-hitting action among skilled players who just happened to be sexy women. But in early September, when the Chicago Bliss kicked off the season against the Miami Caliente, the highlight was a new contribution to gridiron strategy: stripping the passer. “Our QB, Anonka Dixon, had her bra top ripped off,” Caliente running back Michelle Stevens exclaimed in a postgame interview [2]. “Three girls from Chicago jumped on her after the play was already over and shredded her top to pieces. There she sat, topless on the field, and for no other reason than she is an unbelievable player and a huge threat to Chicago’s defense,  they wanted to take her out of the game.”

No doubt about it—the Lingerie Football League is demeaning to women, demeaning to football, and even demeaning to lingerie. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a particularly useful addition to the culture, but consider the landscape it inhabits. Cable news channels are generously decorated with the journalistic equivalents of 115 lb. QBs who can’t read blitz packages but look great in hot pink panties. Politics is filled with candidates whose greatest attribute is their curb appeal. Stand-up comedy, the last refuge for the ungainly in Hollywood, is now ruled by the intermittently funny but side-splittingly marketable Dane Cook. At this point, sport is pretty much the only institution in America that has not fully embraced the notion that aesthetics matter at least as much as talent. If the Lingerie Football League can help change that, we’ll all owe it a drunken high-five.

In the past, sports have traditionally privileged performance over mere form. It’s the original level-playing-field, rewarding hard work, discipline, and those blessed with the natural ability to throw a football 60 yards on their first try, not great cheekbones. Had Susan Boyle been born with the arm of Peyton Manning, she wouldn’t have had to defer her dreams of stardom for two decades simply because she didn’t look the part of an NFL quarterback. She would’ve been starting in the Super Bowl at the age of 30.

Now sport is catching up with the rest of the culture. At Wimbledon this year, in an effort to boost television ratings, the tournament’s organizers decorated Centre Court with the most attractive female players rather than the most accomplished ones. “Good looks are a factor,” admitted spokesman Johnny Perkins [3], in an effort to explain why lissome but unseeded nymphs like Gisela Dulko had pushed top-ranked bruisers like Dinara Safina and Serena Williams into less prominent venues. ESPN The Magazine’s inaugural “body issue,” [4] featuring nude or nude-ish portraits of 30 athletes, including Williams, Minnesota running back Adrian Peterson, professional surfer Claire Bevilacqua, and an assortment of boxers, swimmers, jockeys, and poker players to be named later, hit newsstands last week.

While the Wimbledon folks reward the aesthetic elite with a certain sheepishness, the Lingerie Football League’s founder, Mitchell Martoza, does it as a point of pride. If you’re not familiar with his creation, lingerie football is just what it sounds like—women, in their underwear, chasing one another around, with a football in the vicinity. To prepare for battle, players don panties, bras, knee pads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, cleats, riot-cop helmets, and a scratch-resistant coating of spray-on tan. Many take the extra safety precaution of having massive silicone cushioning devices installed in their chests. It started as a halftime diversion during the 2004 Super Bowl, and this year it has evolved into a full-blown league, with 10 teams and a 20-week season.

Earlier this year, as tryouts were taking place around the country, Martoza explained [5] what it takes to earn a spot on the roster. “You have to be beautiful. We make no bones about it.” And not just beautiful, but beautiful and young. (The oldest player in the league is 35, but most are 25 or under.) And not just beautiful and young, but beautiful, young, and thin. (The heaviest player in the league, a 6’2” quarterback, weighs 148 lbs.)

Football experience—or, at least, aptitude—helps too, but only after all those other criteria are met. Indeed, when a reporter asked him [6] if he’d considered recruiting players from the Independent Women’s Football League, a 41-team league where the players wear traditional uniforms and 300 lb. offensive linewomen are not uncommon, he exclaimed [6], “No offense to them, but they couldn’t be further from what we’re doing here. Women’s athletics haven’t been that popular primarily because they’re not the most attractive people in the world, usually, and in this day and age your brand has to be marketable.”

But even with visionaries like Martoza leading the way, the sports world often remains a step behind other sectors of the culture. Take, for example, the case of Carrie Prejean [7]. The 22-year-old blonde fills out a swimsuit as impressively as any Olympic medalist, she frequently invokes her past as a high-school jock [8], she’s dating an NFL quarterback [9], and yet neither Martoza nor USA Swimming has reached out to her yet. But after she boldly stated her preference for “opposite marriage” [10] at the Miss USA Pageant, the National Organization for Marriage quickly enlisted her as an advocate [11], and almost overnight, Prejean found herself with a new career as a conservative activist, guest-hosting on Fox & Friends, standing up for America [12] at the Value Voters Summit, and appearing alongside such a-list opinion leaders as Phyliss Schlafly, Bay Buchanan, and Ann Coulter in the 2010 edition of the Great American Conservative Women calendar [13].

“As a former beauty queen, it’s refreshing to be taken seriously,” Prejean said [14] of her new role as an ideological pinup girl. That she actually uttered this with a straight face suggests she’s surprisingly astute: Give her a small town in Alaska to run for a few years and there’s no telling how far she might go. But where, really, is the best place to steer the beautiful but unqualified? To the White House, or to the 20-yard-line of the Sears Centre Arena?

Our narrow-minded prejudice against professional cornerbacks who can’t backpedal at a 45 degree angle ultimately limits the career options of the facially gifted. The Lingerie Football League could change that. If it prospers, other sports leagues will emulate its approach. Lush natural lashes will replace 40-yard-dash time as the key indicator of potential NFL success. Coaches will pressure players into injecting themselves with Botox rather than steroids.

In time, talent-free knockouts of both genders will command just as much legitimacy in arenas and stadiums as they do now in theaters, news studios, and governors’ offices, and if we’re lucky, they’ll choose lingerie football over politics, nearly naked golf over journalism. Fleet-footed baldies and acne-scarred bruisers will suffer unjustly, but society at large will benefit. If you really care about the future of America, skip your annual donation to the United Way and buy a half-dozen tickets to the next San Diego Seduction game instead.