In Defense of Lingerie Football

Photograph of Lingerie Football League by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

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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. “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, 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,” 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.