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There have been several posts about the Lingerie Football League on Women Talk Sports. I’ve commented on many of them and have been interested to hear both ends of the opinion spectrum. It wasn’t until the subject of the LFL came up while talking to my male co-worker that I decided a post was most certainly necessary. While paroozing through the “man channels” (i.e. ESPN, Spike) one day he stumbled upon a LFL game. The first thing he said was, “They really do hit each other!”. He was shocked to see it on the screen before him, explaining that it wasn’t just women prancing around in their “slutty” outfits (his words, not mine!). I started to ask him questions about this, since I was searching for an outsiders perspective on this dilemma in the women’s sports world. He is not a football or basketball fan, so the fact that he stopped to catch a bit of this game to “see what it was all about” was fascinating to me.

All this got me thinking, could this actually be a good thing? Clearly, this person who is not into women’s sports, or physical sports for that matter, is actually taking note and spent minutes watching this game, and on top of it, understands that these women are actually playing the game! I could kind of see a cringe on his face, like he knew he wouldn’t want to be out there with them. So, now I’ve determined that I think these women are in fact athletes, who I also wouldn’t want to be on the field with. Question one answered.

The next dilemma within this controversy is the uniforms. Although, besides my co-worker mentioning that the uniforms attracted him to the game during his channel surf, there was no mention about the uniforms. I found this interesting, since I figured all men would find the uniforms to be something special but what he was mostly shocked by was that these women were actually playing football. After hearing his surprise about that aspect of it all, I had to ask him, knowing he had no idea, “Did you know that there is the Women’s Football Alliance, that does the same thing…but the women wear clothes?”. He was taken aback. He had no idea. Clearly, the uniforms drew him in but the fact that they were playing the sport kept him watching for a few minutes. I doubt I’ll ever watch a LFL game, unless I am able to interview one of these women to get their perspective, because I cannot help but be hung up about their clothing choices, since there is league that offers the sport without adding the piece of sex along on the side. I believe the purpose was to draw in men, not men who liked women’s sports, but men who wanted to watch women, wearing little clothes, hit other women in barely any clothes. It seem like a form of exploitation. Although I still feel this way, I started to see hope on the horizon.

My thoughts are engulfed with thoughts on how to get people to watch women’s sports, respect them as athletes, and stay interested in what is going on in the women’s sports world. I was thinking for a moment that maybe these women were, after all, onto something. They are doing something that is catching attention, and letting everyone out there know that women CAN play football. If this guy was focusing on the football aspect of the whole thing, than I can assume there are more out there like him. There might just be people who catches a glimpse of the uniform, starts to watch, and is impressed with the sport. I hope there is more of those types of males (and females) than the later. I prefer to be a little spark-plug with my clothes on when I play sports (hm… this is making me rethink the bundies) and it is disappointing to me that wearing that is how people take notice. I would like to think that this whole thing is a planned attack by those in the LFL. Maybe they are using this as a ploy to get people interested in women’s sports and then slowly add more and more articles of clothing to the uniform until they are fully clothed at the end of the season?! Doubt it. The hope is that maybe the WFA will get some press along with this too, and maybe some of the women from the LFL will want to take their tackling, throwing, and punting talents to the WFA.

So, maybe we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but then again, why not make the cover decent looking so we don’t want to judge, we want to watch?

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