Stripper Football

Still groggy from waking up for Adam Bosch’s 8 a.m. J2 class I stumbled back into my dorm and plopped down in front of my TV with a nice greasy bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in my hand. After flipping around a bit I decided to peruse the trashy channels to look for some Springer or Jersey Shore, which ever came first. Instead of angry midgets or angry orange people I found something I really didn’t expect: Football.

It’s called the Lingerie Football League, and it’s trashier than the Jersey Shore and Jerry Springer combined. Scantily clad females playing a game of football for popped collared bros drinking Bud Light. The catch is that this is no powder puff football game or even flag football; this is real full contact American Football. The field might be slightly miniaturized and the game might be a half hour long. But the tackles and the dog piles are all too real for these women dressed in nothing but shoulder pads, bikinis, and some sort of lacrosse/hockey helmet hybrid.

At first I watched this from the perspective of one of Gitlin’s “ironists”, raising my eyebrows and chuckling at the bros in the crowd, who appeared to be rocking out to Nickleback. After the half hour long game of stripper football I realized that I had been sucked in. I found myself rooting for Philly, something I pray I never do again, and realizing that this trap being broadcast on MTV2 had captured my attention long enough to show me advertisements.

I was ashamed, I had fallen into the pitfall of the ironist: joining the crowd you are tying to mock.

This common mistake aside, I found the game intriguing. The entire time I was watching this game I was asking myself the same question, “is this degrading or liberating for these women?” By the end of the game I had come up with the game being a bit of both.

It appeared to be something straight out of Idiocracy, a fusion of the NFL and Hustler Magizine, much like the fusion of news and porn in the movie. Besides the standards of American football there seems to be one rule to this sport: no uggos. All of the women are trim and athletic women who have managed to find a balance between being trim female athletes and curvy voluptuous women. None of the women on the field seemed to be “real.” I have never met a woman who fits the 36-29-38 dimensions of a “perfect” body AND have the ability to take a hit like these girls can.

After sitting and musing on the whole idea behind the LFL I became quite disgusted. I found myself drawing a startling conclusion: women aren’t allowed to play in the NFL, so instead they have to put on Lingerie and play half naked with little to no protective padding in a Roman coliseum type spectacle.

A feminist’s worst nightmare.