Does this sport condone rape? Or tickle fights?
I think professional lingerie football is a strange sport, to be sure. Attractive women dressed in bras, panties, helmets and shoulder pads play football before paying customers, almost all of them men. The players seem to play hard and many of them are excellent athletes. Is it sport? Is it sex? Is it spectacle?
Sondra Miller, a feminist and rape crisis counselor, believes that lingerie football increases the incidence of rape and violence against women, and writes that the proper ethical conduct is to end it:
“Don’t support the women’s lingerie football league. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t watch it on TV. Don’t talk about it at the water cooler. Ignore it — or better yet — speak out against it.”
Her reasoning:
“To me, women’s lingerie football sexualizes women in a violent environment and calls it a game or, even worse, entertainment. These games completely normalize the dangerous combination of sex, violence and women.
“While nearly all of the men (and women) who watch these games would never commit rape, they will condone it on some level just by attending or watching. By supporting this league, even in the interest of innocent fun and entertainment, they send a message that women, sex and violence are normal, tolerable or — even worse — exciting.”
A stretch, I’d say.
Our culture sexualizes women (men too), and women who wish to be sexualized have that right. Lingerie football is no more of a violent sporting environment than women’s boxing, lacrosse, roller derby, fencing, soccer or rugby. Miller is a feminist—surely she isn’t arguing that women shouldn’t be allowed to participate in violent sports. She hasn’t objected to, say, professional women’s beach volleyball, gymnastic or swimming, in which the participants are at least as revealingly clad as the lingerie football players…and without the helmets and shoulder pads, which, unless Ms. Miller know something I don’t, aren’t usually regarded as sexually provocative. So physical sport involving women isn’t the problem, and competition with revealing clothing isn’t the problem either. It’s when you combine that frilly underwear with the blocking and the tackles that it becomes “dangerous.”
Right.
Huh?
How do lingerie football games normalize anything? The whole point to the game is that it’s an oxymoron, and slightly tongue in cheek. The game feature women battling women—how does this relate to rape? What man thinks about rape when he sees one woman in a bra and shoulder pads tackling another?
Miller says that this is the statement that convinced her husband:
“Rape is the ultimate disrespect of another person. Anything that falls on the spectrum of disrespect contributes to a society where we get closer to the extreme end of that spectrum.”
Ah.
What???
Anything that falls on the spectrum of disrespect moves us closer to rape? The Westboro Baptist Church moves us closer to rape? Wanda Sykes saying that she wishes Rush Limbaugh would get cancer moves us closer to rape? Joe “You lie!” Wilson moves us closer to rape? Really?
Well, I’ll give Miller this: they move society about as close to rape as lingerie football does.
Rape is indeed the ultimate disrespect for a woman. The way to discourage rape is to reinforce good ethical values in children as they grow to adulthood, by ensuring that they are nourished in an ethical culture that discourages people from harming anyone and teaches that it’s wrong to force anyone to do something against their will. A culture in which young women can choose to simultaneously display their curves and athleticism in a spectacle that appeals to both the male appreciation of football and the male enjoyment of female pulchritude is not incompatible with such a culture. Indeed, lingerie football is just a logical marketing creation: guys like to watch football and the game’s cheerleaders, so why not have the cheerleaders play the game? The women aren’t being abused or humiliated. The women, who are generally under 150 pounds, don’t generate much “violence,” either.
Call it stupid, call it titillating, call it a bad sport or a waste of time. But condoning rape?
Ridiculous.
Ethics Alarms 
At least she didn’t insist that there be a law against it.
…yet.
–Dwayne
I think it’s simultaneously ironic and poetic that I had never heard of Lingerie Football until it was brought to my attention by Ethics Alarms–which itself was a direct consequence of Sondra Miller’s article.
–Dwayne
An ethics version of the Streisand Effect.
Pulchritude.
Nice.
One assumes that Sondra Miller would be more actively working against Victoria’s Secret — both the commercials and the stores themselves. Victoria’s Secret sells sex, per se, instead of women’s in their undies playing what has heretofore been a man’s sport.
Similarly, has she seen the British newscaster who reads the news topless? Are we to assume the incidence of rape has skyrocketed since this silly program was instituted?
And male Football players in tight pants do not add to sexualization of men? As someone who has had girlfriends tolerate the 9 hours of football I watch every Sunday due to the eye candy, I’m calling this out as a double standard.
If that argument doesn’t fly for you, what about WWE wrestling? Shirtless, sweaty, ripped men in spandex pants grappling each other. Is this adding to the rape of men?
Apparently. Honestly, I read this woman’s piece three times, and still don’t know what she thinks is the problem. I’d have more sympathy with an argument that the Kardashian reality shows and the various Jersey shows seed violence against women, because if women were really like they are portrayed in those shows, it could be justified as eugenics. But lingerie football is less sexually provocative than a Victoria’s Secret ad, and less violent than an episode of “Charlie’s Angels.” I just don’t get it.
I, too, never heard of Lingerie Football until reading of it here.
The motivations of its sponsors and proponents? For athleticism, sport? Possibly, probably not.
For (you should pardon the expression) titillation? Probably, possibly not.
But I do think Ms. Miller is having a Chicken Little reaction, in playing the “rape” card. A great big tempest in a pot of tea.