lingerie football

Count The Ethics Alarms: A Lingerie Football YOUTH League?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Looking forward to the opening of the Lingerie Football Junior League...

The headline: “Lingerie Football League Wants to Start a Youth League.”

All right, maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds. Still, we can watch four-year-olds wearing falsies and “shaking it” in kiddie beauty pageants on “Toddlers and Tiaras.” How far removed from that is a future football league with 13-year-old girls tackling each other in their training bras?

Lingerie Football League founder and chairman Mitchell Mortaza issued this statement on the LFL website:

“Obviously the improvement of our game is directly tied into the development of the future LFL athlete. What excites us at the league is seeing the caliber of athletes improve so vastly each season, now imagine in five years when we start fielding athletes that have trained their entire life for the opportunity to play LFL Football.”

And what does early training to to play lingerie football consist of, I wonder? The more important and troubling question: what does it say about our cultural health that the only route available for young female athletes who enjoy football to practice their sport is to train to eventually play the game while dressed like a Victoria’s Secret model?

Lingerie Football Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

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.” Continue reading →