True Football Fantasy?

By Kylynn Pelkey | gargoyle@flagler.edu
“True fantasy football.” I discovered this little pay-per-view prize while watching TV with my boyfriend several nights ago. A half-hearted grunt of excitement from his side of the couch encouraged me to glance toward the television when I saw a sight that not only surprised me, but shocked me. Lingerie football. How had I never heard of this before? My appalled expression matched my boyfriend’s appreciative one.

The game lasted less than an hour and my disbelief faded to despair by the end. Of course America would have a Lingerie Football League. Leave it to a money hungry man to devise a master plan and leave it to attractive women to buy right into it. It seems like these days, women can’t wait to exploit their good looks to get a leg up in the world. And what legs these ladies had! Not one girl looked overweight or over 25. Each was sexy and seductively dressed under kneepads, shoulder pads and a helmet. They played full contact, eagerly smearing one another. Each girl’s 1,450 square inches of exposed skin was subject to turf burn and bruises.

Tyler Eno, 19, turned his nose up at the thought of dating one of the football divas.

“Girls who hit other girls aren’t my type,” Eno said. Tyler, who studies sport management at Flagler, said it’s not only the rough girl on girl action that rubbed him the wrong way. “Lingerie football is a complete joke that essentially uses women and sells their sex appeal as opposed to selling an actual sport experience like other men’s or women’s sports,” he said.

Bradley Hernandez, another sport management major at Flagler, has a different opinion.

“It’s a great idea,” Hernandez said. “It brings together all the females that love football and gives them the chance to play. At the same time, it brings in a huge amount of male viewers.”

And Hernandez is right about the male viewers. As the camera panned over the stadium, row after row of middle-aged beefy brutes looked on admiringly. A handful of wannabe women were watching too but by their jealous expressions, they didn’t have what it takes to step foot on the field and they knew it.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love football,” said Chelsea Hubbell, 22, who studies communication at Flagler. “But I would never do something like that.”

Hubbell said not only was the league degrading, but it wasn’t an option for young people like herself who were about to pursue careers.

“If people Googled you, that’s all they would see,” Hubbell said.

So who are these women who are proud to flaunt themselves as sexual football figures? And why is it that women are so eager to use sexuality as their tool for success? I’m not going to argue that the league is degrading, we are way past that. If the team was fully clothed, would anyone watch it? Of course not. The key is sex. Men will obviously tune in to watch mostly naked women mash up against each other, but why are women so enthusiastic to offer it? Why do we continually get naked to get a response from people?

Every time we jump right in and reap the reward: dude drool. What part of that is respectable? If you ask me, women keep interpreting Women’s Rights as the right to be naked, and it keeps turning around and biting us in our (bare) ass.