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Go Home Lingerie Football?

TIMOTHY NOAH MAY 21, 2012

Lingerie Football?

BY TIMOTHY NOAH

If you fret that most forms of female objectification provide insufficient opportunity for concussions, or if you simply feel that the bread-and-circuses decline of American civilization is proceeding too slowly, have I got a sport for you: women playing football in their underwear. The Lingerie Football League claims to be the fastest-growing sports league in the country, and I don’t doubt it. The dozen or so teams have soft-porn names like Las Vegas Sin, Orlando Fantasy, and Chicago Bliss, and players are warned in their contracts that wearing “any additional garments under wardrobe provided by Producer” without prior consent will be punishable with a $500 fine. The contract also contains a wardrobe malfunction clause, one that’s a bit different in spirit from prevailing policy at the Federal Communications Commission. (The games air on TV, but it’s cable.) Players are “advised that Player’s participation in the Event and the related practice sessions and Player’s services and performances hereunder may involve accidental nudity.” The league founder, a deeply tanned fellow called Mitch Mortaza, is a former contestant on the TV reality show Blind Date (“I’m not out there lookin’ for nuns”). His nickname is “Razor” and he has been arrested for drunk driving and public intoxication (though not recently).

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The op-ed industrial complex has been slow to discover lingerie football. More surprising still, a Google search for “lingerie football” and “Gloria Allred” failed to turn up any evidence that the celebrity feminist attorney is on the case. These troubling market failures will, I trust, soon be righted.

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15 comments

Tim...I think you've failed to see the next logical evolution or de-evolution (shout out to Mothersbaugh & Casale) of our social slide into primordial baseness. The Lingerie Football League will be partnering with the NFL's Fantasy Football League where post-pubescent man-children can live out their inner-desires whereby they get to coach their new fantasy lingerie football teams to victory. Where time-honored football phrases like 'stripping the ball' and 'run it up the middle' take on new meanings, and they can watch half-naked women play contact sports with lesbian-eroticism as their amply proportioned, well-oiled ladies in lace tackle one-another, wardrobe malfunctions are rampant and pile-ups at the line of scrimmage last several minutes as the referees watch in amusement before flagging the defense for a "groping the passer" penalty.

- singlspeed

May 21, 2012 at 11:29am

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It occurred to me that this is just another reality tv show. So I googled reality tv shows, and up pops wikipedia's "List of reality television programs." One has to see the list to appreciate the depth and scope of human debauchery and shame.

- rayward

May 21, 2012 at 12:44pm

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a while back on CSI NY they had a segment with the LFL, at the time I thought it was a pure invention of the writers and could not believe there could be anything so stupid as this. It is not prudery on my part, but this is just really stupid. I can not imagine paying a penny to watch it. Going to a beach in Thailand or Brazil, not that is worth the money.

- blackton

May 21, 2012 at 12:54pm

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SND. Nush?

- liberalref

May 21, 2012 at 1:19pm

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Fans of lingerie football, with its excitement over (gasp) accidental nudity: Guys, it's 2012. Have you really not found the porn yet?

- Tristan

May 21, 2012 at 1:44pm

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I am totally with you, Tris. Where are you, nush?

- liberalref

May 21, 2012 at 1:57pm

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Like hockey fans who love the fights or NASCAR fans secretly hoping for those 10-car pile ups, fans of the Lingerie Football League are tuning in for those moments of "accidential nudity."

- TedFrier

May 21, 2012 at 2:01pm

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What a bunch of smug liberals talking down on what promises to be the last outlet of titillation for those beleaguered, middle-aged overweight dads who no longer care or dare to catch fleeting glimpses of their rotund wife's rump in granny panties, house robe and curlers as she struggles to get the fifth load of towels and work clothes into the squeaking yaw of a machine she lovingly refers to as her clothes dryer. Samuel D. Pulchaski, of 5841 Chestnut Lane, in Waukesha, WI, is a hard working assembly-line man. The kind of non-practicing Catholic who still harbors the guilt-ridden lectures his mother gave him as a teenager when she discovered his clandestine treasure trove of Sears catalogs and the blasphemous but now collectible Marilyn Monroe Playboy issue. As a beloved father of 4 sons and 2 daughters, Sammy (to his co-workers), blushes at lewd jokes in the company of women but partakes in the ribald sex jokes he and boys tell to each other after the fifth pitcher of Miller Lite down at Fracaro's Lanes where they "bowl" on guys night out. Mostly Sammy doesn't understand some of the new lingo but he does enjoy watching the slimmer, middle-aged wives bend and bowl. Sammy takes to Lingerie Football like a duck takes to water. His eyes glaze over as he watches, neigh, obsesses over the scantily clad ladies running, sweating, tackling one another. He knows he'll never get close to something like that ever. He wallows in his own growing bulk of a body as he washes down the third chili cheese dog his wife makes for him on Game Day Sunday with his 4th Miller Lite, quickly changing channels between the Packers game and LFL game lest his wife spy him watching such drivel on the tube. He goes to bed every Sunday evening, satiated on nitrate injected hotdogs, beer, the joys of another Aaron Rogers-led win, and the night-time fantasies he will dream of coaching his "Lucky Lace Ladies" football team to a record winning season and the pep talks he'll give the girls in the locker room after the big win.

- singlspeed

May 21, 2012 at 2:34pm

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Nush may be hanging at NY Mag, where brilliant as he is, he has his hands full. Picture this site with another 2 or 3 dozen Mr Rationales and Seattles. As Sophia would say, Oy.

- Tristan

May 21, 2012 at 2:54pm

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This is so sexist! Once again women are expected to do things under conditions men never have to put up with. Play football without protective padding?!

- Claris

May 21, 2012 at 2:56pm

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Well, Ted, that's true. But I think hockey fans, among the three groups you listed, are explicit in acknowledging this. When I played, it was certainly in part for the fights. But this is the age of the internet. Why rely on *accidental* nudity? And if poses aren't your thing, and you like the female form in competitive action, google "nude catfight"

- miceelf

May 21, 2012 at 3:00pm

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rayward: "I googled reality tv shows, and up pops wikipedia's 'List of reality television programs.' One has to see the list to appreciate the depth and scope of human debauchery and shame." Several years ago, it was discovered that not only was the universe expanding, but contrary to existing theory and all intuition it was expanding at an increasing rate. My explanation was that our broadcasts of American Idol, The Bachelor, and Big Brother had finally reached alien civilizations and they were trying to get as far away from us as fast as possible.

- dsimon

May 21, 2012 at 3:16pm

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Mark Twain: Man is the only animal that blushes --- or needs to

- drofnats1

May 21, 2012 at 4:12pm

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I have long liked that old joke - I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.

- liberalref

May 21, 2012 at 5:38pm

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This is kind of old news. I think it was the 2003 Super Bowl where Dodge was buying advertising on the Lingerie Bowl that was scheduled to run at halftime of the Superbowl. This was one of their edgy, new media campaigns. They got their ass handed to them. Every woman for miles around promised to boycott Dodge if they participated. Dodge pulled out. And I think there is an attraction there. When's the last time your wife put on some thigh highs and wanted to play football? Oh, so the Avenger's is high art, and we're so pedestrian for watching chicks in High Heels try to run & tackle each other. Listen to the latest Rap Songs if you want to know what the youth of America is up to.

- CRS9TNR

May 21, 2012 at 6:08pm

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