Putting the layers on lingerie football

Australia has its first lingerie football star, Chloe Butler. For the former AIS runner it’s cause for celebration. She plays tackle football in front of stadiums full of fans – something which young girls in Townsville where she grew up could only dream of while watching Jonathan Thurston or Matt Bowen rip up the field for the Cowboys. And she gets more endorsements than she did playing for the ACT Brumbies during the Australian rugby season.

However, there is one catch. As the name of the league suggests, Butler is forced to play tackle gridiron in her underwear to be subjected to sexist leering no matter how hard she runs, catches or tackles her heart out for her team, the Los Angeles Temptation.

When the Lingerie Football League was established by Mitch Mortaza in 2009, it was not part of some patriarchal crusade to oppress women.

Here is Mortaza’s account of how he dreamed up the Lingerie Bowl and then the Lingerie League after watching an NFL match,
“Even though there were great musical performances at halftime, there seemed to be a mass exodus of people at halftime leaving their very expensive seats within the stadium…Obviously, those people were also leaving their TV sets. Now how can we capture this audience that is leaving their TV sets on television’s biggest viewing day? That is how the Lingerie Bowl was born. Because of the viewership and commercial success of the previous Lingerie Bowls, we thought we should consider launching more of a year-round model”.

Mortaza believed that there were opportunities to make money out of advertising if he could get more people to watch the half time entertainment at the Super Bowl and that was how lingerie sports came about.

When the world is organised in a way where money and profit matters most, it makes sense that a small few make money while larger sections of people in society end up being collateral. Like Jessica Hopkins, a Lingerie Football League player for Seattle who has publicly expressed her feelings about having to wear her underwear to play football, “It’s not fair but we all know sex sells, I'd much prefer to have my skin covered when playing tackle football on hard astro turf, but the lingerie/sexy aspect of our game is what gets people interested.”

Ok, but gets who interested in what? In a study at the University of Minnesota, researchers found that the core fan base of women’s sports – women and older men are offended by hypersexualised images of female athletes and although younger men in the study saw the images as “hot” their interest in women’s sport didn’t increase. The researchers argue that all that sex sells is sex, not women’s sport. Mary Jo Kane who was involved in the study argues that this “sex sells” approach, “reassures (especially male) fans, corporate sponsors and TV audiences that females can engage in highly competitive sports while retaining a nonthreatening femininity”.

Of course sexism is rife in sporting circles around the world, and lingerie football is just the latest in a long line of barriers women face in a quest to be recognized for their talents. In Australia just 4% of TV sport broadcasting is dedicated to women; the average income for a professional netballer is $5000 compared with $180 000 for AFL players and this is for two sports which both have roughly the same number of participants in Australia – around half a million.

The segregation of males and females in pretty much every sport highlights difference between the genders and helps shape gender stereotypes – that men are strong, violent and physically superior and should be appreciated for their skill level, whereas women are fragile and meek and consequently female athletes can only be appreciated for their sex appeal.

As children we learn that girls who play a variety of sports well are “tomboys” - that this is abnormal and instead, girls should aspire to be feminine and that means playing a girl’s sport like netball or Barbies or netball.

On the other hand, to be masculine is to be sporty and males who don’t conform to this stereotype, who are not good at sports are labelled as, you guessed it, girls.

Netball Australia’s recent media campaign released for the World Championships was called “Facets of a Gem” and featured pictures of the players glammed up and text which said, “Off the court, they're full-time students, professionals, entrepreneurs, daughters, friends, wives and girlfriends". Picture an ad for the AFL featuring Barry Hall in a tuxedo with the words, “off the field he’s a boyfriend, an uncle, a son, a friend and he loves gardening” and you see gender stereotypes being reinforced in Netball Australia’s campaign.

We’re bombarded with sexist messages like this from a very young age, leading us to believe that women’s inferiority is natural. Rarely do we hear about the evidence showing that in endurance sports, women can outperform men.

Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano have recently published a book titled "Playing with the Boys”. In it they argue that gender separation in sports will never provide equality for women. To bolster their argument they list countless examples of women competing with men and outperforming them. Annika Sorenstam competed in a PGA Tour event in 2003 and outperformed dozens of the male pro-golfers in the tournament. The authors of the book argue that women’s greater percentage of body fat can be an advantage in extreme temperatures. They also point to a 1996 study which showed that equally trained males and females performed identically over a 42 kilometre run but women outperformed men over 90 kilometres.

Generally scientists point to testosterone to explain the superiority of males’ physical performances, but some do admit that the largest influence on the differences between men’s and women’s sporting abilities are still societal. Studies show that girls are coached differently – corrected less and overlooked as children, not to mention the lower participation rates due to pressures on women to conform to the aforementioned stereotypes.

Between football cheerleaders, strippers at AFL club parties and the abnormally high numbers of sexual assault allegations against football players, you could safely claim that the sports domain is one of the most sexist sections of society today. It reflects the sexism in broader society on the one hand and on the other hand sport actually helps shape sexist ideas in society by giving justification for these inequalities.

Precisely because sport is such a charged and visible arena for sexism it can be an important platform to challenge these types of oppression.

In 1973 Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis battle of the sexes in front of a massive audience which was a symbolic victory for women in earning respect for not only women’s physical abilities but also against the commonly held idea at the time that women didn’t have the nerves to cope with high pressure situations like men did. In that same year Billie Jean King and the women’s players union she helped create threatened to strike during the US Open and subsequently won equal pay for women at the US Open. Today, tennis is one of the only sports in the world with equal pay for women at its major events the Australian, US and French Opens.

In the hope of expanding their ability to profit by objectifying women’s bodies, Mortaza’s company has recently established the Lingerie Basketball League which is taking off in leaps and bounds in the US. I shudder to think about how far the lingerie sports leagues can spread. At some point the players involved have to take a stand. Instead of obediently donning their pants and bras week after week, they can fight, just like Billie Jean King and others did in a way that changed women’s tennis forever. They can be part of making history - break down stereotypes and inspire other exploited sections of society to do the same.

In the mean time, the rest of us who aren’t built like avatars but who are exploited and oppressed, need to keep resisting so that when the time comes for athletes to take a stand, they are able to find support and ultimately win.