Regina's lingerie football team will take part in a 12-week regular season starting near the end of August.
REGINA — Regina was awarded a Lingerie Football League Canada franchise on Wednesday.
While details, including the team name and schedule, are not confirmed, the Brandt Centre has been named the official home of the Regina franchise, which will take part in a 12-week regular season starting near the end of August.
It is the third Canadian franchise awarded by the LFL — joining the BC Angels and Toronto Triumph. The LFL is a seven-on-seven tackle women’s football league in the U.S. that featured 11 American teams in the 2011-12 season. Players wear shoulder pads, elbow pads, knee pads, garters, bras, panties, and ice hockey-style helmets with clear plastic visors instead of face masks.
“It’s something different; we’ve seen a lot of the video footage and some of the coverage from the league last year in the United States and thought it was something different — a little on the risque side — but why not give it a chance and see if the market will bear it?” said Neil Donnelly, Brandt Centre vice-president of events and entertainment.
"Minor league pro football is a weird universe filled with bounced checks, unpaid bills, empty promises, out-right lies, empty arenas, endless women, endless booze, occasionally drugs, endless trips on rented buses to towns on the outskirts of the Big Time and, for one night a week, a football game." -- Bill Shea
By Tina Beaudry-Mellor, The Leader-Post February 25, 2012
Everyone has heard by now that the Lingerie Football League has just extended its franchise into Regina. The indoor football league has women wearing lingerie like bikini tops, lace bottoms and garter belts, along with protective gear in order to play football.
As several men hoot and holler about how they can't wait to get tickets on numerous radio stations in Regina and as some women even suggest that we should all "relax" and let these women have fun, I am struck by how deeply normalized the sexual objectification of women is in our society. Some women don't see anything wrong with this and this is what I find most unsettling of all.
Presumably, fully clothed women playing football doesn't attract any fans. I get this argument. I mean, take a look at the attendance at U of R Cougar Women's basketball games, despite the fact the team has had a phenomenal undefeated season averaging 84 points per game and whose Michelle Clark has had a record 55 3-pointers this season.
It seems female athletes - with the notable exception of Hailey Wickenheiser or Catriona Le May Doan - face enormous pressure to present themselves as sexual objects in order to attract attention (and sponsors and media coverage) to their athletic talents. Take a look at Danica Patrick, Victoria Azarenka, Lindsey Vonn, Maria Sharpova, and the list goes on and on. The "hottest" female athletes are the ones we know well in part, because we see them often and usually half-naked regardless of their sport.
At a time when young women are flocking to universities to gain a post-secondary education so that they can secure financial independence and a career as adults, we continue - over and over again - to give them mixed messages. Yes, women comprise about 51 per cent of the population and we are becoming more educated and better represented in numerous fields from business to law to politics to the sciences to athletics. But we don't focus our attention on these women. Heck, we barely know them!
Instead, we as a society tend to focus our attention and our energies on women whose claim to fame is highly dependent on their looks or their self-objectification.
The fact that most young women know who Snooki, the Kardashians or Jenna Jameson are, as opposed to Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, Premier Alison Redford or GE Canada CEO & President Elyce Allan, one of the Top 100 most influential women in Canada, is a case in point.
So what are we telling women - especially young women and little girls - about what we value?
I find it ironic that the same women who constantly focus on other women's appearance and who tell others to relax over the lingerie football league are also the ones who found it outrageous that Abercrombie and Fitch was selling padded bikini tops for eight and nine year olds. Just where do you think they are getting the message from that this is OK? You don't have to be on Toddlers and Tiaras to be perpetuating this stuff. We do it day in and day out in much more mundane ways.
So while it is one thing for some men to focus on women's appearance as the barometer of their desirability, it is quite another when women do it to other women. And it is yet another when women do it to themselves. I suggest that the women who want to play football in their lingerie are participating in objectifying themselves and while some argue that this is "empowering", I cannot imagine anything less so.
Seriously, is this what we go to school for? What we fight for wage equity for? And struggle to get off the corporate sticky floor for?
Is this why women train so hard in the gym, on the track and on the football field, so that men (and other women) can be entertained commenting on how they look and not on how well they perform their sport?
Before you run out to buy your tickets, ask yourself if this is what you hope for your daughter's future. After all, it is someone's daughter you are watching.
And ladies, before you run to try out or to buy tickets, ask yourself if this is why you go to school, work hard and try to be taken seriously.
The Lingerie Football League is really offside.
Beaudry-Mellor is an instructor, Department of Political Science & Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Regina.
"Minor league pro football is a weird universe filled with bounced checks, unpaid bills, empty promises, out-right lies, empty arenas, endless women, endless booze, occasionally drugs, endless trips on rented buses to towns on the outskirts of the Big Time and, for one night a week, a football game." -- Bill Shea
By Les MacPherson, The StarPhoenix February 28, 2012
As someone with an appetite for the bizarre, I can only welcome the Lingerie Football League to Saskatchewan.
Regina reportedly is getting a team for the fall season while a Saskatoon franchise is under consideration. Here are the ingredients for a great rivalry between sister cities for provincial bizarreness supremacy.
Some are welcoming the league with open arms, others with pursed lips. The pursed lip crowd says lingerie football is demeaning to women. It sends the wrong message, they say. Maybe so, I say, but who wants to live in a world where only the correct messages are allowed? And who decides what is the correct message?
The Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority, that's who. Entertainment deemed by the authority to deliver the wrong message is traditionally denied a liquor licence. That's why we don't have strip joints in the province, or anything even close. The authority, then under the NDP, famously forbade even an aerobics demonstration at a Regina Buffalo Days beer garden because the fitness instructors worked out in form-fitting spandex.
A change in administration has not led to any relaxation of these lofty standards. The Saskatchewan Party government from all indications is just as prudish as the NDP government it replaced. Liquor sales still are forbidden where women perform in revealing costumes. Just last year, a lingerie burlesque - whatever that is - was shut down at a Regina watering hole. It seems that the New Saskatchewan we all have heard so much about still wears a flannel housecoat.
As with lingerie burlesque, lingerie football is unsustainable without beer in the equation. No one wants to watch without a beer when he can stay home and watch the same thing on YouTube, for free, and with a beer. This is why the league probably won't last in Saskatchewan. One or two games into the season, the host venues will get a registered letter from the liquor authority forbidding liquor sales at lingerie football games. And that will be the end of lingerie football in Saskatchewan. Oh, the league might try to comply by dressing players for games in this province in something more than lingerie, but then it really wouldn't be lingerie football any more, would it?
Maybe they could play burka football instead. Burka football almost certainly would get a pass from liquor authorities, from the pursed lip crowd and also from the Saudi religious police. I just hate to think that putting women in burkas is the correct message.
We can only hope the Saskatchewan Roughriders have a grandfather exemption. Those tight pants they wear are hardly less revealing than the bikini bottoms of the Lingerie Football League. Maybe the Riders will be made to play in burkas, too. It certainly would open up the hidden ball play.
More troubling than the arbitrary regulation of costumes worn by entertainers is the guise under which it is done. What we have here is the liquor and gaming authority, so-called, acting as a moral authority. If there was truth in labelling, it would be called the liquor and gaming and moral authority, but that would sound creepy and repressive. So if they can't even say it, maybe they shouldn't be doing it.
Even if it is not shut down by liquor inspectors acting as religious police, lingerie football is a gimmick and unlikely to endure. Football is entertaining enough without lingerie. The game doesn't need any help. A better idea would be to combine the wide appeal of lacy underthings with sports that could use some help.
Lingerie golf comes to mind. Or lingerie tennis. Or lingerie championship 10 pin bowling. Those would be three more reasons to visit Edmonton.
"Minor league pro football is a weird universe filled with bounced checks, unpaid bills, empty promises, out-right lies, empty arenas, endless women, endless booze, occasionally drugs, endless trips on rented buses to towns on the outskirts of the Big Time and, for one night a week, a football game." -- Bill Shea
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