By: Simran Sarai, Sports Writer
Despite drawing in women from a variety of sports, the validity of the Lingerie Football League’s (LFL) conduct should be questioned. Prior to its 2009 launch in the US, lingerie football was something people could purchase to watch during the Super Bowl half-time show. As one of the sole professional sports leagues for women in Canada at the time, the league eventually expanded to include Canadian teams, like the BC Angles.
In its sole season in Canada, each team played two away games with travel costs covered by the league. But that’s as many benefits as players would get. While women athletes around the world were voicing their demands for equal pay — the LFL had women competing and performing for free. Players weren’t even allowed to compete without paying a registration fee.
Athletes competed with hardly any protective gear or clothing. They faced backlash from the communities they competed in, who voiced their displeasure that women were being asked to compete professionally in lingerie to pursue their athletic endeavours. Former Angels player Stevi Schnoor also wasn’t a fan of wearing the team’s “one size fits all” attire.
“How is this going to fit me and the girl I’m looking at next to me?”
Her teammate Kate Marshall explained how the lack of protective clothing encouraged models to try out for the team, rather than women who were looking for an athletic league of their own. “You literally had people like myself who had been in athletics for a while” and “models who just kind of thought it would be fun.”
Marshall compared the Angels tryout to a “Sports Illustrated photo shoot,” holding the league’s uniform responsible for undermining the level of competition.The uniforms often caused unwanted exposure, but they were prohibited from wearing anything underneath their uniforms to avoid capturing another company’s “brand apparel” on television. Coaches cited worries about the predatory nature of other coaching professionals who might see the LFL as an opportunity to harass the athletes.
Many athletes wore the uniform, as “uncomfortable” as it was, to be able to play professionally and in hope of future, paid opportunities.
There’s no question that the LFL was trying to “upsell” the sport to men with its team names. Before BC, the team name “Angels” was used in Major League Baseball by the Los Angeles Angels. Sounds kind of fitting considering that Los Angeles is the city of angels. So riddle me this: what’s the correlation between angels and BC? There’s a very different connotative meaning behind this use of the word — which alludes to the mysticism of women and their hypersexualization by men.
While the LFL was marketed as a progressive opportunity for women to develop their athletic skills, it failed to empower women. Instead, it contributed heavily to the very issues that women in sports had advocated against for decades. Rather than providing women with a genuine opportunity to showcase and improve their skills, the LFL ultimately served as a money-grab for those who wanted to take advantage of the male gaze, without even paying the women involved for it.
