Frills and spills of lingerie football tackle all women hard

‘Players must sign a contract that includes an ‘accidental nudity’ clause.’

Turning sport into a raunch spectacle is sexist and damaging.

A YEAR after the faltering arrival of the glitz-style girls’ beauty pageant in Australia, we are soon to endure an attempt to import another sexist American spectacle to our shores.

The Lingerie Football League is a women’s seven-a-side gridiron league that began in 2009 after the success of the ”Lingerie Bowl” pay-per-view event broadcast at half-time during the Super Bowl. The game is full-contact like the men’s game, but the uniform of bra, panties and garters bears little resemblance to the male uniform, with the exception of shoulder padding.

The LFL will hold exhibition matches in Brisbane and Sydney from next week to generate hype for an anticipated season launch in 2013.

Sport Minister Kate Lundy has called the LFL a ”cheap, degrading perv”, while young Australian women unafraid of having their backsides exposed to millions have indicated their interest in taking to the field.

The US and Canadian ”games” are largely orchestrated for cable television and the primary audience, according to LFL founder Mitch Mortaza, is young college men. The teams have names such as Los Angeles Temptation, Chicago Bliss and Orlando Fantasy, which are more sexually suggestive and less evocative of athletic prowess than the Broncos, Lions and Bombers.

The ”players” effectively take to the field in underwear. Tackles and manoeuvres inevitably reveal even more buttock and breast. No wonder players must sign a contract that includes an ”accidental nudity” clause.

• Scott Beveridge met some of the star players of the LFL when they visited Brisbane in May. Listen to their point of view here.

The Lingerie Football League is little more than jelly wrestling repackaged for a mass television audience. Private viewing of porn or a strip show is different to selling the objectification of women as an innocuous ”sporting” event. The LFL is damaging to all women in addition to making a mockery of women’s sport.

We need to consider the effect of the movement of raunch culture out of adult venues and into the mainstream. LFL is not restricted in the same way as an exotic dance or a men’s magazine, and so the upcoming Australian exhibition matches include ”family tickets” that offer discount admission for children aged between two and 12. Women tackling each other wearing lingerie is being marketed as a family night out.

In a recent interview with Melinda Tankard Reist about the LFL, Derryn Hinch asked: ”What about male divers, they wear very brief shorts … will you ban them?” Next time there is a male diving pay-per-view event, predominantly subscribed to by women, in which other men tread water poised to dislodge a competitor’s Speedos, perhaps we should consider it.

Other supporters propose that the LFL is a legitimate sporting event because many of the women who participate have played sports professionally. The truth is there are dedicated women footballers in the US in the Ladies Gridiron League but no one wants to promote or watch their games, in which players are clothed. The LFL selects women who look like centrefolds in their bra and panties, not muscular or stocky women who might be athletically most suited to football.

Female athletes are regularly undervalued for their sporting abilities, but rewarded for their appearance. This is why tennis player Anna Kournikova was often scheduled on centre court, while higher-ranked players without model looks were relegated to outer courts. It’s why the prettiest female swimmers such as Giaan Rooney continue to receive endorsements after retirement, while equal or greater athletes who are not as photogenic aren’t considered suitable for promoting products.

The mere fact that women choose to participate in the LFL because it is the only way they can be paid well to play football in front of a sizeable audience does not make it acceptable or a triumph in a society still striving for sexual equality.

There is nothing wrong with admiring athletic bodies, male or female, nor with adults choosing sexual entertainment, but marrying women’s sport with adult entertainment is undoubtedly sexist. That anyone who questions what the LFL means for how girls and women are perceived and how they see themselves is labelled a prude says much about the way sexism is more insidious than ever.

Dr Michelle Smith is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at Melbourne University.

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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The Romance of Garlic and Knives

“It’s what we call a extending menu, with no categorical course,” Ms. Caparulo, a prepare and longtime cooking teacher, said.

The dishes were so successful and so many fun that she and her husband, who was a food photographer and also a cooking instructor, began training couples’ classes during a Institute of Culinary Education in a Flatiron district.

“The classes were sole out from a beginning,” she said. “Cooking is something couples can do together — like biking or going to museums. we cruise food brings out cognisance in people.”

On a stormy open afternoon, she was training a four-hour recreational category for couples who wanted to prepare Italian or prepare improved or spend some time together or only stop annoying themselves by meaningful zero about cooking in a universe of 21st-century gourmets. Seven couples sat on stools, disposition over a block list to get to know one another. They were collected in an oversize kitchen during a hospital that looked out from a 14th building onto a mosaic of buildings that were confused in a mist.

Ms. Caparulo was friendly, yet sprightly and no-nonsense. She fast led her students by a 11 dishes they would be making, including shrimp scampi, bruschetta with roasted red peppers and Genoa salami rollatini. She divided a category into 3 teams obliged for designated dishes.

“You’re in this together,” she said. “Nobody cooking compartment we’re all finished.”

To a dual misfortune cooks in a category (O.K., it was a crony and me), this sounded a bit ominous. But we were there to learn, after all. Our group was reserved a boiled calamari with pointy marinara sauce, a shrimp and a bruschetta with mortadella mousse. (Mortadella, it turns out, is a pig sausage.)

Ms. Caparulo changed from list to table, charity instruction on tasks like how to prepare garlic (“Start with a garlic in cold oil, not hot. That way, we won’t bake it”) and how to reason a rupturing knife. (“It’s like retaining a tennis racket.”)

The room, creatively a bit cold, began to comfortable as burners and ovens were dismissed up. My crony Margo, who knew a tiny some-more about cooking than we did, suggested that we combine on a 4 pounds of calamari, a k a squid. We placed them on rupturing boards, rupturing them with knives that we hold like tennis rackets.

Around us, a 4 teammates butterflied shrimp, forged adult baguettes for bruschetta and puréed mortadella, Parmesan, ricotta and cream. Kristin Killian, a standout on a team, constructed a tasty pinkish stew of mortadella mousse while Margo and we struggled with a unconstrained supply of calamari.

Kristin’s husband, Ross, who had enrolled a dual of them in a category as a Christmas benefaction for his wife, helped us cloak a sliced calamari with flour and cornstarch. Then he and we boiled a calamari and emptied it on paper towels while Margo went to demeanour for an antacid.

At a finish of a evening, we collected again during a vast block list in a kitchen. Our plates were heaped with small, splendid portions of shrimp and calamari, bruschettas with white-bean purée and mortadella mousse, and cylinders of prosciutto wrapped around mozzarella balls. The sleet had ended, and we could see a gorgeous scenery of brightly aflame buildings by a windows as we ate and drank manly eyeglasses of sgroppino (limoncello, lemon sorbet, prosecco — tasty and dangerous).

Ms. Caparulo has seen couples accommodate in her classes, she pronounced later. She’s also seen group perplexing to greatfully their wives by training to cook. Women cruise it romantic, she said.

“Cooking brings out a misfortune in some couples and a best in others,” she said. “You’re wielding pointy objects and you’re around fire, and we can tell a lot about couples by a approach they prepare together.”

Once, she had to insist that a integrate prepare behind to back, so a mother wouldn’t try to control each pierce her father done in a kitchen. “It was kind of like together play for toddlers,” she said.

During a holidays, couples from out of city throng a couples classes during a institute, yet many students come from a New York area. In new years, Ms. Caparulo said, cooking and cooking instruction have turn some-more renouned with immature people perplexing to economize in a unsure economy.

She pronounced she couldn’t suppose not stability to learn her couples classes after her father of 32 years died dual years ago. “They’re too many fun,” she said, “and they’re good for me.”

Her 5 children — all good cooks, she pronounced — are grown. Her Friday family dinners are in a past. In annoy of a fires and pointy objects and opportunities for conflict, though, she still thinks cooking can make families closer.

Two weeks after a class, Kristin Killian pronounced she had some-more certainty in her father in a kitchen. “Ross is now some-more concerned in cooking,” she said. “And we know what? We’ve started cooking with a kids — we have dual boys and a lady — once a week during dinner.”

After a four-hour course, even a destroyed prepare has picked adult a few tricks. But — cooking can be fun? Cooking can be romantic? She’ll take that on faith and another potion of sgroppino.

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