You can pick up a lot of random information in popular genres, like detective fiction and police procedural television shows. Murder mysteries are typically set in some small special world, so that you can learn a lot about that world: English change-ringing, say, in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors. Similarly for episodes of cop shows (understood broadly). So yesterday I was treated to an hour’s drama on CSI: NY about the Lingerie Football League (as it was then), in season 6, episode 13 “Flag on the Play” (first broadcast on 1/20/10). Some LFL players in action, in real life:
An odd cross between sexualized display of the female body and athletic contest.
Highlights from the Wikipedia article:
The concept of the LFL originated from an alternative Super Bowl halftime television special called the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view event broadcast opposite the Super Bowl halftime show.
The league was founded in 2009 as the Lingerie Football League and was rebranded as the Legends Football League in 2013.
[The LFL] is a women’s 7-on-7 tackle American football league [played indoors], with games played in the spring and summer at NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS arenas and stadiums.
There are in fact, three leagues: in the US (with 6 teams), in Canada (with 4), and in Australia (with 5), plus teams in 4 other countries and 2 more in development.
When the name changed,
The league announced that the athletes would wear “performance apparel” instead of lingerie, but the uniforms look very much the same as before. In addition to the new uniforms, redesigned shoulder pads were introduced to provide more protection for players. Other league changes included eliminating images of sexy women from team logos and changing the league tagline from “True Fantasy Football” to “Women of the Gridiron”.
There’s an obvious conflict between the drive for sexiness and the need for protection; the league has received many complaints from players about safety. The players think of themselves as serious athletes and seem to put up with the costumes as the cost they have to pay to get into competition,
(Then there’s Australian rules football, primarily played by men but with a significant number of women participants, with no protective gear at all.)
