I had the pleasure of going to the Cleveland Indians game on Friday night for the "Jim Thome-coming" celebration with my husband and some friends. I had a great time at the game, ate TOO many hot dogs (7.5 to be exact) and watched a 16 year-old girl enjoy her first ever major sporting event. Overall it was a wonderful evening that will give me more Indians Memories to add to my list. And then I started looking at Twitter and seeing tweets about the Cleveland Crush.
I'm quite addicted to Twitter. I love to send out random tweets during the day when I should be hard at work. I love tweeting during sporting events and chatting with other fans - whether we agree or not - about the Indians and Browns. I'm looking forward to hockey season this year because I've found some tweeps who like hockey as much as I do. Should be a fun season. But at the Indians game Friday, amongst all of the tweets about the Tribe game, I started seeing tweets about the Lingerie Football League and their game that night at the Q. Oy.
The Cleveland Crush is the Lingerie Football League team in Cleveland. Yes, you read that right. Ladies that play full contact football wearing uniform-like bras and panties. And that is my problem. There were tweets all night from the guys that were going to the game talking about how hot the girls were. I saw a few actually related to how they were playing but even after searching high and low through my time line the next morning, I never did see a final score or if the Crush won or lost. That tells me the people tweeting weren't there for a sporting event. They were there to check out the girls.
I'm all in favor of equal opportunities for women. I'm a big fan of Title 9 and making sure girls have access to sports and scholarships in high school and college. But when you take a sport and turn it into a spectator event, you cheapen the sport and the people playing. I've seen some stories on the ladies playing for the Crush and they are very talented. They work hard and are very good at the game of football. I could never take a hit like they do or catch a pass thrown hard right at me. But I wouldn't even try if I was required to do it in my underwear.
Women's rights have taken quite a few steps back in recent years. As a woman, I still think that a gentleman should open the door for me. That is just polite. That has nothing to do with equal rights. And I think that there is definitely a place for a woman's professional football league. I just truly believe that making the women wear skimpy outfits demeans all women and makes it harder for men to take us seriously in other areas beyond the arena.
Don't try to tell me that I'm overreacting. I asked six different women that I am friends with and that are big sports fans if they knew the name of the Cleveland Lingerie Football League Team and they didn't even know what I was talking about. I asked six men and they all knew, smiled and said they couldn't wait to watch it on TV. To call this a sport, when it is only marketed to horny guys and is shown on MTV2 is a joke, and it saddens me that any women at all were willing to participate.
Now, you can call me jealous or say that if I was a "hot young thing" I'd have a different opinion, but I will tell you that you are very, very wrong. I am a fan of both women AND the game of football. To cheapen either with this kind of "entertainment" is wrong. And sad - very, very sad. No, there aren't any pictures in this blog. If you want to see pictures of the ladies playing in their "uniforms" then you are exactly the audience the league is looking for and you should just go spend your time and money at Christie's or the Diamond Men's Club. At least those kinds of places are honest about what they are doing and don't try to pass themselves off as anything else.
Respectfully Submitted,
Kate
I went to that Crush game and I found it very entertaining. Sure, watching women run around in a bra and panties is fun, but for the most part I forgot about that, and actually got into the actual game. Like every other Cleveland team, they lost in heartbreaking fashion in the final two minutes.
ReplyDeleteAs for your comments about the uniforms and that being the wrong way to get people to watch their sport. Their uniforms are basically a bikini, its not actual lingerie, and the WNBA how wearing traditional uniforms are working out? No one watches that stuff.
And for the record, they had a "meet and greet" with the entire team after the game, and there were maybe two good looking girls, the rest were built to play football, and were a little too frightening for me.