Savvy Women

Those SWM readers who live in America know that it is football season. To know this, one would simply need to turn on the TV and do a little channel surfing at just about any time of the day or night on either Saturday or Sunday. Of course, I forgot ESPN’s Monday Night Football and the Thursday evening games. My point is this, football (to the chagrin of many a reader, I’m sure) is ubiquitous, in America, this time of year.

What you may not be aware of is that there’s a new league, something called the Lingerie Football League, or the LFL, for short.

As the official LFL website makes clear, this new league is composed solely of women players, with the rules being slightly different from the men’s game. The game is full contact, and many of the competitors, as official Lingerie Football League promotional materials make clear, have storied athletic backgrounds. There are currently ten professional LFL franchises that represent the following cities: Chicago (Bliss), New York (Majesty), Philadelphia (Passion), Tampa (Breeze), Miami (Caliente), Seattle (Mist), Dallas (Desire), Los Angeles (Temptation), San Diego (Seduction), and Denver (Dream).

To get a sense of what the game is like, there are several videos available on the league website. There’s also this one, shot by a fan, at one of the Bliss games.

After watching the video, it’s clear that the spectators are really into it, but that may not be surprising given the players’ uniforms (or lack thereof). All this raises an interesting question: Should this sport be taken seriously, or is it an example of sex-ploitation?

The LFL would certainly like to give the impression that the sport is for real, and the players themselves talk about how they don’t want to be thought of as “powder puffs,” but then again, LFL officials have used the term “lingerie” to describe this new league. That would be like changing the name of the NFL to the “Boxer Shorts Football League.”

I’d like to hear from my readers. What do you think about this new sport and the LFL?

This semester I’m teaching a first-year writing course at AUC and have chosen the topics of “pleasure” and “pain” to guide my reading and writing assignments.

In preparation for that class, I was sitting in one of my favorite cafes recently and reading the “Preface” of Motivation and Personality, a book by the great Abraham Maslow, the feel-good psychologist renowned for his discussions of the “self-actualizing” individual, the sort of person we should all strive to become.

Suddenly, while moving down the page, I came across the following passage:

“I think that great social and educational changes could occur almost immediately if, for instance, we could teach our young people to give up their unreal perfectionism, their demands for perfect human beings, a perfect society, perfect teachers, perfect parents, perfect politicians, perfect marriages, perfect friends, perfect organizations, etc., none of which exist and simply cannot exist…Such expectations we already know, even with our inadequate knowledge, are illusions and, therefore, must inevitably and inexorably breed disillusionment along with attendant disgust, rage, depression, and revenge.”

I would like to add that the perfect woman, mother, and/or wife doesn’t exist either, not in reality, though much of American popular culture would suggest otherwise, putting women under extreme pressure to achieve an ideal.

It is hard for me to speak about other cultures and societies, but in America we seem to have fallen in love with the idea that every woman can “have it all” (or be it all) if she tries hard enough. Not getting it all (or being it all) leads to feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy (to add to Maslow’s above list).

As I’m writing this, I’m wondering why we feel that “having it all,” that being “perfect,” is something attainable and thus worth striving far. Are Americans, by nature, given to flights of fancy, or have we been victimized by Madison Avenue and Hollywood?

A couple of paragraphs earlier, I said that popular culture was in large part responsible for inculcating this value of perfectionism in Americans. To prove my point, I’ve included a TV commercial from the past, one that I remember very well. As you watch it, ask yourself what message it holds for women.

I rest my case.

Just as a follow-up to last week’s Big Brother entry in which I briefly mentioned Deborah Tannen, linguist and author of numerous books on a variety of topics, including, most notably, the relationship between communication and psychology, I’ve decided to blog this twenty-nine minute interview between Tannen and a fawning Karen Allyn.

The video concludes with the two discussing Tannen’s next project (just released, under the title You Were Always Mom’s Favorite!)–a book about sisters–a relationship that Tannen describes as one that’s “extremely close, but it’s extremely competitive and hierarchical” just as is the relationship between mothers and daughters.