This football season has been creating excellent opportunities to examine the role of women in male locker rooms, but the way the NFL backpedaled from a series of teachable moments is both superficial and predictable.
The tough questions don’t make any money and sex sells — regardless of the transactional cost on our society.
The main thrust of a global business is penetrating new markets, and nobody thrusts and penetrates like the NFL.
By the way, have you seen the new line of women’s team gear Touch by Alyssa Milano exclusively sold on nfl.com?
I’m personally holding off my purchase until it makes a Cleveland Browns thong in my size.
The first time the NFL stepped into a steaming pile of controversy involving the representation of women in sports and society, a Hispanic woman named Ines Sainz was treated like a sex object by a number of New York Jets players.
Ines Sainz is paid to do one thing, and that one thing is wearing really tight pants on camera. Her job is to be a sex object.
While not quite wearing the full-fledged whore uniform, Sainz was dressed provocatively enough to unwittingly become the most famous butter face in the fight for sexual equality since Susan B. Anthony.
The NFL, though, stiff-armed any substantive discussion with a barrage of press conferences and apologies demonizing a bunch of guys who acted somewhat disrespectfully toward a pretty girl flaunting her body to get ahead in the world.
In other news involving the Jets’ sexual harassment, Brett Favre tried wooing professional fame whore Jenn Sterger with romantic text messages starring his 40-something old man pigskin while he was playing in New York.
Sterger, who rose to prominence by flashing her fake boobs at nationally televised Florida State University games in a historically inaccurate and racially insensitive “slutty Seminole maiden” costume, was working at the time for the Jets as an on-air personality based on her extensive journalism experience earned by posing in Playboy.
A federal court had to step in and allow female reporters access to American locker rooms in 1977, making the areas underneath the stadium some of the most sexually segregated parts of our society.
Whether or not women actually belong in a male locker room, and how far they have to unfortunately exploit themselves to get there, has been up for debate ever since then.
But this conversation is tough, and it involves far too much self-examination for a sport whose lifeblood is cheerleaders and beer commercials.
We were all too happy to let the NFL drop the ball on this hornet’s nest of an issue.
Instead of prying open our own deeply held delusions about outdated sexual roles and taking a closer look at exactly why pretty women have been attached to most sporting events, we left yet another battle to be fought by our modern-day gladiators.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears every Tuesday.
