Bikini Basketball League is an Insult to Title IX

In the same year that Title IX celebrates its 40th anniversary, the Bikini Basketball Association announced its launch. Following in the footsteps of the Lingerie Football League, the BBA will feature six teams of half naked competitive female athletes.

Title IX has been critical in providing numerous female athletes with the ability to play sports at their respective schools, but there’s a larger issue when it comes to women’s sports that needs to be addressed. Merely existing isn’t enough—we should expect more than the offensive and hyper sexualized norms that permeate sports culture.

My gripe isn’t with the women who opt into playing for the league, but with the larger systems and economic forces that circumscribe choices and channel female athletes into choosing to play ball in a bikini for pay. We live in a culture where sex sells, especially when it comes to women’s sports and the (frequently) male executives who oversee their marketing and branding.

In an August 2011 article for The Nation titled “Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports,” Mary Jo Kane writes, “Scholars have long argued that a major consequence of the media’s tendency to sexualize women’s athletic accomplishments is the reinforcement of their status as second-class citizens in one of the most powerful economic, social and political institutions on the planet.”

We can do better and expect more as sports fans, starting on college campuses.

We can start to eliminate this problem at the collegiate level by paying more attention to women’s college basketball. Sure, Geno Auriemma and the Uconn women have become household names, but they’re not the only women’s team who play college basketball worthy of our attention. Male athletes on campus don’t have to fight to be taken seriously, but they can play a positive role in encouraging fans to watch women’s college basketball instead of sexist spectacles like the BBA.

There should be great concern about what this Bikini Basketball Association says about us as individual fans and what it says about our society at large. It sends a message that we only take women’s sports seriously when players prance around nearly nude. Colleges and universities nationwide can become role models by speaking out against this standard and, in turn, encouraging a better environment for their own players.

Basketball season is around the corner. College teams are gearing up for exhibition and regular season games starting in November. Instead of perpetuating an ignorant cycle about sexuality and female athletes, challenge the status quo: refuse the expectations set by the BBA, pick a women’s college basketball team, and cheer them on this season.

Share and Enjoy

Answer Man: What happens to NFL fine money?

Q. The National Football League recently fined four coaches $130,000 for breaking rules. That’s a pretty big chunk of change, so I am wondering: What happens to the money from those fines and from similar levies upon players? — Alan, of O’Fallon

A. You’d think the NFL honchos might give it to the Lingerie Football League to improve its officiating in case the NFL zebras strike again.

But, seriously, it’s nice to know that the bad boys (and girls, I suppose) of sports are coughing up millions of dollars for good causes. In fact, some of it may eventually come back to help them down the road.

“Player fine money is used to support retired player programs as well as other charitable causes as agreed upon between the NFL and NFL Players Association,” David Krichavsky, the NFL’s director of community affairs, has told the Associated Press.

“Every letter notifying the player of a fine indicates where the fine money goes. I have gotten feedback from players who don’t like writing the check to the NFL, but they are pleased to know it does not go back into our coffers but to charitable organizations.”

Krichavsky says fines to coaches are treated the same way, and the payments come directly out of a player or coach’s salary. In recent years, the NFL has levied fines that total between $3 and $4 million a year. In all, the NFL gives roughly $200 million a year to charity.

The fines have gone to support such causes as the Brian Piccolo Cancer Fund (for the Chicago Bear player who died of embryonal cell carcinoma at age 26); the Vincent T. Lombardi Cancer Research Center; the ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) Neuromuscular Research Foundation and the NFLPA Player Assistance Trust.

But the money can be used for any pressing need. In January 2010, for example, the league gave $500,000 to the American Red Cross to help the hundreds of thousands left homeless by the earthquake in Haiti.

Some players do ask that their fine money go to a certain charity, and the NFL is solicited by various groups who suggest the money should go to them because of the nature of the infraction.

“Despite those requests, we stay universal in the way we disperse the fine money,” Krichavsky said. “We don’t cater to specific requests.”

Not surprisingly, other professional sports leagues handle their fines in much the same way.

Although they’re usually only a tiny fraction of what you see in the NFL, many fines in baseball go to a central fund shared by all teams, says MLB spokesman Rich Levin. In some special cases, the money may go to a charity of the player’s choice.

In the National Basketball Association, money is split between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association, with each choosing what charities will receive its share. It’s more straightforward in the National Hockey League, in which all fines go to the NHL Players’ Emergency Assistance Fund to help financially strapped former players.

Q. How did the word “fudge” ever come to mean evading an answer or not telling the whole truth? — P.B., of Belleville

A. When it comes to making up stories, people often think that nobody does it better than an old sailor.

Well, meet the granddaddy of them all: a Captain Fudge who sailed the seas in the late 1600s. No, I’m not putting you on this time. In 1791, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the noted British prime minister, reportedly cited a pamphlet from 1700 that described Fudge as someone “who always brought home his owners a good cargo of lies.” He was so good at spinning yarns that his nickname was “Lying Fudge,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

In any event, his name apparently reinforced an earlier usage of the word from the early 1600s meaning “to put together clumsily or dishonestly.” That, in turn, may have grown out of the word “fadge,” meaning “to make suit, fit” or the French “fuche” and German “futsch” as an exclamation of contempt.

Today’s trivia

What oil company opened the first branded service station? When? Where?

Answer to Sunday’s trivia: James Dean missed the fights of his life when he crashed his Porsche Spyder into Donald Turnupseed’s Ford Custom on Sept. 30, 1955. After his work on “Giant,” the young acting phenom was slated to play Rocky Graziano, a troubled soul who found his way through boxing, in the 1956 movie “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Instead, Dean died in the wreck and the Graziano role launched the career of Paul Newman. More trivia: Dean earned the first-ever posthumous Oscar nomination for “East of Eden” and earned a still-unmatched second nod for “Giant.” Turnupseed died of cancer in 1995.

Send your questions to Roger Schlueter, Belleville News-Democrat, 120 S. Illinois St., P.O. Box 427, Belleville, IL 62222-0427 or rschlueter@bnd.com

Share and Enjoy