Enough with the bikini sports leagues, okay?

The Lingerie Football League has had its share of high-profile troubles, including labor disputes involving entire teams, complaints about shoddy safety gear and contractually-obligated nudity and low attendance, which is why it surprised approximately no one when the league went on hiatus. Clearly that has not been enough to deter some people from thinking that the world is clamoring to watch scantily-clad women play sports, which is why we are now faced with the prospect of yet another bikini sports league: the Bikini Basketball League.

A call went out on Twitter yesterday in search of women who a) look good in a bikini, b) can play basketball and c) don’t mind combining the two for the visual pleasure of gross dudes to try out for six teams around the United States, including – perhaps not surprisingly – one in Orlando.

I don’t think I have to tell you that I consider a “Bikini Basketball League” to be a terrible idea, nor do I really want to explain why.  What I do want to talk about is one of the defenses I’ve seen of the proposed league, which I find rather disingenuous and completely out of step with reality, specifically that there exists some kind of demand for bikini sports leagues.

Allow me to be clear about this: there is no demand for bikini sports leagues.  None at all. Someone somewhere makes this argument every time news of a bikini sports league surfaces in the media, and it’s bullshit.

I know that the founders behind the Lingerie Football League love to go on and on about how they are the most successful women’s sports league in the United States – which, if this were true, would be a sad commentary on the state of gender relations in this country – but if the demand were so massive, then why would the league go on hiatus for an entire year?  I know, it’s ostensibly to promote the sport abroad, but let’s be realistic – if women tackling each other in their bra and panties were half the draw the LFL says it is, wouldn’t they be taking advantage of that instead of bringing their momentum to a screeching halt so they could play some exhibition games in Mexico and Australia?

And the Bikini Hockey League?  They’ve managed to put together a whole two teams.  Good luck mounting an entire league with two teams, you guys.  Maybe in another decade you’ll have enough teams to have an actual tournament!

There seems to be this belief that putting out “a call for tryouts” somehow equals evidence of “demand.”  It’s evidence of something, all right – evidence that there are some really unimaginative people out there.  The world is full of people who are constantly trying to work some angle or hustle some get-rich-quick-scheme, and the way those people operate is they see someone else’s idea and then they try to come up with some new spin to cash in on what they perceive as being a sure thing.

The promoter behind the Bikini Hockey League took it a step further and combined his half-assed idea with the modern equivalent of the traveling sideshow by promoting a reality TV show in concert with the league.  As I said before, if there is one thing this world needs more than another bikini sports league, it’s another shabbily-produced reality TV show.

So what we have here are some dudes who bought the LFL’s hype and thought, “Hot chicks?  Bikinis?  Sports?  CAN’T LOSE, BRO.” Then media outlets jump on it because, hey, controversy!  Page views!  Facebook comments! And then before you know it, it feels like we are living in the fever dream of a 13-year-old boy whose testicles have just descended.

If half the guys who take to their keyboards to defend their right to see nearly-naked women play football (including all of the assholes who keep clogging up my queue with comments I will never approve in a billion years) had actually bothered to buy a ticket to go see an LFL game, the league would not have gone on hiatus.   But they aren’t, because I guess it’s much more fun to talk about your right to objectify women than it is to actually objectify them? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that most of these guys are not actually going to the sports leagues they so ardently defend.

And why would they?  They can fap to unlimited free porn on the internet and they have strip clubs, which, as Jenna Marbles says, are the perfect places to go if you want to sexually objectify women while they do athletic things.

So all you boring bros who are out there trying to scam a quick buck, on behalf of the rest of us, I’m asking you to please stop trying to make bikini sports leagues happen.  They are not going to happen.