Look at that fucking alternative lifestyle haircut

Love is love is love is love is love.

So pretty much everyone who knows me knows that I am a total heartless traitor because I am a huge supporter of the US women's soccer team. But the beautiful thing about my love for that team is that it's a personal choice or preference, whatever you want to call it. I don't love them because I have to (that is to say, I don't actually get anything out of being a fan of theirs. If they win the gold medal in London this year, it won't benefit me in any way. Whereas if Canada won, I'd definitely benefit from seeing all the drunken versions of our national anthem being sung on the seabus from Waterfront to the North Shore. Seriously, you have not lived until you've experienced that. It is all kinds of incredible rolled into one sausage roll of awesome).

A typical BC Transit seabus. Yes, I know it looks like a VCR.

No, I love the US team simply because they play really well. It's actually kind of refreshing in a way, to root for a team based on something other than their nationality (the fact that they provide some serious arm and leg porn whenever I watch them adds to the love just a little bit too). Sure, I get sneers and gasps from my fellow Canadians as they squeal "But.....they're American!!!" As if being a Canadian who time and again likes Americans is the biggest fucking crime in the world. We as Canadians live in a northern society that worships Brad Pitt and abandoned Blackberrys for iPhones. So that holy all-Canadian pedestal you've put yourself on? It's not as holy and all-Canadian as you think it to be. 

Of course, when I say that I actually like the Canadian team as well, people tell me that it's impossible to like both teams. And that is my cue to laugh my ass off.

Cute team kicks ass.

Lastly, it's all women's soccer. I generally support all women's sports, no matter what country they're from. Women's team sports is such a rare thing that when it comes up, you snatch that chance to fangirl like crazy because you don't get that opportunity very often. There's no room to create rivalries within women's athletics - mostly because there isn't much to begin with in the first place. Many places and many sports don't even have their own professional women's leagues or if they do, have very few teams. Clearly Gary Bettman and Dan Borislow are not helping this matter.

The girls of MagicJack are totally judging Borislow and the league's annihilation of their team. As are we all.

Women are very limited when it comes to playing a sport professionally and being paid to be an athlete. There is not much out there. In the United States, if a woman wants to be paid to play football, the Lingerie Football League is about as high as you can go - a game based on SuperBowl halftime entertainment that caters to a straight male crowd, who probably wouldn't give two shits about women's sports if the women in them weren't half naked to begin with. Now, don't get me wrong, I like straight men just as much as the next person. However, some can be real morons with short-term attention spans who don't have the stamina to watch women play sports like men unless those women can be degraded and put back in their place as "object" while playing said sport. Sport is still considered a male activity centred around beer, therefore must cater to the male audience, no matter what the sex of the athlete in question may be.

Women's sports are threatening - why? Because it's seen as women trying to invade what is known to be a very male-dominated space. It's a territorial thing. Women's organized sports don't get the same treatment or the same funding or the same respect from the audience because it is still a very foreign concept. Something like the Lingerie Football League is the only way a female football player can get paid doing what she loves. Otherwise, women football players would have to pay for their own resources, their own equipment - in a world where Peyton Manning gets $23 million. 

It is unfortunate that in this day and age, in order to "advance" women's sports, we must reduce women in the process. In the end of it all, it's not about developing female athletes, it's about giving men something else to look at when they're watching ESPN. How are we supposed to create a space in which women can become better athletes, can get the funding they need, can get the chance to play the sport like their male counterparts do, if we don't respect what they do?

Not only is there a Lingerie Football League, but there is a Lingerie Basketball League too. Yes. And you thought movie sequels were bad. 

To make it worse, the LBL has taglines such as the ever so catchy and not to mention, witty: 

"America loves basketball. America loves women. And now, a  match made in hoops heaven."

The selling point:

"Are you ready for supreme athletes that are tough on their opponents but easy on the eyes?" 

The pun that is relevant yet dirty at the same time:

"Where beauty meets the hardwood."

And the summary for people too stupid to have understood the previous taglines:

"Basketball never looked so good."

The website for the Lingerie Basketball League features the MVP as well as the Hottie of the Year. It's also a league that you "audition" for, rather than "try out" for. In other words, athletic talent is not exactly the highest priority. However,  a headshot is required, as is a full body photo. Basketball skills are ranked from 1 to 5. 

Women play sports for themselves, not for men. And men REALLY need to get over that and stop producing these dumbass sports leagues.

(As a sidenote here, and I'm gonna tell you the honest to God truth. This is just my personal opinion so I hope nobody takes offense to this:

Yes, women are hot. Yes, men can be hot. No, I do not want to see men or women in their underwear while they play sports. Maybe it's just me, but all I can think of is how unsanitary that is. Like seriously, there is nothing sexy about playing any kind of contact sport while half naked. You're sweating all over each other and sharing each other's sweat and there's nothing to ABSORB that shit you know? That's what jerseys and equipment are for, for God's sake. Yes, they protect you, but they also soak up all that game play, if you get what I mean. Besides, I think jerseys look hot on people. So really, all this lingerie sports league stuff is totally unnecessary for me, because sports are sexy, period. It has nothing to do with how little an athlete is wearing. And if you can't view sports that way and need sexiness to be blatantly obvious to you in the form of lingerie, then that is just sad, I'm sorry).

I'm just saying. It would be nice if the future generation of girls understood their worth in what they can do, and not how they look. It would be cool if girls could be proud of who they are. If we could live in a world where femininity wasn't seen as a weakness, a curse, a limitation, a prison, then maybe we could finally stop trying to simplify it as everything that "masculinity" isn't. It would be pretty ideal if women athletes could be seen and treated and promoted as what they actually are - athletes.

Apparently as of now, that is still too much to ask for.

P.S.: The US women's soccer team won against New Zealand 2-1 on February 11th at the FC Dallas Stadium in Frisco, TX, thanks to 2 later goals by Alex Morgan. I am fucking HAPPY.