Missive the Eighteenth
Rising from Obscurity through Extreme Measures.
DATELINE: Saturday, September 16, 2000, at 0300 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
The Olympics opened in Sydney tonight. I taped the ceremony to watch later, commercial free, on Cricket Song's color television. In the meantime, I thought I'd pass along an Olympics sidebar or two you might not hear or read about in the mainstream media.
Australia held a television viewer's contest in 1995 to select a new name for its women's national soccer team, the Socceroos. Viewers chose the nickname Matildas in homage to the nation's favourite song, "Waltzing Matilda."
Despite the romantic connection to fable and folklore, the Matildas didn't catch fire with Aussie sports fans. The team didn't win much, attendance at their matches was dismal, and the male-dominated sports media either ignored or insulted them.
To put right their status, the Matildas did what any self-respecting group of bold, innovative women athletes would do: sell naked pictures of themselves.
Actually, 12 of the female football all-stars, frustrated by their unwelcome anonymity and angry at sportswriters for dissing them as second-rate jockettes and locker-room butches, charted a radical makeover to their personal and collective images.
All the Way to Nipples and Pubic Hair.
After listening to a sales pitch from a wealthy male publisher in Sydney
about the public relations advantages of posing nude for a "sports calendar," the dirty dozen
met a few times under the informal leadership of Alison Forman, a world-wise,
30-year-old Aussie soccer pro from the Denmark leagues, decided to buy into the publisher's pitch, and went all the way.
I do mean all the way: full frontal nudity, nipples and pubic hair, and provocative, mock-dramatic poses in black-and-white studio formality amid smoke, mist, and nylon nets. Take a peek for yourself: CLICK HERE to visit a site sponsored by WorldFootball.com.au . You certainly won't see any soccer balls.
Amy, Allison, Sharon, Kim, Tracie, Sunni, Alicia, Katrina, Sarah, Traci, Cheryl, and Bridgette set the calendar-buying public on fire. Their Year 2000 date book, The Matildas: The New Fashion in Football, was released on the last day of Spring, 1999. Response was sensational. An initial press run of 15,000 sold out within a few weeks. Resellers began to line-up for rights to the second edition.
"We've obviously hit a nerve, and we're as surprised as anyone," Warren Fisher, chief executive of the Australian Women's Soccer Association, said the day after the calendar's release. "We did this to raise the profile of our sport and our team, so we can show people how good these girls really are."
Australia wasn't very much scandalized by it all. Bare-breasted female beachcombers and sunbathers are standard fare down under. Aussies are a pleasure seeking, secular people, physical to the extreme and not yet engaged in pitched social warfare over gender issues. The 12 Matildas' muscular nakedness was depicted tastefully enough to satisfy all but the most ardent of the self-righteous. These were free women, young and athletic and beautiful of body in most surprising ways. Why worry?
The Americans Could Not Have Done It.
"The Americans told us they could never have done such a thing because their culture would never have allowed it,"
Mrs. Forman, the ring-leader and calendar girl for the month of April,
said in an interview published this week on a Sydney website.
"The Norwegian women's team actually produced a calendar some years ago,
but no one bought it because nudity there has no novelty value at all.
In Australia wee were somewhere in the middle."
Radical acts sometimes can exact a radical price on the radicals. The 12 Matildas were public women, playing well publicized games in an atmosphere of great expectation from a sporting folk preparing to host the grandest games on the planet. The Matildas suddenly had everyone's full attention. What would they do with it?
At first they won matches! They defeated China. Some of the 12 even autographed their nude photos on calendars presented by fans. For a while the Matildas joined the elite Top Eight in international team rankings.
At the 1999 World Cup, however, they failed so miserably that the head coach was fired. Cute headlines punning the nude photos began to appear over stories about the team.
Then, in January, star player Traci Bartlett, the nude Miss November, not only quit the Matildas, but abandoned soccer altogether. She quit to make a statement of solidarity with her true love, the nude Miss March, Kim Revell, whose football skills weren't strong enough to secure a place on the team that was shaping up for the Olympics.
The new head coach demoted the team captain, a non-calendar girl, and promoted Ms. Forman in her place. In August the team drew fire for agreeing in masse to add the dietary supplement creatine to their training table.
No TV when the Host Team Loses at Canberra.
The Matildas did gain a berth in the final eight of the Olympics games, but not on their football prowess.
Having fallen from the elite, they accepted the automatic bid tendered to the host nation.
In Canberra on Wednesday, the Matildas lost their first Olympics match, 3-nil to Norway. (Some events got underway before the opening ceremony.) The match wasn't even broadcast on national television. "Five years ago it would have been beyond our wildest dreams to be the first Australian team competing at the Games," soccer federation boss Mr. Fisher said. "Now all I can see in the TV schedule is Wheel of Fortune."
To date about 50,000 Matildas calendars have been sold, generating gross revenues of well over a million dollars. Another press run is planned. Retail web outlets in USA are taking backorders. The 12 footballers? Amy, Allison, Sharon, Kim, Tracie, Sunni, Alicia, Katrina, Sarah, Traci, Cheryl, and Bridgette earned less than $4,000 each for showing tits and ass to a sporting public.
In late August another sex-tinged Olympics issue arose to capture the public eye of Australia -- and this one was scandalous. An exclusive story in the Sydney Morning Herald, revealing that about 40 of the city's "most glamorous" drag queens had been selected to ride on a float in the closing ceremonies, raised not only a few eyebrows, but a fury of condemnation from prominent clerics.
Men Dressing as Women Is 'Not Nice.'
The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney complained that "Christians can be restricted from even wearing a T-shirt
with a gospel theme on Olympics sites, while something that represents a standard of confused sexuality
can get such prominent exhibition." Islamic leader Ali Roude of New South Wales told reporters
that men dressing as women was "not nice," that the float would send the wrong message to the world.
Olympics officials countered that the float was merely one of several in a segment of the ceremony designed to celebrate famous Australian movies. Standing beside Babe, Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee in this pantheon of "internationally known cutting edge movies," the Olympics Minister said, is the 1994 classic, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, whose leading character is a famous Sydney drag diva played by Terence Stamp.
The drag queens, the minister said, would ride on the float clad in knock-offs of original Priscilla costumes. "Rumors are now roaring through the gay community about who is in, who is out, and who is creating whose outfit," Julia Baird wrote in the August 23 Herald exclusive. "Bitchy comments about who will have the most expensive costume and how some allegedly unreliable drag queens have missed out are also flying about."
On Sydney talk radio, another story reported, callers demanded a refund on their tickets to the closing ceremony. Perhaps they should have offered to trade for tickets to a Matildas game.
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