Just. Stop. It.

One popular trend that has been annoying the hell out of me for quite some time is the resurgence of roller derby. I find its very existence to be an incredible joke, and I recoil every time I see a poster advertising a bunch of scantily-clad butch girls on wheels.

My knee-jerk reaction to this pseudo sport comes from the idea that it is somehow an empowering feminist movement. The women involved in roller derby have convinced themselves that this is some sort of grrrl power statement, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

I mean, a bunch of girls dress up in fishnets and catholic school girl skirts, skate around in circles, and try to bash the hell out of one another while a bunch of dudes swill cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and whoop from the sidelines.

Most roller derby "fans" are middle-aged boys who come for the promise of watching girls rough up one another. The sex-and-violence combo is just a new twist on the pop culture bitch fight.

Columnist Mike Seate of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review agrees. After writing a critical roller derby article, he was inundated by hate mail. He "just didn't get it" he was told--didn't see the power and promise of all this female empowerment zipping around the oval. But that wasn't the problem at all....he got it. He got it all too well:

"When I took in a modern roller derby bout in California a while back, the audience was mostly male and smiled at all the exposed female flesh. It brought to mind a visit to Daytona Beach where an entertainment promoter insisted I write a detailed, sympathetic feature on something called "Foxxy Boxxing." This, along with "Nude Cole-Slaw Wrasslin'" contests had made the promoter a very wealthy man. These "sports," if you will, also made many of the guys in Daytona very happy."

Seate's assessment of roller derby falls nicely into line with the origins of the so-called sport. The first derby was organized in 1935 by a sports promoter named Leo A. Seltzer. His intent was actually kind of cool--to skate 57,000 laps, equaling the distance across the United States. Ergo, the term "derby."

These early efforts were co-ed, with teams composed of one man and one woman. Two years later, a journalist by the name of Damon Runyon commented that roller derby's highlights were the collisions. So the game was changed to single-sex, with men and women alternating time on the rink. Rather than working in tandem, the skaters' roles shifted to offensive and defensive.

The "evolution" of roller derby continued into the seventies, where that generation took their cues from professional wrestling. This is where the goofy names and blustering talk originated, and the time frame that is being regenerated today.

During this period, roller derby was televised. It was further popularized by the film "Kansas City Bomber," starring the sexpot Raquel Welch.

While roller derby participants attempt to meld the kitsch of pro wrestling and the sex kitten appeal of Welch, in reality they tend to fall into two categories: the butch girls who enjoy a good contact sport, and the attention-whore girls who like the little costumes and the tattooed boys on the sidelines.

In either case, most of these chicks aren't people that I would necessarily want to see "scantily-clad." Let's face it: roller derby attracts some big girls.

Suffice to say that the titillating aspect of roller derby is lost on me. The girls who come to it from the side of "I want to parade around in a short skirt and have guys look up my skirt when I fall" strike me as women who, if given the chance, would feel the need to validate themselves by swinging around a pole. Except that no one is willing to proffer their dollar bills for the g-string collection.


A friend told me that trying to write an article about why roller derby annoys me would be like authoring a piece akin to "man, I'm so sick of that Huey Lewis!" And in a way, he's right. So how did this resurgence come about?

Like everything else, I blame misplaced irony. Roller derby was, at best, a fringe sport even in its heyday. This lack of popularity makes it an ideal framework for the Fatty Page crowd, a reference to the overweight girls who mistakenly identify their own bodies to the curves of '50s fetish model Bettie Page.

But I also blame a bizarrely twisted take on feminism at the root of this resurgence. Roller derby girls classify their activities as risk-taking, challenging, and some sort of fuck-you to the 'establishment.' While they vehemently argue that there are no overt sex-as-a-weapon elements, every roller derby team makes mention of its extensive use of fishnets, knee-socks, hotpants and tiny tops. Oh, and beating the hell out of other girls.


To me, this is just juvenile pussy power..."Hey, I need attention. I'm going to direct your attention to my vagina and then be offended when you notice. That's mine. MINE. Now back to my vagina."

I mean, roller derby hasn't exactly been endorsed by Gloria Steinem and plastered to the cover of Ms. magazine.

I stumbled across a fellow blogger's take on roller derby, and found some indominable truths in her words. Words that the roller derby girls found and came back to mock her as a "frigid spinster." Go go girl power!

"The “sport” is only nominally about skating....it’s actually about...sex. That’s right, sex, only not real sex, such as the kind we could all be having if Hugh Hefner hadn’t ruined it for everybody, but phony sex as defined by the horndog ideology of the pornocracy. The roller derby is an example of...a non-penetrative, G-rated, but nevertheless two-dimensional, stereotypical, and bogus picture of female sexuality generated from an amorphous plasma of cultural misogyny. It’s kindergarten burlesque."

So if you want to skate around in a sexualized version of kids' clothing while grubby dudes howl, that is surely your prerogative. But don't try to tart it up and call it something that it's not. Because tits and ass and girl fights do not a movement make.