Rollergirls and the culture wars

The Guardian on the greatest sport ever invented:

And when it comes to the culture wars, the new Roller Derby is totally on the side of the good guys. While conservative bigots in America are frantically trying to get women off the soccer pitch and back into the cheerleading closet, the likes of Anne Phetamean, Donna Matrix and Helen Damnation are telling the bible bashers where to stuff their Victorian notions of femininity. Most of these women are involved in the punk scene, many are politically active, and some are academics and professionals. None are the simpering female eunuchs beloved of conservative ideology.

Roller Derby is part Madonna video, part punk-rock mosh-pit, part soft-core panto and entirely culturally transgressive. Joey Ramone would have loved it. Jerry Falwell would loathe it. George W Bush wouldn't understand it. If feminist punk icons Bikini Kill were a sport - they'd be the new, re-invented, all-girl Roller Derby. And Coldplay would be golf.

In short, the new Roller Derby is a cultural conservative's nightmare (and quite possibly his wet dream too, but let's not go there). So it is perhaps rather surprising that Roller Derby has flourished in America's God-fearing, dinosaur-disbelieving, feminist-hating, conservative heartland.

This has led to some fascinating cultural exchanges. In Texas, for instance, the rollergrrls have got right up the pert nostrils of the local sheetsniffing godbotherers.

"Why do you have to wear such sexy outfits?" whined one tissue-tearing mumbojumbilist. "Why can't you be a little bit more subtle? Why do you have to be sacrilegious? Don't you think you could increase the size of your audience if you weren't so controversial and so trashy?'"

Yeah, right - like anybody ever built a bigger audience in America by being less trashy.