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Thursday, August 25, 2005

Is Cheerleading Raunchy or Innocent: A National Debate

If you’ve seen half time at a pro-basketball or football game half clad cheerleaders have become a source of audience delectation. The girls are sexy and the movements often suggestive. This is the new America that shuns modesty.

Recently, a Democratic Texas legislator, Al Edwards, sponsored a bill dealing with cheerleaders at high school football games. Needless to say, these cheerleaders tend to emulate their grown-up counterparts.

Mr. Edwards said, “Girls can get out and do all of these sexual performances and we applaud them and that’s not right.” He goes on to argue that lascivious performances distract high school students and can result in “pregnancies, school drop-outs, the contraction of HIV, and herpes… cutting off their youthful life at an early age.” He adds: “Any adult that’s been involved with sex in their lives; they know it when they see it.”

Exposed midriffs and ever shorter skirts are de rigueur for cheerleaders, but, for many, this exposure is offensive. Of course not every Texas legislator shares Mr. Edwards’ views. In fact, some call his proposed legislation “stupid” or “ridiculous.”

It is interesting to examine the evolution of cheerleading. Originally cheerleading was a male dominated activity, a way for men to assist their comrades in athletic competition and a method for displaying leadership potential. During the Second World War, with so many men at war, women replaced males in what became a source of inspiration. For the first time cheerleading became a beauty-obsessed pastime.

By the 1970’s, led in large part by the success of the Dallas Cowboys, cheerleading became highly sexualized. What worked for the Cowboys became the standard for other professional teams. In less than a decade the fully clothed high school and college cheerleader looked and moved very much like her professional counterpart.

Is this a problem?

For these who remember a more innocent time when cheerleaders were covered down to their shins, contemporary standards are vulgar. That said, the vulgar has colonized every aspect of popular culture. Even cheerleading has gone from, “Go back, go back, go back into the woods, cause you haven’t got, you haven’t got, you haven’t got the goods” to “you’re dead, you’re dead, we’ll bop you on the head.”

Yes, this is all said in good humor, but the humor has an edge to it which has changed the nature of sportsmanship. Fans routinely shout obscenities at the opposition.

On the other side of the social ledger, it could be argued that the problem is in the eye of the beholder. Cheerleaders may emulate their elders, but that doesn’t necessarily suggest they are sexually charged.

The real issue is the spread of pornography into every cultural crevice from ads on buses, to television programming and popular music. It has become inescapable. What effect it is having may be difficult to determine, but I would submit, based on empirical evidence, it is having some effect.

Cheerleading may, in fact, be one manifestation of this trend and, in its way, among the more innocent manifestations. But the trend line is a matter of concern for any American who believes the levers of popular culture affect and enhance or undermine the nation’s character.

11 comments:

James F. Elliott said...

I think he means around the time 14 year old girls were bartered to neighbors for dowries.

James F. Elliott said...

You poor man. Take a load off, read a copy of Dissent or something.

Hunter Baker said...

Why did the chicken cross the road?

According to Tlaloc, because he was trying to escape the ravages of Christianity in the west and thus was willing to risk his life in the traffic, which was also due to the ill effects of Christianity.

James F. Elliott said...

You think?

Hunter Baker said...

I'd say it's a divided heritage on the question of sex. When it comes to the Puritans, though, I'm pretty sure they were rocking out behind closed doors given their famously affectionate marriages and emphasis on the home.

We have some who have said sex should be rare and only done for procreation. We have others who think sex between married couples should be embraced to the full. I'm in the latter camp and think it represents the most healthy way for the act to occur.

Hunter Baker said...

I don't understand why it's repressed. The male-female sexual dyad in the bond of marriage is brilliant. It's fits perfectly for the female need for intimacy and reforms many of the negative male instincts. It also ensures that children will grow up with two guides, one from each sex to help them mature.

Now, that's my reason-based argument for exalting male-female committed marriage. If we get into theology, then obviously I've accepted the message of the Bible that it is the only acceptable setting for the sex act. It's not repressed. It's just what I believe. I don't get all itchy about people doing what they do. I just think they've made the wrong choice.

Kathy Hutchins said...

Well, according the comments on another thread, this is going to be culturocentric bigotry, but here goes anyway: I was raised in Indiana, and moved to Texas in 1980 to go to graduate school, I was 22 years old, and had never been out of the Midwest until then.

(1) Texas high school football culture is sick and deranged. It was 25 years ago and it just sounds like it's gotten worse. It was not unknown for parents to ask public schools to hold back their sons in junior high school so they'd be bigger when they were trying out for varsity football later on. The public hysteria over "No Pass, No Play" went on for years.

(2) Texas middle class culture is vapid and shallow and vulgar. Anyone who's seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- Mrs. Beauregard? Remember her? There are fifty million women just like her in Collin County alone. Or it seemed like it, anyway.

(3) Combine the two, throw in some MTV to fire up the kids' imaginations, and sluttish cheerleaders just rise up out of the black Texas dirt like maggots out of meat. Someone asked where the parents were when their little darlings were getting kitted out like Las Vegas whores. They were standing behind their little darlings waving their Discover cards, probably.

S. T. Karnick said...

Kathy, some sport or other is that way pretty much everywhere in the USA. I know of a couple who has held their son back in school for two full years in hope that he will grow tall enough to succeed at hockey. (No such luck, so far.) In football and basketball programs where I have coached and my kids have played, numerous kids are much older than the age their grade would suggest (usually because of bad grades and not because their parents deliberately held them back, although the latter is by no means uncommon), and they have a significant advantage in athleticism over their non-flunked counterparts.

As to the cheerleaders, it is a rather sad situation. Starting in kindergarten, they are put into what looks suspiciously like training to become concubines for the athletes in their high school years. To paraphrase Louis XVI in Mel Brooks's The History of the World, Part 1,, it's good to be the quarterback.

Kathy Hutchins said...

I think I must be the most fortunate mother in the world. I have two daughters, now aged 17 and almost 11, and neither one has ever shown the slightest inclination to go out in public in a sports bra and a pair of hot pants and wiggle her butt at 3000 strangers. Rather the opposite. They've both belonged to a fencing club for years, and I spend two nights a week ferrying them hither so they can whack (mostly) boys with swords. A couple of days ago, the younger one thrashed the crap out of a fellow who outsized her by at least eight inches and fifty pounds, with a rapier in one hand and a dagger in the other.

James F. Elliott said...

Dude. Don't eff with Kathy's kids.

Jay D. Homnick said...

This is not a subject that I want to be lengthy about, since a lot of people close to me were once cheerleaders.

Let me just say this: a) I think it's absurd for the legal system to be used to regulate cheerleading. b) I think cheerleading is a pretty pathetic part of our culture. It promotes a very shabby role for women, sending entirely the wrong message to both the teenage boys and the teenage girls.