Cheerleaders (Really)

There was a piece in the New York Times this morning that filled in a little blank spot in my mind and helped me feel I had something to say, finally. It’s about cheerleaders. Cheerleaders generally, I guess, although the article was about NFL cheerleaders specifically. I put the article here.

I do want to say some things about cheerleaders, I guess, but I am sure I want to write about how we think about cheerleaders. My mind was getting itself ready to read this morning’s Times when, last night, I watched some of the movie, The Replacements.[1] Part of the story has to do with the team recruiting extremely erotic cheerleaders from a nearby sex club.

These cheerleaders do things on the sidelines that nearly anyone would agree ought not to be part of a public performance, but the key to the movie’s treatment of this performance is the presentation of the mother who is scandalized and who puts her hands over her little boy’s eyes so he can’t see. All the other shots of crowd reaction are positive. The question here is whether we should disapprove of the mother (prudish) or of the cheerleaders (scandalous).

There doesn’t seem to be any way to make both judgments. Either the behavior of the cheerleaders is appropriate, in which the mother can be made an object of ridicule, or the behavior of the mother is appropriate, in which case the behavior of the cheerleaders can be criticized. One can imagine a middle ground in which some cultural consensus could be postulated. Then the cheerleaders could be said to err on one side of this consensus and the mother on the other. If you have hopes for such a strategy, you have not been watching how cultural arguments are made.

I didn’t know until I read the piece by William Rhoden that some NFL teams have cheerleaders and others do not.

“Philosophically we have always had issues with sending scantily clad women out on the field to entertain our fans,” said John Mara, the Giants co-owner. It’s just not part of our philosophy.”

Frankly, it isn’t part of my philosophy either. I remember from my own high school days that the cheerleaders did what they could to focus the student body on the upcoming game. At the game, they tried to coordinate or amplify the cheering that would otherwise have been scattered. They led offensive cheers when we had the ball and defensive cheers when we were trying to stop the other team.

Twenty years or so later, I was a faculty member at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. Westminster had some really good football and basketball teams while I was there, but the “cheerleaders” didn’t really lead any cheers. They performed little routines on the sidelines. They “gave” cheers. We all listened. They we went back to the game. There was a real cheerleader at Westminster during the time I was there. Whoever did the cheer I am thinking of was called Tommy Titan. He was, ordinarily, more than half drunk. He mimicked the letters T, I, T (gimme another T) A, N, and S and asked us several times afterward what that spelled. The response he got was thunderous and we returned to the game with a somewhat elevated sense that it actually mattered. He wasn’t performing except in the sense that he was performing a function.

The NFL cheerleaders--take this Dallas Cowgirl, the class of NFL cheerleaders--have no function I have heard of that has to do with football. Ditto for the NBA cheerleaders. They are something that happens during TV timeouts and called timeouts. As I write that, it occurs to me that there might be more objection to TV timeouts if there were no cheerleaders. Maybe that’s what they are for.


It’s interesting from a policy standpoint because the performance is public. It is what it is and everyone who is there gets to/has to watch it. It isn’t like the mother in the movie can take her son to wholesome places and the guys who like it hotter can go to strip clubs. If it’s at the game, everybody gets it or nobody gets it. That brings us back to the “sex is good fun” position taken by the men in the stands and the “this is disgusting” position taken by the mother.

As a policy-oriented kind of guy, I would like to see a discussion of the question, “Does this kind of display lead us in a good direction?” Does it say about “women” what we want to say? Does the association of women and violence say what we want to say? Do the 4th of July parades come next, after the football and basketball games? Should the norms of sexual permissiveness be permitted to evolve as sexual practices evolve?

I think those are good questions. They will not be asked so long as anyone who wants to ask them becomes the new subject of the debate. The debate will be about “The New Prudery.” The people who hoped to have the debate will be the killjoys who object to other people having a little fun. I can tell you how a debate on prudery will turn out. Really, I can.


Finally, a personal note. Just an asterisk, really. So I’m watching football on TV and they cut to a shot of the cheerleaders. What do I do? I watch and I enjoy it. These are gorgeous women and I am a man who grew up liking to look at gorgeous women. I don’t think I should be asked to do anything else and I don’t want to do anything else. I’d really prefer that there weren’t cheerleaders at these games. If there are, I would prefer that they didn’t put the cameras on them. If they put the cameras on them, I wish what they do weren’t so blatantly erotic. I would vote for those things if there were any way to vote.

Now this double-mindedness of mine could be called some bad things. Hypocrisy is what it is most likely to be called. But really, I don’t think so. I know what I would prefer. I would prefer my sports without the cheerleaders. That’s policy. Or philosophy. Or something. Trying to look away when they show the cheerleaders is something else. It’s a level of vigilance to which I do not aspire, for one thing. And it’s not what I want to do at the moment either. My policy preference doesn’t spare me from what the cameras show. My instant attraction to beautiful women doesn’t spare me from my response to them.

I take the resulting awkwardness as the kind of dish my culture has served up. I think I’m dealing with it pretty well, given the alternatives. What I’d really like is better alternatives.

[1] I will add this to my list of favorite “not very good” movies. I own it because it features Pat Summerall and John Madden, playing themselves as the play by play and color commentary broadcasters. There’s a good bit of John Madden going “Boom!” and going wild on the telestrator. Summerall has been called “the voice of Sunday afternoon.”