Let’s get the obvious objections out of the way. Cheerleading involves the following egregiously offensive activities:
– Girls cheering for (mostly) boys
– Girls wearing short skirts that submit them to the male gaze
– Girls in said short skirts in front of large audiences
– Girls wearing outfits that are gender normative
I mean that’s really it, right? I realize those are big categories, encompassing all sorts of entrenched gender dynamics that, upon analysis, reveal a loads about what it means to be a teen in America over the last seventy-five years.
But like Twilight and other “bad objects,” I approach cheerleading as what academics call a “negotiated pleasure,” which basically just means taking the stuff that you like and not naturalizing it. Instead of saying “I like Twilight because I DO, get off me!” you take another fifteen minutes and realize “oh hey I like Twilight because it’s selling all these particular fantasies,” and “oh hey, maybe I like these fantasies because I’ve never known anything other than an existence under patriarchy,” etc. etc.
So I was a cheerleader for seven years. And I loved it. And I’m going to negotiate the shit out of why.
In my hometown in Northern Idaho, we had junior highs instead of middle schools.I can’t decide which structure is more terrifying: with Middle School, you get there and just feel like a small child; with Junior High; you get there and realize you’ve been playing at childhood for a year too long.
When I started 7th grade, I didn’t wholly realize that I should’ve mastered one of two sports before arriving: volleyball or basketball. I’m not (under) exaggerating: those were the only two sports available. And both of them terrified me, in part because, as the only left hander in the entire elementary school, I had endured six years of P.E. without a left-handed glove, which is another way of saying that I got hit in the face a lot.
I did piano lessons; I did Girl Scouts. My mom made me do soccer; I locked myself in the bathroom. I played (defense), my coach thought I had “a whole lotta potential,” I hated it. Like hung out in the backfield and concentrated on making people off-sides hated it. At the time, I hated physical activity — too embarrassing, I think — although I’ve very much gotten over that. I think what I really hated was all the eyes on me, expecting me to do right by my team.
The first week of junior high, I tried out for flag team (?) which just seemed super cool. I was super wrong. I also wasn’t selected, which, thank God, turned out well, as all of those newly selected ended up with meth convictions.
I tried to find my new place. I was on the Math Team, which was so egregiously uncool. I had to pose for a yearbook picture in my math-punning sweatshirt and hated myself. I couldn’t decide who to be friends with: my childhood friends, who still kinda dressed like children? Or these new kids from the Catholic school who were kinda bad and wore flannel? There is no inner turmoil the like the turmoil of seventh grader deciding who she’s going to target for friendship, and then the anguishing effort that follows. The phone conversations, the horrible, contentless phone conversations.
I was desperate to figure out who I was, and suddenly cheerleading tryouts were there to do just that. I had done (bad) jazz and tap dance for a billion years; in fact, the cheerleading coach had also been my 2nd grade dance teacher, back when we climbed the stairs to a super sketchy dance studio in the burnt out remnants of downtown, when we danced to “Hippy Hippy Shake” from the Cocktail soundtrack and dressed in costumes that were essentially replications, size 6x, of a prostitute’s Western burlesque. Black and white stripes with pink puffy sleeves and lots of fishnet attaching it all. That happened.
I had modest flexibility; I knew dance counting; I learned quickly. The tryout consisted of a group cheer and an individual cheer — the group cheer was straightforward (you just had to learn how to rotate your wrists so that the fist was never showing, creating a fluid line from shoulder to knuckle). But you had to make up your own cheer and that was mortifying. Other girls asked their moms for old words; my mom, a track star in high school with spikes signed by Jesse Owens, had nothing for me. Her friend did, but it was weird and very ‘70s and invoked “all you gals,” but it was all I had.
We also had to perform three jumps, which were demonstrated for us by the veteran girls. Left hurk, right hurk, front herk, tabletop, the all-important toe-touch: we were expected to learn, and perfect, them all. We had to do jumps, of course, because in cheerleading, you jumped when something good happened. A basket, a goal, a turnover. As I grew older, it was a way of funneling glee: tension, turnover, JUMP! Or maybe we had to do jumps because that was the way that the people in the audience could see our skirts go up and our new and perky breasts go up and down.
I never thought about that then — truly. Instead, I thought about how to make my touch toe better. Other girls were working on their lay-ups and spikes; I worked on rotating my hips. It wasn’t a competition, per se, but it was. Randi had the best touch-touches. Randi was the best.
‘70s cheer, bad jumps, and mild nepotism was enough for this coach to vote me, along with seven other hopefuls of various skill, almost entirely more superlative than mine, onto the squad. My mom tried her best to mask her dismay, and I don’t even think I saw it — she was mostly just glad that I was doing something, anything, athletic, after years of responding to her plea to “go do something outside” by taking my book and Reading. Outside. Forever.
So I was a cheerleader! In junior high, we’re all desperate to peg our identity to something, anything. I had hidden my love for Star Trek, for doing complex, gratifying math problems as fast I could. I had nothing I could make public, and then I had cheerleading.
I shouldn’t have been ashamed of those other aspects of my life. In another school, in another city, in another state with a different set of opportunities and rubrics of cool, I wouldn’t have been. Or I would’ve found other things — gardening, cooking, writing, maybe even running — that I could love without wearing skirts that showed off my thighs.
But if you’ve never lived in a small, rural town, I need to underline it for you and bold it and then make it italic: I had so few other options that made me feel like I belonged. If I would’ve been a cooler kid, if I would’ve had some magnificent and vibrant sense of self, if I could’ve given two fucks about what others thought about me, if I had had solid proof that no matter how few friends you have in 7th grade you can still grow up to be a person of worth, then maybe I would’ve said no to the weird quasi-sport that involves choreographed hand movements in non-breathable polyester outfits. But I didn’t, so I didn’t.
After you win the cheerleader contest, then you get to pick outfits. Your parents have to come to the meeting, and in 7th grade, I was so mortified of my mom that I had to give her very specific instructions. Keep in mind: at that point, my mom was about 35, had a tanned, sporty body, taught math at the college, and was generally vivacious and funny. But it meant nothing because MY MOM DIDN’T DO HER HAIR. She wore sports bras sometimes! Thus the very detailed letter:
Dear Mom,
Tomorrow we have a cheerleading meeting after school. Room 214 (Mrs. Dufour’s Room) It is to discuss and pick out cheerleading uniforms. Please look appropriate, wear a dress and do your hair, basically look like you just got off work. Leave here about 3:00 so you get there about 3:05 – 3:10. Don’t get there on time, that would not be good. Please don’t snort, make stupid jokes, or ask a lot questions. Could you please just do these things?
Love,
Anne Helen Petersen
YOU GUYS. The full AHP only came out then in times of dire, oh-my-god-my-mom-is-going to mortify-me ness. It also came out when I asked my Dad, in writing, to please stop picking me up in the 1972 Ford Ranchero (with the Eight Track) just because he wanted to embarrass me. Cheerleading uniforms were super serious business and I was going to let my mom do something like not wear mascara to pick them out.
I was worried about appearances, about manifestations of class, but I had no idea. We were upper middle class, but mom didn’t look like it — meaning she dressed like a grad student, meaning she didn’t spend an hour blow-drying her hair, meaning she was awesome — and when all your societal standards have been set by looking at moms who do look like that, it’s easy to mistake “class” for “time spent with Vidal Sassoon hairspray.”
My mom showed up exactly at the prescribed time. She didn’t snort. She agreed to fork over a hundred something dollars for a top emblazoned with “JJH.” She realized, somehow, that this was what I needed from her. She also saved that letter and has employed it strategically and hilariously in the years since because it, and I, was the fucking worst.
In junior high, cheerleading proved a strictly dilettante affair. We spent a lot of time just learning new cheers, coming up with dances (our best = a medley of 69Boyz’s “Tootsie Roll” and Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” I AM NOT KIDDING) and unironically wearing jackets with our mascot, the Jenifer Jack-Ass, on the back. We got in fights; we got better. We thought we were awesome and, most crucially, better than our arch rival, the squad from the Sacajawea Braves.
At the end of freshman year, we had to do all sorts of mortifying things — go with a boy to Freshman Dance, for one, and vote for “Freshman Superlatives,” which meant picking which friend won “Best Looking.” I won “Most Likely to Succeed,” which, you know, whatever — just another way of saying “Most Popular Nerd.”
But we also had tryouts for the high school cheerleading squad. The girls teaching us were old and hot and had great hair, like incredible ponytails, and had been culled from the best of the best of the junior highs. They were such a motley mix: tiny, tiny girls, Mormon girls with perfect perms, muscular girls who drove Geo Metros with tricked out stereo systems. They looked this way because some of them were flyers (meaning: they flew into the air) and some were bases (meaning: they threw those other girls into the air). But one thing was clear: these girls were IT. As soon as I saw them, teaching me the Fight Song, I knew I wanted to take their high school identity and make it my own.
But here’s the thing about high school cheerleading, at least in my hometown: you have to try out in front of the entire school. And then the entire school votes on you. From what I understand, this practice has been abolished, but at the time, half of your score was based on actual judges, and half was based on the student body, who got out of an entire period of class to come to the assembly on vote on our “cheerleading aptitude.”
Things that got you elected = ability to do a back handspring, older popular siblings, hotness visible from 500 feet.
Things that did not = reliability, not doing Meth, 4.0 GPA, somewhat mediocre toe-touches, wholly average looks, a father who had looked at the penises of half the student body during yearly physicals.
I made Junior Varsity, and that was enough. Let it also be said that I was so inside the Lewiston High School ideology that I never once thought this process absurd. It was just the way it was. When I teach ideology to my students, I teach the American Dream, I teach patriarchy. If I were to teach it to the kids I went to high school with, I would talk about how normalized it was that the entire school was let out of class to watch girls perform and then vote, unironically, on the ones they liked.
Yet it wasn’t a popularity contest, at least not strictly — everyone had friend groups, after all. The squad was a vivisection of the high school population, straight-edges and hicks, near-burn-outs and closet nerds like me.
High School cheerleading was next level shit. Our coach was a perfectly-coiffed middle aged lady with an awe-inspiring array of mascara colors. She was also the head secretary of the school, and she got things done. We had two-a-day practices for the month leading up to the school; we lifted, we ran, we were expected to learn the thirty dances and one hundred cheers within weeks. In junior high, cheerleading had been a mix of a social club and dance rehearsal; now, it was work. But still, I loved it, the way that I loved really hard math problem or trying to figure out whether Lieutenant Riker and Deanna Troi were really Imzadi. It was a challenge; I craved it.
And the uniforms! The Varsity had three different ones, all new and totally paid for by the school. Purples, Golds, and Whites, and you (meaning: the captains) got to decide which ones to wear depending on how hot you wanted to look (whites made you look wide). JV got the hand-me-downs — but not just the ones from the year before, but from the last twenty years. I had eleven cheerleading uniforms in my closet, including a one-piece that, after searching yearbooks in the library, I identified from 1985.
Does that sound gross to you? It was so not gross. Just because this super thick yellow polyester thing was over ten years old and had seen a million washing machines does not make it gross. The long row of perfectly matching uniforms was like a childhood dream come true. On game days, I had nothing to worry about. There was the uniform, but there was also the jacket (with my name embroidered), the socks (megaphones) the shoes (Kaepas) and the bloomers (always purple; gold bloomers showed your underwear).
Bloomers used to be a word to describe something much better and frillier than what we had for cheerleading. Now, they’re essentially colored polyester second underwear, a way for people to see your nether-regions with only half the titillation of seeing your nether-regions. It was naturalized — just another part of the costume you put on.
Cheerleading for JV was fine. I mean, the games were on Thursday, the crowds were relatively small, but once I graduated to Varsity, that’s when things got perfect. You showed up an hour early, met up with the band, and the police shut down the quarter mile stretch between the school and the field so you could parade your way over. Your ponytails were high and you had perfect little Bengal Tiger paws painted on your cheeks. Glitter was ubiquitous. And in that uniform, with its sleek lines and fitted flare to show off your high school thighs, you looked good.
In a town of a certain size and a certain distance from a real city, there’s so little to do that Friday night home games became a huge deal. Thousands of people, Friday Night Lights style, in various shades of body paint and drunkenness. Parents and friends and kids and everyone with their eyes on you, yet you were somehow totally unresponsible for the actual game. It was so gloriously liberating. The only thing I actually worried about = when our team was annihilating the other team, and we’d have to do the entire fight song — which included two two touches — ten times a game. Shit was exhausting.
I liked the dances we’d do to pep band renditions of the “Hey” Song, Louie Louie, Summertime Blues, and a billion other inoffensive old people standards. But I liked the cheers, with their straight, strong movements, most of all. The sheer symmetry of it all. Part of cheerleading is about providing entertainment when the ball isn’t in play, but a whole nother part — the part I really loved — was about strength. It was there when I caught girls who’d been thrown thirty feet in the air, and it was there in every high V I hit, the quaking of the muscles in my arm, the breathlessness as I hit jump after jump.
This wasn’t Bring It On. We didn’t have male cheerleaders — mostly, I’m sure, because they would be scared of the associations that would, at least at that time, accompany it. We also had legitimately good sports teams, which made the cheering seem weirdly more legitimate. It’s obviously great to cheer to for a winning team; it’s even more great to cheer for a massive crowd that is fiercely loyal and thus wholly willing to yell along with whatever inane cheer-poem you’ve devised.
Away games were a different sort of calculus. Every team was at least a two hour drive away, so we’d get out of school early (who needs 5th and 6th period, I mean honestly) and ride the surprisingly nice bus, pom poms and homework packed away in our matching purple and gold duffels. During basketball season, I’d sit and do homework through the sophomore and JV games — Henry James read so weirdly with the backdrop of constant buzzers — and we’d eye the rival cheerleaders, trying to gauge how hard we’d have to work to show them up on their own turf. It was never hard. We never actually talked with those girls, we just stared at them, our bizarro mirrored selves, a court’s length away.
I get that it wasn’t a game, and there were no winners. I get that part of what I really liked was wearing my uniform in public and the allowances it gave me (at least two speeding tickets, avoided). I get that my participation perpetuated a system through which girls watch while boys do.
But cheerleading tethered me to high school; it pulled me through. My brother never found that, and he graduated a year early just to get away from the suffocating alienation. There are things I regret about high school — not dating the guy who was clearly my match; actually (sorta) dating the guy who chewed tobacco. Being so moralistic, not eating avocados, not being nice to my mom. But cheerleading has never, and will never, be one of them.
Today, my mom tells me how hard she had to fight her natural feminist inclination to stop me from trying out, year after year. I hope if I ever have a daughter (and holy shit, what a weirdo she would be! Just wait ‘til she reads this!) I’ll have the same expansive willingness to allow her to make meaning and pleasure out of the options before her. Or, you know, be braver than I was, start a zine, be Tavi, abolish cheerleading elections entirely. With our own girls and with others, we can’t forget: there are so many ways to be awesome.
Tags: anne helen petersen, cheerleading, it is most definitely a sport, sports day
In marching band, my favorite cheer we did with the cheerleaders was when they’d shout at us, “Hey, band, how do you feel?” and the response was supposed to be, “We feel good! Oh, we feel so good, oh!” but instead we’d yell, “With our hands!”
Ah. Jokes. The good ol’ days.
Our marching band never did anything with the cheerleaders. I was in color guard, and during gameplay we always felt like lame alterna-cheerleaders. We stood in the stands with pom poms and occasionally yelled out a “hey” or “ungh” or whatever the appropriate exclamation was for the songs that had them. We had fun discussing the butts of the football team, though.
Ah, band jokes. 🙂
There was one male cheerleader at our school, and he would never participate in the “Shake Your Booty” dance. So we in the band would just yell at him, “Gaaaaaryyyyyy! GARRRRYYY! SHAKE YOUR BOOTY, GARY!”
There was one cheer ours did where they yelled, “Support your team! Stand up and scream!” And we were supposed to spell out P A C K E R S, Packers, oh yes!
Which usually the band would do the first time. And then the second time, we’d spell it backwards (S R E K C A P, srekcap, oh yep!) and the last time we would just scream.
I loved, LOVED marching band and I don’t think my high school clique is more valid than yours just because you wore skirts. I lived this description of living through a small town, and I hope your brother escaped.
AHP, if you’re around, I would be SO INTERESTED to hear about bodies and if you guys talked about them together. Sometimes sports help you transcend that stuff, and sometimes sports DO NOT, and I love how this is a little peek behind the curtain to where we imagined Perfect People might live and work and play. We talk so much about how dorky we were in high school and compete for who was the bigger dork or least popular, and what I love about this piece is that you were in that world but didn’t always feel of it.
Nicole I’m so around! We *never* talked about bodies, and we ate like crazy. Like just tons of snacks and then a full fast food dinner after every away game. And it actually wasn’t until *after* I was done with cheerleading that I developed my own disordered eating habits — when I had cheerleading, I had a regular source of exercise; when I was done, I had to figure out how to make my body stay the way I had grown to like it.
There was, however, always a bit of a shuffle with who was getting which skirt — they were passed down each year, and there were always a few slightly larger sizes.
As a fellow bookworm-turned-cheerleader (for a fundamentalist Baptist high school and college; oh the stories I could tell!), I totally agree on the eating thing. I never ate more than I did as a cheerleader, because I was so damn active. I never gave a thought to what I ate, it wasn’t really an issue for any of the girls on the squad that I remember. I mean, my favorite after game meal was a bacon double cheeseburger.
Great stuff, AHP! I also had a mother who was enthused (but confused) that I was trying out for cheering because my idea of physical activity before that was climbing the apple tree in our backyard and then sitting up there for hours on end reading.
DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER MEAL at McDonald’s, that was my post-game jam. And like an entire bag of Starburst Jellybeans on the busride home.
I was a cheerleader for seven years, beginning at the age of seven and ending when I was too anorexic to hold my flyer in the air anymore. The teams I was on during middle and high school spoke intimately about skin problems, dieting, shaving issues. Within the squad there was an unseen social hierarchy tied to who was part of which stunt group, who was placed at the front of the dance formations, and who was in the honors classes or on academic probation.
I don’t know whether this was because my high school is on the outermost ring of what is considered the suburbs of NYC or because I happen to be a millennial. I think it would have been interesting to consider the sense of physical empowerment cheerleading can provide, knowing that you can lift someone who weighs at least as much as you do, that you can do as many push ups as the football team, and that you can handle things like a kick in the temple without any protective gear.
There was some body talk – or some looking at one another and talking about thinness – in my endurance sport circle in high school. But it was swimming, and we were parading around without much of anything on. Also, this was Southern California, and culturally, there was a very pervasive, be thin, be blonde message.
College is where the pressure to be thin really started in my circle of athletic friends, and where disordered eating really became a thing. Some of that pressure came from one another, some from the men’s teams, some from the typical drive for perfection that goes with competing.
I just sat and thought about it for a little while, and I don’t remember the girls on my team ever talking about bodies, at least insofar as weight and bra size and stuff go. Every year we’d divide up the uniforms and some were bigger than others (by big I mean, like, maybe a couple size eights) and some girls would get those and some fit better in the smaller ones. It wasn’t a big deal as long as you could do the jumps and tumbling and stunts that you needed to do. We did talk about bodies in the sense that as we got into 11th and 12th grade there was some locker room sex talk, trading stories and advice, stuff like that. I didn’t participate much because I didn’t have anything to contribute – I was a pretty virginal teen – but the girls on my team who were sexually active were really supportive with each other about it.
I LOVE that you talk about the concept of negotiated pleasure in this piece. Such a helpful concept. Just sayin’. Lovely reflection piece.
of course they were imzadi how dare you doubt that
/not sports person
NOT EITHER which is why I compared my one athletic activity to…..Star Trek novels.
Wait, what’s the difference between junior high and middle school? I’ve always used the terms interchangeably.
I would like to know this too!
(we don’t even have them in Australia, it’s K-6 and 7-12 everywhere)
At least in the Northwest: junior high is either 7th-9th or 7th-8th; middle school is 6th-8th.
Mine was 7-8, and it was officially named a middle school, but we also called it junior high. I know they changed the grades a few times before I got there due to overcrowding in the district before they built a third elementary school. For a time it was 6-8, and it may even have been 5-8 at one point.
My (tiny) Northwest school called 6 – 8 junior high, but K – 8 were all in the same building, and 9 – 12 were in a building 50 feet away, and we basically had the same teachers/coaches 7 – 12, so it’s not like there was a huge shift.
Junior High is grades 7-9 and mddle school is grades 6-8. So if you went to Junior high, like myself, you didn’t start high school until 10th grade.
So if your high school is only three grades, what do you call them? Freshman, junior, senior? Sophomore, junior, senior?
Sophmore, Junior, Senior. We were never technically “freshmen” which was weird now that I think about it.
my town (in canada) had grades 7-9 junior high and 10-12 high school when i went, but canadians escape this by not using those terms – grade 10, etc. (also not used in university – 1st year, 2nd year, etc)
I went to a 7th-9th grade junior high, and the ninth graders were called freshman. The 7th and 8th graders didn’t have any class titles. Then in high school, sophomore, junior, and senior as usual. Basically we took the title depending on our grade, not our school.
Oh, wow. This is utterly fascinating to me. I grew up in a town where the most popular/winningest sports were… cross country and Ultimate, neither of which had cheering sections per se. We had, I think, maybe a handful of cheerleaders. There was a “dance team” that reportedly performed at games. We didn’t even have a marching band. So this is a window into an entirely foreign world, one I only know from movies.
OMG another lefty gym-hell sufferer! THE WORST.
…and now I will finish the piece, and I can’t wait, because I did danceline (Pom squad? Dance team? Terms vary from place to place, I guess) for a lot of years and we always worked REALLY HARD to distinguish ourselves from Ugh The Cheerleaders, but also had a lot of “It is TOO a sport!” solidarity.
This is really interesting – an atypical viewpoint of something so culturally ingrained. I like how you point out that culture of “it’s not questioned, it’s just how things are done” that is so perfectly high school.
Cheerleading isn’t even really a thing in Australia, I think there are some basketball or footy teams that have them but it’s certainly not a high school thing; it seems to me quintessentially American so it’s fascinating and foreign 🙂
Also I love Bring it On.
I’ve never heard the term “footy” in that context, but it made me laugh because when I was little I had trouble saying “Phillies,” so I called our local baseball team the “Footies.”
I would be interested to hear how you feel about All-Star cheer teams that do not cheer at games but are actually a sport in their own right? This aspect of the sport is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in Europe where we don’t have cheer leaders at sports events. It really is an alternative to gymnastics and dance, one that I found after I was too old for gym.
I also find it interesting that people think that cheer uniforms are for the sole purpose of looking good, rather than being suitable for the activity. What would you rather cheer leaders wear? Keeping in mind that they must be able to perform tumbling and stunt routines that require at least the splits. I find this especially interesting when very little is said about female track and running athletes who often wear considerably less than cheerleaders but aren’t considered over-sexualised. Yes, cheer leaders wear make-up and do their hair but is this any different from dancers or actors who wear a costume.
I agree, the skirts have to be short, otherwise they would interfere. And high school cheerleaders always wear modest sweaters.
Pro sports team cheerleaders are a different story.
Right? I played volleyball and from JV (10th grade) on, we wore “bunhuggers.” Essentially, cheerleader bloomers without the skirt. They definitely made me feel self-conscious, but it helped that 1) they weren’t really sexualized, as you pointed out, I think mostly because 2) NO ONE actually watched us play except our parents.
Not skirts? Not makeup? You can’t really argue that there’s any point to the makeup beyond looking pretty, which is not something that say, runners are required to do.
I used to be an all-star cheerleader and the makeup does in fact serve a purpose. Part of the competition criteria that a team is judged on is “spirit” (or similarly named since it varies from competition to competition), and a team’s facial expressions are a HUGE component of that score. If you don’t have makeup on then it becomes very hard for the judges to be able to distinguish your facial expressions. It’s the same reason that dancers wear heavy stage makeup, if they don’t their faces will be washed out and indistinguishable on stage. The copious amounts of glitter is probably overkill I’ll admit, but it did make sure that you were visible from very far away. I mean I dislocated my knee in the middle of our routine in competition (and my knee popped right back in so I continued the routine until the end) and my mother managed to be able to tell that something was wrong just by my facial expression, which she could probably only see because I had so much makeup on. I do think that shorts and/or pants would be perfectly logical alternative to shorts because they would provide the right amount of flexibility (in fact I have seen teams compete while wearing a combination of shorts/vests/pants/tshirts etc.).
However, I do think it’s important to think about in the case of all-star cheerleading (where the outfits are normally skimpier and the makeup more heavy) that it’s not a male dominated field at all? There aren’t really guys going to competitions (unless they’re obligated due to personal relationships with someone on a team), there aren’t many male coaches, or even male participants – especially when compared to the number of females involved in the sport – both as participants/judges/bystanders. So I think it’s interesting to think about why all-star cheerleading looks the way it looks because there’s really no male gaze in it’s sphere. Not at least in the same way as school sponsored/football league (ie Pop Warner and other leagues like it) teams are subjected to it.
The all-star teams kind of rub me the wrong way as a former school-based cheerleader, for a few reasons that I need to get straight in my own head before I try to articulate them here. But one that I’m definite on is that it seems like the all-star teams’ uniforms are way more skimpy and sexualized than they need to be for function, even for the wee little girls; for example, midriff-baring tops are pretty much standard, I think, which is automatically exclusionary to girls who aren’t thin, regardless of their skills. So at that point, all-star = skinny. I feel like that’s just as bad or worse than cheering for other teams, conceptually.
Male cheerleaders (and gymnasts) wear long pants for their routines, and those require tumbling and such as well. No reason that all cheerleaders can’t do that.
Being from the frozen north like i am, the cheerleaders where I went to school wore thick white tights- practically leggings- during most of football season. Under their pleated skirts, which were pretty long for the day- closer to knee than mid-thigh, for sure. (Hello, Catholic school.)
I grew up in the frozen north as well. To cheer at football games we wore long pants (form-fitting ones, sort of like leggings), turtleneck bodysuits, vests like the ones the girls in the last photo of the article are wearing, and sometimes even our varsity jackets and gloves if it was super cold. We were covered from chin to toe (in form-fitting clothes, granted, but still). For basketball games we didn’t wear our jackets, obviously, since we were inside, and we traded out the pants for short skirts and briefs, but on top we still wore the bodysuits and vests. For competitions the uniforms did get a little skimpier: the turtleneck bodysuits went away so we had bare arms and v-necks, but that was it. I don’t remember ever feeling exposed or like we had to wear skimpier outfits than the girls who played volleyball or ran track.
I enjoyed reading this. In junior high I did literally every sport ever and was on cheer leading/dance team. Had to cut down once I got high school though to a few sports and cheerleading. The uniform shuffle was also the only time we talked about size. I was 5’9″ at beginning of 8th grade and was given the biggest uniform…which was still minuscule, but way too wide so my stomach showed much to the administrators dismay. It was that or the one that literally didn’t go over my butt. Anywhoooo rambling, but I wanted to agree with you as a nerd/athlete, cheer leading was great, it was a part of the team and one of my favorite parts is people watched you! I loved performing, but no one comes to girls varsity soccer games or track meets. There wasn’t a huge crowd at the knowledge bowl competitions. And I can’t sing, so I couldn’t be in the school musical. So cheer leading was the best way to perform, it was great!
Ps: I extra liked this essay because I’m from eastern Washington…
if you’re from Eastern WA maybe we cheered AGAINST EACH OTHER
I am from eastern Washington too! So much of this rang true, but I was a volleyball/basketball/track/nerd.
I did knowledge bowl too! I think it was our school’s most successful team while I was there. While there are downsides to the small rural schools, the ability to do a wide range of activities without being pigeon holed into one group or another was one of my favorite things about high school. There were so few people that there had to be crossover between knowledge bowl and varsity basketball.
I was about to run away in fear of sports day as my idea of getting fresh air is also reading outside, but then I read this and it was amazing. More AHP!
A;SLJDF;ALSDJFASLDFJ you guys I just found a YouTube video of the current LHS cheerleaders and I can’t stop watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ-Mzir5jL4
Annie – did you see THIS? Oh wow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXmfEVm8h7o
WOW. Wowwowowowowowwow. Important things to note about this video:
1.) That is absolutely my high school and nothing has changed, and everyone really does own that much purple & gold stuff.
2.) Somewhere around the minute mark there’s a dude wearing one of the old cheerleading tops that I used to wear.
3.) There’s some good cheerleading action around 3:10
4.) When they go out onto the stage at 4:20, that is THE STAGE where I tried out in front of the entire school. And the fight song, wow.
5.) This was all apparently made for “The Golden Throne,” which is our huge rivalry with the school across the river. Thus the maniacal chanting at the end.
My brain nearly exploded at it all BEING EXACTLY THE SAME. Except the kids. They look cooler than we did in the late 1990s.
Those are my school colors. I am having flashbacks to Spirit Day.
Also, this makes high school a lot more wholesome and fun than I remember it being. Oh, boy, I wanted to go to college from day 1.
Ugh, soccer. When I was 9 I had a best friend who had a little brother, and he and my brother were best friends, too. The only reason I said yes to soccer was because the three of them were all going to play. Only my friend was equally uninterested, so we hung out in the defense and chatted, and let the ball past us more often than not.
I played soccer because everyone played soccer, and no one was actually any good at it so it didn’t matter. Then I moved to suburban Denver and went to middle school (instead of DC elementary school) and joined a soccer team and people cared if they won or lost. Turns out I was actually terrible so I quit, eventually.
That’s a shame that you had to move and lose your enjoyment of the game, but I’m glad you got a few good years where you could have fun. Playing sports you’re not good at when people really care about winning sucks, which is why I HATED team sports days in gym class.
My soccer team was pretty terrible, and the kids were young (6-9), so the focus was on sportsmanship (or at least that’s how my coach was). We were terrible, but we weren’t the worst team because we won one game! The pinnacle of my lifetime sports career. 😉
Eh, I think it’d be a stretch to talk about “enjoyment of the game” even in the 6-10 “we’re all shitty and in elementary school” age. The most memorable thing about it was getting a bee sting on my hand once. It was just something that was done because everyone that I knew did it. I played goalie and defender because I didn’t like to run, even then- my mom still talks about her self-doubt in putting me in the sport when I came up to her and delightedly said I wasn’t afraid of the ball any more. Considering that aspect I probably would have quit in DC even without the move, once it wasn’t something everyone in my elementary school class was also doing.
I can understand that.
I never stopped being afraid of the ball. When something comes flying at your head, ducking and/or covering your face is a good instinct! 😉
I was captain of my squad at a school where cheering was just Not a Cool Thing At All. As a band/AP kid who went on impassioned-if-misguided feminist rants in class, I don’t know if I could have made the squad at any other school. But it was my EVERYTHING. I worked my ass off for three years on varsity, and have nothing but good memories of it. I’d actually love to coach someday.
But. I do know that my experience is atypical, especially among the feminist circles that I run in. I totally love “negotiated pleasure”, because I constantly feel like I’m contradicting myself whenever I defend the sport. No matter how many times I bring up competitive squads or the necessities of a fitted uniform or all of the good ol’ life lessons of teamwork or sportsmanship, it’s always right in my face that the end goal for the majority of cheerleaders is to support men.
This process repeated itself when I went to college, majored in Women’s Studies, and joined a sorority.
I, too, was part of a sorority (although a small, liberal arts nerdy one) and actually don’t see sorority membership as mutually exclusive of feminism. . . . . but that might be fodder for another piece.
Oh, I don’t, either. But I do perform the same mental gymnastics when I attempt to articulately defend them.
Definitely fodder for another piece, that I’d love to read (also was in a small, liberal arts nerdy sorority).
I used to have misguided, feminist-inspired negative feelings about sororities until I joined a sports team in college, and quickly came to feel that the two had more in common than I initially thought. That being said, I went to a nerdy commuter school, which probably colored both greek life and the feel of sports teams more than I would ever know.
Wooo, nerdy feminist cheer captains represent! I still find it amusing to drop that on people who went to ‘normal’ high schools (not wee liberal Catholic ones) and who therefore find it to be downright shocking that I even made the squad.
But really, on top of all the teamwork and sportsmanship and all that, cheerleading is one of the few things that I started out sucking at and actually stuck with for long enough to become good (usually if I’m not at least a little bit good at something when I try it, I quit pretty quickly), and I’m still incredibly proud of that.
My school didn’t have cheerleaders. When I was in 12th grade they started something called “Spirit Squad,” which was sort of like cheerleading, but it had no funding or uniforms or choreography or anything, and no one higher than 10th grade was in it. Instead, all the popular girls were on the soccer team. (Most were on all the teams in some capacity).
AHP, did you read Megan Abbot’s book Dare Me? It’s not a particularly pleasant book, but I really appreciate the seriousness and depth with which she wrote about the cheerleading and the stunts. I actually like this review better than the book itself, I think.
Also, this is GREAT.
I hope if I ever have a daughter (and holy shit, what a weirdo she would be! Just wait ‘til she reads this!) I’ll have the same expansive willingness to allow her to make meaning and pleasure out of the options before her. Or, you know, be braver than I was, start a zine, be Tavi, abolish cheerleading elections entirely. With our own girls and with others, we can’t forget: there are so many ways to be awesome.
Ugh, cheerleaders. At my (big, suburban, Texan) high school, they were the worst. But so was dance team (which I was on). Anyway… in such schools there are way more evil things associated with cheer leading. Such as: heavy, early drinking, peer-pressure encouraged sexual activity, taping and distribution of such activity, serious injuries from doing difficult gymnastics largely untrained. Etc…. Not evil for you, but seriously evil in certain contexts.
The two weirdest things about me looking back on high school post-graduation are realizing that 1) all those impossibly cool, popular girls really were closet nerds with insecurities of their own and plenty of embarrassing interests and baggage and 2) my impossibly nerdy, shockingly insecure self was way more popular than I realized. I was never in the upper echelon or anything, but just realizing the dichotomy between my perception of my popularity and its reality helps me understand that the same was probably true for all those girls. The cliche is always that those perfect, beautiful, organized popular girls all grow up to be dipshits who marry alcoholic real estate agents (like those bitchy girls from Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) but the truth is that a lot of those girls end up being perfect, beautiful, organized women who do interesting things and have many accomplishments. One of the delights of coming of age during the Facebook era has been reconnecting with girls who intimidated me in high school, only to find out that they are perfectly nice and friendly, and that we have (and had) more in common than we ever suspected back in the day.
Also, I was an outspoken feminist even at that very early age, read a million books, had big college dreams and wanted to grow up to be President (still do) and I would have killed something with my goddamn teeth if it meant I could have been a cheerleader.
Cheerleading was actually completely transformative for me, despite the obvious gender pitfalls, for a couple of reasons:
1) I grew up lower middle class, during the best years, but more often poor in a farm-town-turned-suburb where everybody knew everybody else’s shit. It was very important in our household, for some reason, to hide that, to pass as “normal.” Once I became a cheerleader nobody gave a shit whether I was poor anymore, and I could think about other things besides passing on a given day.
2) Cheerleading was the first way I experienced my own body as powerful in a purely physical sense. While I was aware that the body I was displaying was sexualized by lots of members of the audience, I also came to understand, very quickly, that the strength and agility required by the stunts, jumps, and dance routines represented a kind of power I had never known before, that was contained entirely within me.
THIS. This is what I’m talking about.
I was a cheerleader when I was 5-8 years old, which is a whole other ball of wax. We even had a “cute” cheer that involved turning around and flipping our skirts up to show our butts.
Oh man, I was dying to be a cheerleader but my dumb, liberal Canadian high school abolished it the year before I arrived! DEVASTATED. I played hockey instead.
Can anyone explain to me what ‘Varsity’ and by extension, ‘Junior Varsity’ means?
Basically, it divides players by skill. When you try out where I went to school, you could end up:
On Freshman team. Obvs for first years. Anyone could join, skill not needed, if you wanted to learn to play or just wanted to play but really sucked.
JV. Was if you had some skill, knew how to play, but weren’t as advanced, or maybe physically ready for the harder stuff. You played other JV teams in competition.You could wind up playing Varsity a year or two down the road if you improved at the sport.
Varsity. For the most skilled players. Really very good first years can end up on the Varsity team. But a lot of the teams are made up of upper class players who have had training and time to improve. In the US college scholarships and pro-recruiters start watching players early in a student’s high school career. The earlier you are on a Varsity team, and the better you are through your four years, the more likely you are to be noticed by a recruiter.
To have a three-team-deep bench, you have to have a big enough school body, or enough money to support and develop skill among your players. In really small schools, or underfunded ones, some kids will end up playing three sports as varsity players from first year just so the school can make up a full team for competition.
oh AHP, the instant i read “i am going to negotiate the shit of why” is when i knew i had fallen in love.
i played tennis in high school, and feel like that was sort of similar in that that sport requires so much skill and athleticism, but also SHORT SKIRTS.
i also ran cross-country, and one part i shamefully liked was running past high school crushes in the parking lot/the cute soccer players because we always finished races on their field.
Chicken biscuits! Now I want one.
Cop-out! 😉