Let"s Ban Cheerleaders from Women's Sports

A long time ago I took my daughter to her first women's basketball game. I wanted to expose her to a sport I loved and give her an idea of how young women can play a sport with strength, intensity and beauty. She loved the game and squealed and yelled and devoured food. When we got home she excitedly told her lawyer mom, "I want to be one of the girls that wears the cute dresses." Needless to say, my wife was not pleased that I had inspired my daughter to aspire to be a cheerleader.

I still go to women's athletics events and endure cheerleaders on the side. Yelling, twirling, wearing very short skirts and bare midriffs, and hunky guys who hold them up after they kick and grind and unveil rictus smiles to the crowd. Cheerleaders at women's games make no sense. They parade an alternative definition of women projecting sexualized supporting objects on the sidelines. If you want you can go to the site "hottest girls of cheerleading" to comparison shop.

Women's sports exists to provide an arena for young women to excel in areas of body and space denied them in the past but now open to them. It expands the definition of physical and moral attributes available to women. Young women who play sports develop strengths and self images not available in the normal course to women thirty years ago except as pathfinders and outliers. Now sports and its excellence exist as a normal aspiration from the age of five on.

So why do we continue to parade cheerleaders on the sidelines? It makes a distorted sense that they shout and pout on the sides during men's basketball games with its preening ego exalted  show boat  ethos. How nice to have supportive little women on the sidelines. And of course they seem to belong amid the militarized splendor of football with its ultra-montane exaggeration of male violence and swaggering corporate dedication to gaining TV exposure. Having cute girls (sorry I mean young women) on the sidelines bumping, grinding, yelling and doing whatever diluted hooker moves are allowed these days, all fit with the spectacle. They shouldn't be there, but they are. I once asked a very thoughtful senior female administrator why we still have cheerleaders. She looked at me and said, "marketing, marketing pure and simple, look at the demographics." She was not smiling.

OK. I get it, but it makes no emotional or moral sense to have this alternative vision of  girls (sorry I mean young women) can be co-existing with the proud secure accomplished women of college athletics.

The terrible irony here is that the cheerleaders are there because of Title Nine. If the men's basketball team gets the band; the women's basketball team should get the band. If men's basketball teams get spandex encased dancers; women's teams get dancers. If men's team's get cheerleaders, then women's teams should have cheerleaders.  The logic makes a bizarre sort of sense, but women cheerleaders mock the deep intent of Title Nine.

Let's just get rid of them.

"Competitive" Cheerleading Violates Title IX in Sooo Many Ways

Everyone knows a sham and scam. For years certain colleges have sought to turn cheerleading squads into competitive "teams" to rescue the  schools from serious Title IX issues. When Quinnipiac College cut women's volleyball and replaced it with cheer squads, the courts yelled NO. Seriously, cut volleyball and expand cheerleading!!!!  Think about it.

The desire to shift to cheerleader squads could save money, avoid expanding the number of women's teams and keep government scrutiny at bay. A desire to turn cheerleading into a recognized NCAA sport has rumbled around in the south for years for cultural and economic reasons.The recent court decision states that cheerleading squads do not meet NCAA or reasonable competitive standards to qualify as Title IX counters. This is clear, but the decision should be applauded for another reason. Pretending cheerleading squads qualify as competitive sport violates the entire cultural intent of Title IX.

First, competitive cheerleading keeps the social order intact. Attractive, self-selected, somewhat athletic cliques jump, leap, cheer and get tossed around by larger males. High school reality and myth reinforce a very strong hierarchy of pseudo social values about who counts and who does not or what it means to be a desired or successful girl. The alluring and revealing outfits emphasize traditional notions of value and status so much so that the sexuality and traditional femininity override the athleticism. Just think Kirsten Dunst, Gabrielle Union and fellow travelers in Bring it On  (now in its fourth iteration) and you get the picture. Better yet just look at this picture from deadspin of college cheerleaders practicing outside their hotel reveals a chief attribute of cheerleading.


Second, cheerleaders stand on the side cheering on the largely male dominated teams. Its origins signify the hierarchy of women supporting men's sports, women's customary place. The whole culture of cheerleading and competitions resembles the culture of beauty queen pageants. The path feels similar to gymnastics except gymnastics grows from deep roots and is far more rigorous, disciplined, demanding, rule bound and does not replicate what values should determine who is at the top of the social hierarchy.

Third, moving cheerleading into a competitive center transposes the stunning emergence of powerful athletic women dominating and claiming sports as their own as in basketball, softball, soccer, lacrosse or running. The growth of women's sports has accompanied and amplified a growth in conceptions of what women can be. Cheerleading would displace this expansion with an activity that simply reinforces traditional valuations of women around narrow notions of beauty, body shape, strength and their relation to men. It feels eminently safe much as early women's college swimming did because it grew from images of Esther Williams and ideals of beauty, not competitive athleticism (thanks to Courtney Beyer for this insight).

The battles over Title IX will not go away. They are going to get worse with the reality of 60 percent female undergraduate populations. They will get worse as long as football dominates the budgets and numbers of scholarships and as long as football and men's basketball generate so much money.

These battles, however, are not  just about numbers and budget; they are about culture and women's possibilities.