In the News
Texas House Bans ‘Suggestive’ Cheerleading : on Yahoo! News
… bawdy performances are a distraction for students resulting in pregnancies, dropouts and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Let me tell you a little something about suggestive cheerleading. Cheerleaders and sex have gone together as long as there have been organized sports. There’s the stereotypical slutty-cheerleader thing, and there’s the unattainable-by-geeks-sex-goddess thing.
As a high school cheerleader (random Sonya fact: I was the captain) I realized that wearing a short skirt and flashing my bloomers were not really helping the team. I suppose performing a half-time dance routine kept the massive crowds at Calamus-Wheatland Jr./Sr. High from rioting, but even when I couldn’t come up with one good reason why I was a cheerleader, I knew that I had generations of the same cheerleading rituals behind me.
There’s a fine line between erotic dancing and popular dance moves theseadays. I don’t think there would be many high school squads nationwide that would pass the Texas criteria for non-sexy dancing.
There’s also a fine line between cheerleaders as a pep squad, and a bunch of girls who are on the cusp of sexuality and have been given a tool with which they can wield this power: cheerleading will always be sexually charged until they start wearing stripey pants and stop being eye candy … at which point they will stop being cheerleaders.
This gives me an opportunity to let out a terrible secret haunting me from my middle school years: I was a cheerleader. We had a co-ed squad. The males among us (I was not the only one) merely screamed and yelled encouraging things to the team or joined in cheer. For some reason, my custom shirt (we all had one) said “ULTIMATE” on the back.
I was not using my (non) sexuality as a tool though. I had pants.
That’s shocking, Colin. OK – the picture I have in my head is of you, an 8th grader spastically shouting using up all that sugar energy wearing a flourescent green early-90’s oversized shirt. Have you pictures?
And do you want to start a squad?