Cheerleading: a sport in crisis(usa)- the Guardian

[IChing]

Cheerleading used to be as central to the Reaganite small-town wet-dream as picket fences. But a growing maelstrom of sex, substance abuse and violence has rocked the sport to its core, argues Steven Wells

Steven Wells
Wednesday March 15, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

It's the half-time show at an indoor soccer game in America. The Frisbee-catching dog having done its stuff, a team of cheerleaders takes the floor. They bump. They grind. They shake their backsides and thrust their pelvises. The audience - overwhelmingly composed of 7-12-year-olds who've just finished singing the Spongebob Squarepants song - stare politely, munch hot-dogs and slurp their bucket-sized soft drinks.
Then little girls are pulled out of the crowd by the cheerleaders, lined up and taught a hip-gyrating dance routine that ends with pronounced pelvic thrusts. My female companion - a British sociologist who specialises in sport and gender - nearly chokes on her salted popcorn.
"Urk! What is this?" she yells. "What the fuck are they doing?!"

A mum in a nearby seat looks pointedly in our direction and scowls. Don't we know there are children present?

Cheerleading is a sport in crisis. Actually, in crises. There's a furious debate as to whether it's actually a sport at all. There's a blazing row about just how appropriate it is to have schoolgirls in short skirts perform dirty dancing moves. And there are those who argue that cheerleading reinforces gender roles that should have been mocked to death back when Rock Hudson was pretending to be aroused by Doris Day.

And then there's the fact that for the last five years America has been ripped apart by a maelstrom of cheerleader sex, substance abuse and violence.

In Iowa, a 15-year-old cheerleader was arrested for allegedly writing "Columbine-style" threats to blow up her school.
In Boston members of a high school cheerleading squad produced "a homemade lesbian porno video".
In Minnesota, a cheerleader paid $50 to have a rival beaten up.
In Brooklyn kids at a school "pep rally" heckled, punched, kicked and then battered a cheerleader they considered "mediocre" with a garbage can.
In Pennsylvania a mob of drunken cheerleaders, doped up with malt liquor by their coach, went on a car-trashing rampage.
In Texas, teen cheerleaders were accused of sending a "shit pizza" to their local rivals.
In Colorado two cheerleaders were arrested for dealing morphine.
And - most famously - last year in Florida two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders were arrested after one of them hit a woman who objected to the "Top Cats" having sex with each other in a bar toilet stall.>>>>snip

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329434832-108371,00.html


----------Your President

Had to put these photos in for a true perspective of the news story.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Cheerleading used to see as "wholesome" when I was in high school,

like being a majorette and in the Color Guard. Once I heard about a mother of a cheerleader in Texas (Amber something) trying to take out a contract to murder the mother of her daughter's rival, I knew the activity was being taken much too seriously. I even overlooked high school teams trying to be the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Cheerleading is now (with the exception of some) on the same level as Heathers.

[Rich Hunt]

2. popularity contest

In some places, it's a popularity contest, and more about status than talent.

I got beaten up when I made the cheerleading squad.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Geez. You lose if you're on the team (beaten up) or if you don't make it

(social Devil's Island).

[AnnieBW]

4. More Wholesome?

Back when I was in school, in the early '80's, the cheerleaders from our high school's big rival sent our school's cheerleaders brownies laced with chocolate Ex-Lax. Fortunately, it was caught before they were eaten. One girl was apparently allergic to the ingredient in Ex-Lax and could have died.

Cheerleading is "wholesome" my fat ass!