Sorry about the lack of posting recently. It has been a weird week, complete with a bizarre sleep schedule, which means I've had no time to keep up with sports. You could tell me that Margaret Court won the WTA championship and I'd believe you. So here are some things I've been musing about that aren't timely per se.
This particular thought occurred to me when I was stuck in traffic with the radio tuned to the hits station that has inexplicably replaced San Francisco's dance channel (both have rotations that only contain about twenty songs, but at least the latter happily billed itself as music for the gay man). For approximately the four hundredth time that day, Taylor Swift's latest single came on. My brain must have been particularly empty of stimulation at this point, because it caused me to have an actual thought. Yes, a Taylor Swift song. Why is the head cheerleader so frequently the villain in these little dramas, be they on the radio, TV, or in the movies? Cheerleaders are clearly the lazy writer's shorthand for cliquish popular girls, in which popularity is used as a proxy for mean behavior. Yet why is there always also some innocent, good-hearted popular boy who is being corrupted by this heinous woman? In other words, popularity is bad in these female-driven narratives only when it's an attribute of other women, not men.
No surprise, I have a couple of theories. The more benign one is that we're displacing our societal discomfort with cheerleading onto the participants. In the early days of college sports, cheerleaders were men, which makes a certain amount of sense. They generally have louder voices and the goal of the cheerleader was to lead the crowd in cheers. At some point, the decision was made that there should be young women involved. Over the years the short skirt and tight top have accrued to the position, and also the weird corollary that cheers must take place in very thin, shrill voices, which may protect the vocal cords but also makes the sound fail to carry. It's often unclear how a couple of enthusiastic students from the crowd couldn't do better than any but the most elite squads. In the post Title IX atmosphere, there has been a certain amount of embarrassment about high school cheerleading. Many teams have worked harder on competitive routines or morphed into dance teams, which contain the same amount of T&A but at least have a recognizable aerobic activity attached. But watching the cheerleaders for professional sports brings the idea to its bare essentials, that breasts are provided as a sideshow for the straight male fans in case they get bored by the actual game. How can we countenance such a thing for our teenage daughters, especially in an age when they could choose to play sports instead? Thus it must be the fault of the participants. The only people who rise to the top of high school cheerleading ranks must be beautiful but stupid, or deeply cruel to their fellows, or both.
This leads to point number two: if that last sentence seems to tar with a pretty wide brush, why do cheerleaders keep getting represented this way while the most popular boy, the head cheerleader's erstwhile boyfriend, gets a free pass? The narrative is always that this boy is a sensitive, kind soul trapped in a superficial world and must be stolen by our unglamorous but talented heroine. Yet the high school sports culture for boys is just as likely to produce unpleasant products as the cheerleading culture. What we're dealing with here is the classic problem of female solidarity. As in, we're encouraged not to have any because we're supposedly in competition for the scarce resource of male attention. It couldn't be that this boy is with the cheerleader because he shares the general view that only girls who look like models are desirable, or because he's equally stupid, or because she's the one who's aiming low. Nope, the boy is the prize and she's standing in the way. It's probably true that lots of cheerleaders are cliquish, shallow, and mean, because that's how they believe they can succeed. Some of them aren't any of those things. Likewise, plenty of male high school athletes are utter jerks and have no interest in having intelligent, talented girlfriends. Plenty aren't. But the other woman will always be the villain because that's exactly where she needs to be to prevent women from realizing that if they don't compete, they can turn their energies on the system and actually change things. This is not a new insight. It's fairly common, in fact. But it's surprising to me how much the competition narrative persists long past the point when we should have abandoned it, and often from sources who, being perceptive, should know better.
