House of Eratosthenes

Interesting debate taking place on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, regarding a column Melissa Clouthier put up at Liberty Pundits. It’s about cheerleaders, and I’m trying to keep my comments precise because I don’t know too much about it and I notice the conversation is splintering off in several different directions.

I definitely agree with this, though:

Cheerleading has changed…I know this because I’ve seen these young, tiny girls doing absolutely crazy physical stunts. No mats. No protection. Not nearly enough training. Some of the physical moves are so demanding and risky, I have to look away during games for fear of something bad happening and witnessing it. I’m a chiropractor. Cheerleading is a nonstop cringe-fest from an injury perspective. I feel better watching 200 lb 14 year old brutes hitting each other on the football field. They have pads, at least.

So cheerleading has evolved. It’s a sport, plain and simple. And for whatever reason, girls still love it. And these girls I’ve observed mean business. This is Texas, after all, and Texans take both football and cheerleading serious-like. Kids start at 3 years old. It is a lifelong goal to cheer for the high school team. Yes, it’s a bit warped, but it’s the reality.

And feminists and legislators need to take this new reality seriously. It strikes me as misogynist to be okay with women doing a demanding physical sport which results in the most injuries of any high school sport and it’s not treated with the same safety regulations.
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Anyway, it is completely unacceptable how many girls are harmed by cheerleading..and permanently. This needs to change. Now.

…except for that bit about “it’s a sport plain and simple.” What it is, today, is a hazardous “sport” for the reasons cited…because, as has been explained, it has “evolved” into that.

I have to wonder what happened to the girls like the ones I knew in high school? If they wanted to compete in a sport, they could have tried out for any one of a number of things. Basketball. Tennis. Archery. Track. Cheerleaders were cheerleaders because they wanted to synchronize, as part of a coordinated team. They were physically in tune. They could dance. They weren’t there to absorb blows, deal with pain, show how high they could jump, or anything of the like. So yes, there’s been a change here. Cheer teams competed, someone built a pyramid higher than somebody else, and that’s-all-she-wrote.

I’m not saying this to limit female opportunity. Some people are cut out for coordinating their kicks and hops and swivels, and some people are cut out for competition where they prove themselves better than all the rest. That’s the way people are, and last I checked girls were still people. Wonder what the natural-dancers think about this nowadays, the ones who’d be a natural fit for yesterday’s dance squad, but can’t try out nowadays because they’re not up to any body-abuse. I wonder how their mothers feel about this.

I notice the last few days cheerleaders are in the news. I guess this is that time of year when some girls have just joined the squads after years of planning for such a thing, so it’s on people’s minds. A cheer team up in Connecticut is making news because some among its members are begging for more modest uniforms.

A Tuesday story on Yahoo.com reported that, according to the Connecticut Post and NBC Connecticut, Heidi Medina, the captain of Bridgeport Central High School’s cheerleading squad stood before the Bridgeport Board of Education in her team’s standard uniform, which bares the midriff and uses either small shorts or baggy sweatpants as bottoms, to make a statement that the uniform was inappropriate.

To Medina and the rest of her like-minded squad, I say: “Way to go girls, that’s the spirit.”

To those who might dismiss my opinion as that of some puritanical tyrant, I will be the first to plead “guilty” to ogling the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and the countless imitations that soon followed.

But none of them were in high school.

Medina and fellow seniors were not only objecting on personal grounds, but also insisted the uniforms do not meet regulations. The 2010-11 National Federation Spirit Rules book, which guides cheerleading competitions in Connecticut and across the country, has a rule, Section 2 Article 6, that states: “When standing at attention, apparel must cover the midriff.”

The cheerleaders reportedly did not see the uniforms before they were ordered.

“It really hurts our self-esteem,” Bridgeport Central senior Ariana Mesaros said in the story. “I am embarrassed to stand up here dressed like this. Is this really how you want Bridgeport to be represented?”

I would have to agree; the cheerleaders I knew in high school wore sweaters and short skirts. Baring the midriff seems, from what I can tell, to be another product of the tournament competition. If she’s under eighteen, we don’t need to be seeing any of that.

Although I do have to say, I’m tuning out when you start talking about “self esteem.” Whose idea was this? What’s gotten better in the world, since our little kid-lings got it into their head that they have to be wonderful & deserving of everything all the time?

And this…

Apart from causing embarrassment, skimpy cheer uniforms may present other very real health risks.

A report on publicnewsservice.org cites a study by Dr. Toni Torres-McGehee of the University of South Carolina. Her research team polled 136 college cheerleaders, and found one-third of them to be at serious risk of developing eating disorders because of what they think their coaches think about their waist size.

…is just silly. It deserves to be dismissed without serious thought. I mean, try and give it some — let’s think it through. Cheerleaders might develop dangerous eating disorders if they’re too concerned of what their coaches think about their waist size. Which means cheerleaders shouldn’t be concerned of what their coaches think about their waists…or any other body part. Which means, since cheerleading is a sport now, none of the other “athletes” should be concerned with their coaches think about their physical development either. We need to shove all this stuff off the table because we don’t want any dangerous eating disorders.

You see where we’re going here — it all comes back to Melissa’s point. Cheerleading is a rough-and-tumble sport now because girls should have a chance to be just as tough as boys…and somehow, cheerleading is the only opportunity they have…not sure how we got there. But, Eating Disorders. Which is code for, it ought to be okay to be a fat, out-of-shape butterball.

Well, news flash: If you want to be injured doing something that requires exertion, your best shot at getting injured is to be out of shape.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of prudishness about bare bellies and so forth…this is, easily, the most entertaining thing I have read all week long. Middle-aged butter-faced goth feminist stiff-arsed Brit, finds herself ensconced in a Hooters restaurant!

This is probably the worst Friday night of my life – and that’s saying something. I’m sat on a high stool at a small table, plasma screens are oozing sports programmes around my head and there is a grubby plastic menu in front of me that is littered with pictures of fast food.

Not a green vegetable in sight, unless you count a deep fried chilli, coated in batter.

There is the thump, thump, thump of awful music in the background, competing with the braying of table upon table of men: young men, old men, students, office workers, football supporters…
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I remember, as a student in the Seventies, interviewing one of the last Playboy bunnies at the club on Park Lane.

I asked the young woman in fishnet tights how it felt to be part of a dying breed.

Peeling off her false eyelashes, she said the world had moved on – women were no longer to be viewed as objects. Fast forward 30 years and, again, I’m talking to a young woman in tights with false eyelashes.
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I imagine this is what a dirty old man deems sexy: semi-exposed breasts and buttocks, but a hint of the schoolgirl, too. There is nothing intimidating about these women, which, I think is the point.

I ask my waitress, Kimberley, who is blonde with a sweet face, whether you have to be beautiful to work here.

‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘We have had really beautiful girls, stunning girls, working here before and they can’t do it. They are too haughty, not friendly enough with the customers and the men feel they are unapproachable, to be honest.’

So: sexy, but not with ideas above her station.

Hah!

No, Liz; accommodating and friendly, with the sex appeal acting as a beacon putting us on notice that the accommodation and friendliness are probably there. Fluffy hair from the years before James Bond was killed off and Barbara Boxer was elected to the U.S. Senate, a tight top and skimpy shorts — and we know she’s probably not going to be a complete bitch. Like, uh…aw, it’s too easy.

Where she works, we probably won’t find people like you.

Does she not feel exposed, knowing all these men are looking at her bottom and cleavage? ‘I feel quite covered up,’ she says. ‘This is no worse than what you see young women wearing here in Nottingham, out shopping or clubbing.’

This is true, but that is their choice. Here, exposing your thighs and cleavage is compulsory.

Uh, no…it is an exchange of labor for wages, undertaken freely as an agreement between establishment and employee.

Kimberley is a marketing graduate. I ask how much she earns. ‘I get the minimum wage,’ she says. ‘But we get to keep our tips.’

Supplementing your income from tips may work in the U.S., which has a culture of tipping. Here, I wonder how she makes ends meet.

Ah. Now we come down to the heart of the matter.

Hooters Two nations, one an offshoot of the other. The mother nation shows her love of the bureaucracy that motivated the daughter to sever the ties that bind in the first place, by spending the last thirty years or so jamming it into overdrive. Rules, rules and more rules: “It’s ‘ealth & safety gone mad, mate!”

And the culture of tipping flourishes only in the daughter country, where there remains some love of freedom and liberty. Here, people use money as a communications device; we use it to demonstrate our priorities. To show where we will appreciate good service, and have appreciated it.

It seems back where Parliament actually sat to pass the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts that would give birth to our nation over here, people have the feeling they gave at the office. The culture of tipping looks like a quaint Yankee custom. Service is service, I would guess.

This month sees the nine hundred forty-fourth year come to a close after William The Conqueror defeated Harold at Hastings. Nine and a half centuries of this country. And they just got their first Hooters restaurant. Unbelievable. That’s a good definition of a dysfunctional, backward nation. I’m hard pressed to think of a better one.

The more you read of Liz Jones’ article, the more it becomes apparent that her problem isn’t with bare legs (actually, nylon-covered) or heaving cleavage. Choice versus coercion hasn’t got a lot to do with it either, since she got that essentially backwards and doesn’t seem to care one bit. Nor is it that her precious home turf is being invaded by Hooters. They just got one; one in the entire country.

It is the idea that somewhere, someone can be pleasant to a man. Someone is finding out what he wants, and giving him exactly that, with a big pleasant smile on her face. Making him want to come back.

She’s somewhat disturbed by the over-sexualization and the implication of infidelity. But I think that’s just icing on the cake; she’s just grasping at straws, there, trying to win converts to her side with that talk.

She, like many people, is extraordinarily upset that somewhere, in proximity, is a place where the male can go and find acceptance, even if it’s only as a paying customer. She comes from a world where, even if a man pays and pays and pays, there is something awful about ever showing appreciation for anything he ever did or to even acknowledge that something has been made possible for others because of his contributions.

This gets back to the cheerleading issue, because the feminists seem to be confused about it. As Ace points out, they don’t like cheerleaders for the same reason Liz Jones doesn’t like Hooters — has too much to do with pleasing males, and nobody deserves to be pleased except females. But at the same time, they want to drive this recent effort to make cheerleading into more of an “ass kicking” sport. It is predominantly female, and females should kick ass; that’s what feminism is all about.

So we’re left with a whole lot of contention and disagreement precisely where someone was supposed to be toiling away at bringing harmony. The thing about bare female flesh is most confused of all; at one time, it is a banner of independence, then in a flash it’s suddenly causing eating disorders and is a symbol of male-on-female oppression, because someone’s doing something to make the men happy or something…and…

…wham. The womens’ “liberation” movement turns into the Taliban. All good looking women must wear pant suits, or else the men might get the idea that the women don’t want to make them perpetually unhappy. And who knows where that might lead? If a woman somewhere makes a man happy, then before you know it, women all over the place will start making men happy…and then the two sexes might actually get along with each other! Ick!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The skimpy outfit and the heaving boobs, are about as important a motivating factor to drag me into Hooters as the hot wings. Which means, they’re not that important, since as anyone who’s been in a Hooters knows, their hot wings are overpriced and rather blah. Besides, I’m at the age now where those girls could easily be my daughters.

I get excited going there because I know I’m not going to find people like Liz Jones, or anybody who even remotely resembles her. The whole sick culture of “men are workhorses and paychecks and nothing else” melts away when I walk through the front door.

Kind of like winning the Battle of Yorktown all over again…and while I watch the redcoats in full retreat, a young girl in skimpy clothes walks up with a plate of hot food and a pitcher of cold beer. What could be better than that?

“I get excited going there because I know I’m not going to find people like Liz Jones, or anybody who even remotely resembles her.”

Same reason I ask for the smoking section when I go to a restaurant here, and I don’t smoke.
- jamzw | 10/09/2010 @ 09:04
Morgan, most of what you wrote makes sense, however, I do have a small issue with this:

Her research team polled 136 college cheerleaders, and found one-third of them to be at serious risk of developing eating disorders because of what they think their coaches think about their waist size.

And with the area-of-discussion around that block of text. After quoting this, you proceed to call it “silly.”

Is it? Look, I’m no expert, but I wonder if you’re reading too much into this. The author of the piece you’re attacking does come-off with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, but I don’t really see her suggesting that cheerleading shouldn’t exist or that fat chicks ought to be allowed onto the squad. Neither the author nor you even attempt to distinguish between being “a butterball” and being unhealthily thin…which is indeed what some young women/girls are driven to do to themselves. There’s a reason we have anorexia problems in this country with girls that age.

Lots of females are actually at a healthy weight (and a doctor would happily tell them so) but they push themselves further and actually cause themselves health problems – not getting enough nutrients, binging/purging, etc in an attempt to reach some unrealistic goal. You once (rather astutely, I might add) pointed out – maybe it was a Thing I Know – that this pressure isn’t coming from men, as feminists allege, but from the glossy pages of fashion magazines. But it doesn’t matter – if high school girls are running around with these midriff baring tops on, the pressure to be unhealthily thin is going to be even worse. It will at least come from themselves as they stand in front of the mirror at home, if not from the girls in the locker room or the cheerleading coach.

And am I missing something, or did you just contradict yourself? You indicate that when you were in high school, the cheerleaders wore sweaters and short skirts. I don’t think you’re that much older than I am, because that’s the way I remember it, too. Hell, anything less and they would have been cold out on the football field during those Friday nights deep into November, even where you and I live. You also rightly point out that we don’t need to be seeing midriffs on a girl who is under eighteen. Quite right – I don’t like the idea of my daughter showing that much flesh and of men leering at her, even high school boys.

But then you turn right around and (appear to) slam the author of this piece for objecting to the same attire, albeit on different grounds. What gives, Morgan?
- cylarz | 10/09/2010 @ 14:47
But then you turn right around and (appear to) slam the author of this piece for objecting to the same attire, albeit on different grounds. What gives, Morgan?

What gives is my bullshit detector. “Could cause eating disorders.” If I know anything about kids, I know that they’ll never grow up to be strong if they don’t encounter some expectation from meaningful authority figures that they should be strong. Now look what you have going on here: Bare their tummies, your oppressing them. Cover them up, you’re oppressing them. Let them pick out their own outfits, and that could be oppressing them too. Really, sometimes I don’t understand how someone can have a girl, try to raise her into a woman, and not end up wanting to haul a high-powered rifle into a water tower Charles Whitman style.

The idea of a girl developing an eating disorder because of her cheerleading uniform, is yet another in a long list of things that could happen…and, arguably & verifiably did happen…but is by no means a sure thing. Ever see a bellydancer who looked like she had an eating disorder? Me neither. How about the girls who could stand to lose ten pounds, or twenty? Great, now if you try to do something about it, you might be giving her Anorexia. Like I said: I don’t know how they keep from becoming Charles Whitman. And to think that Michelle Obama is one of the people trying to do something about our chubby-kid problem. Isn’t it odd you don’t see any studies coming out saying initiatives like our First Lady’s, might be giving kids eating disorders? Any grant money tied up in that?

And this gets to the other part of my complaint: Quacks who come up with “research studies” that, miracle of miracles, “discover” exactly what the quack wanted them to discover. It is a modern menace. It’s happening several times a week now, and nobody really pays it too much attention anymore, although this has a very real effect on our lives. From all I have learned about it, it seems Rachel Carson started this…although maybe Freud did it earlier. Does anyone think Carson was ready to find out DDT was harmless?

I say get rid of the racy uniforms because there’s no reason for them to exist, save for competition in the cheerleader tournaments. And the existence of those cheerleader tournaments, is an object lesson in Thing I Know #265:

You can’t be better than everyone else when you’re trying to be like everyone else.

“Like everyone else” would be coordinating with the other members of the team; being better than everyone else would be, obviously, winning. Anyone who tries to be both will always be unhappy, since you must fail at one of these. So in my view this ranks high on the list of things parents need to be teaching their kids before the kids reach majority age: Choosing between the two goals in TIK #265, so that you can make a success out of something and not spend you’re whole life being unhappy.

Tragically, it seems too many of the parents wandering around in a fog today, seem to have made it their number one goal to reach grandparenthood without ever having confronted their kids about anything.
- mkfreeberg | 10/10/2010 @ 06:18
In my unpaid unscientific scientific opionion, there has never been a fat girl in the history of the world who developed anorexia. Bulimia, sure, if sticking a finger down the throat is a disease and not a bad dietary plan.

Ever heard of a model or a jockey developing anorexia? No, all they think about is eating.

Rachel Carlson wasn’t first to pre-paid, rigorous, peer-reviewed bad science, because Eisenhower already warned of it in his farewell address immediately following that military-industrial comlex thingy.
- jamzw | 10/10/2010 @ 09:34
[…] http://www.peekinthewell.net/blog/on-cheerleading/ Commenters who threaten anyone while here because they are not smart enough to come up with a better answer will have some due diligence done on them. Foul mouthed lefty posters beware. […]
- Marginalized Action Dinosaur » They just don’t like the idea that anyone could be nice to men. | 10/16/2010 @ 19:13

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Saturday, October 9th, 2010