So in the kerfufflery of Kanye West and the Thing, you know the one, I picked up Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me," which is a cute song about a girl who's aware her best bud is going out with a girl who is totally wrong for him, and that she and he would be a much better match. Unfortunately for my happiness, the video is a condensed teen movie about a girl who's aware her best bud is going out with an EVIL UNFAITHFUL MEAN GIRL CHEERLEADER WHO TREATS HIM LIKE DIRT.

Seriously! The song lyrics are all "She doesn't get your humour, she doesn't like the music you and I both like, but I feel like I can't compete because she's so popular and her style is very high-maintenance girly, and mine is very low maintenance comfy." It is not about hating on the cheer captain, it is just pointing out that the singer is different from her, and that maybe just maybe the dude should take a look at a girl who actually gets him.

The video is totally hating on the cheer captain:



"Grrr!" I said, and settled down with a good read. It was Let It Snow, by Maureen Johnson, John Green and Lauren Myracle. I love this book, y'all. It is about teenagers falling in love (or back in love) at Christmas! It is full of holiday joy and entertaining sass and teenagers making mistakes and then making amends! I am in favour of all those things.

BUT there is a trainload of cheerleaders who hole up in a Waffle House and they are, if not EVIL SKANKS, depicted as clueless and ditzy. Moreover, in the discussion of cheerleaders, it is put forward, without any rebuttal, that cheerleading is not a sport.

"Will this never stop?" I mourned, and turned to TV in this time of sadness.

But even Glee was against me! EVIL CHEERLEADERS, WHO ARE, MOREOVER, CELIBATE AND DELIBERATE COCKTEASERS.

World, hold the heck up. We gotta talk about this.

There are two reasons why I hate the depiction of cheerleaders as ditzes or evil or somehow pretending to be athletes.

To explore the first reason, we must go back to the dawn of time, or ten years ago, when I went to Japan on a ten week student exchange. It was me and six other girls from various English-speaking nations, at Tokyo's Mejiro Gakuen High School. I was even less fluent in Japanese than I am now, and it was the first time I'd been separated from all my usual social networks. I was in desperate need of friends. So who was friendly? The other English-speaking students?

HECK NO. Those girls were mean. They held a lunchtime meeting to discuss the reasons they didn't like me*!

No, I was adopted by the cheerleaders. Those girls worked their asses off every day, what with their excruciatingly difficult exam preparation and their intense training schedules. (Mejiro Gakuen is a top-notch school that prides itself on its competitive cheerleading squads [plural].) And yet, they still went out of their way to be kind to the isolated outsider who could barely speak their language.

In fact, every cheerleader I have ever met has been very nice to me. Heck, my best friend married a former cheerleader, and he is one super guy! So I object to bitchy, ditzy cheerleader stereotyping on that personal level.

The other reason is political: degrading a sport dominated by women (to the point where people claim it isn't a sport at all) and characterising its female participants as clueless, brainless, mean girls who are either promiscuous** cheaters or deliberate "teases" is hella HELLA sexist. (Do not even get me started on how problematic the very *idea* of "teases" is. OH MY GOSH women claiming the right to have sex when they feel ready for it HOW AWFUL.)

In Let It Snow, the one-of-the-guys girl Duke tells the boys off for fantasising about cheerleaders:

"You know what? It's sexist. Okay? I hate to be, like, the watchdog for the ladies or whatever, but when you spend a whole night talking about doing girls because they've got short skirts on, or how hot pom-poms are or whatever. It's sexist, okay? Female cheerleaders wearing dainty little male-fantasy outfits - sexist! Just assuming they're dying to make out with you - sexist! I realise that you are, like, bursting with a constant need to rub yourself against girl flesh or whatever, but can you just try to talk about it a little less in front of me!?"

Right on, Duke! Uh. But it's kind of a shame you just spent most of a novella bagging on cheerleaders themselves and arguing that cheerleading isn't a sport, and it's also a shame that the text itself is pretty firm on the "cheerleaders are ditzes, and sometimes heartbreakers" thing. This is a book full of cheerleaders! There is the Waffle House team, who are all identically perky and spirit-focused, and totally undifferentiated as actual people, to the point where there are two Madisons and three Ambers. And there are two other home town cheerleaders who appear in the narrative. One's a snot who is partially redeemed by hooking up with a kind-of jackass and thus conveniently pairing everyone off in the finale, and the other is EVIL HEARTBREAKING CHEATING SCUM. And it's not that these are individual girls who happen to be cheerleaders - they are identified as cheerleaders first and it's as if this cheering has WARPED them. Because cheerleaders are all crazy skanks, amirite?***

Fortunately, unlike Duke, I am happy to be a watchdog for the ladies! Cheerleading is a sport that relies on incredible fitness and flexibility, teamwork, sportsmanship, precision of movement, and hours and hours of practice. The injury risks are high, but the successful performances are spectacular. These stereotypes, which emphasise not the sport, but the presumed sexual experience and behaviour of the participants, and often simultaneously demean their brainpower, exist entirely because the participants are young women in short skirts****. Perpetuating those stereotypes in popular culture is incredibly sketchy.

In essence: world, stop bagging on cheerleaders in cultural products, because it reveals your assy gender issues in the worst way.

Also, it's lazy.

Incidentally, world, I give you props for Kim Possible, but I would really like to see more cheerleaders like those who appear in Sarah Dessen's Dreamland, where the cheerleaders (of whom the protagonist is briefly one) are not depicted as either particularly virtuous or nasty, but as teenage girls, with varied problems, personalities, and goals. Who'da thunk?



* It's entirely possible I was being a snot, because they were all younger than me, and having worked my butt off to raise funding, I did not appreciate what I perceived as their "we're here to have fun on our parents' dime, not study!" attitude. In fact, it is almost certain I was being a snot. BUT SERIOUSLY! A meeting!

** I don't think promiscuity is ipso facto unethical or wrong, but those slapping the label on cheerleaders certainly do.

*** I want to emphasise that I really do love this book to bits and pieces and that is why this bugs me.

**** Of course, Duke is totally correct in that those outfits are problematic. But they're problematic because our culture fetishises short skirts, not because short skirts themselves are bad.


ETA: Y'all, of course I have seen Bring It On. I was thinking this was too obvious to mention, but yes! Totally! It is an awesome movie, and manages to say some very interesting things about race and class and privilege, sidelong.