3/16/2006

We don’t take it THAT seriously
Filed under: General, I quit reading when..., Politics — nobrainer @ 9:18 am

“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.”

The Guardian article goes on to list 8 examples demonstrating the overwhelming extent to which cheerleading is a, to quote the Fark headline, “’sport’ in ‘crisis’”. The writer suggests that cheerleaders here are given the same regard as the Royal Family in Britain.

“Ripped apart”? By cheerleaders? Not the war in Iraq, or CIA leaks, or Hurricane Katrina — no, no, no! The last five years of the Bush presidency have apparently been bad because of the shenanigans of a handful of pubescent girls.

Problem solved. Karl Rove will soon be dispatching his minions.

collapse Evan Says:
March 16th, 2006 at 10:36 am

“One of the strange things about cheerleader culture is that it crosses with religious culture,” muses 24-year-old American cultural critic Marty Beckerman, author of the book Death To All Cheerleaders (in which he describes cheerleaders as a “race of loose bimbos with the brain capacity of squirrel faeces”). As a 16-year-old, Beckerman was sacked from his job as a newspaper cub reporter for asking a 13-year-old cheerleader what it felt like to be “a urine stain on the toilet seat of America”.

“It’s a strange game the parents play, where they want the girls to be sexy but not too sexy,” says Beckerman. “There’s a definite paedophile element - or at least ephebophile - with these old lechers getting off on young girls, but if they get too sexy, then these same religious parents say it’s obscene and want to ban the sexual element. Perfect example of how this country is sexually repressed and obsessed at the same time.”

Having just returned from the Clemson v. Louisiana Tech game, I would agree with that.

The Euro’s are obsessed with cheerleaders too. A couple years ago, I remember how giddy a group of exchange students were when they were greeted by a squad of Clemson cheerleaders.

Because while cheerleaders for cheerleading will point out that there are grinning teens in flimsy ra-ra skirts and tight tops forming human pyramids everywhere from Dagenham to Da Nang, that’s like boasting that there are folks who play cricket in Connecticut. Cheerleading is quintessentially American.

And they love us for it.

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