Yesterday afternoon, as every Wednesday, I took my daughter to her gymnastics class. Most of the time, I don’t stay, I go run some errands but yesterday I didn’t have anything to do but wait. So I sat there and read a novel for awhile. But after the warm-up exercises were done, some girls on the main mat started making so much noise that I couldn’t concentrate on my reading anymore.
They were part of the new cheerleading class. Girls from about 6 to 10 years old were learning to clap their hands at the same time and to scream in sync “Go, Team, go!” and “Win, Team, win!” Some of them already had that kind of ridiculously glittery and shinny skirt on.
To me, it looked pathetic and repulsive. A “cheerleading class,” how odd and oxymoronic this expression is! Why in the world would you teach someone to “cheer” upon command?? Apart from America, the only other nations where indeed you had/have to learn to cheer on command were/are the ones that experience(d) dictatorial regimes: Germany, former USSR, East Germany, China , Iran, North Korea, the Gaza strip were/are great places for organized cheerleading. But why on earth would someone in a free country pay $75 a month to have his daughter coerced into learning to repeat meaningless mantras, like that one: “Rah, Rah, Rah! Ski-u-mah, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!”[1] ??
I had always assumed that cheering was a spontaneous, natural demonstration of approval. If you start “teaching” it, it turns into something pretty ugly, into brainwashing, into propaganda, and to my twisted mind come immediately black and white images from the Nuremberg demonstrations and the crowd waving, cheering in sync the Nazis legions; I see North Koreans schoolchildren in their old-fashioned sports uniforms chanting and clapping for their national beloved leader. I see Palestinians kids wearing green Islamic headbands cheering the names of their “martyred”. Cheerleading is the exact opposite of critical thinking, of developing one’s unique personality.
Cheerleading is also all about learning to support a team because it is YOUR team. Why do you have to support the GREEN team rather than the RED team? Because the GREEN team is YOUR team. Don’t you get it? The players in green go to the same school as you so you have to support them. Not the red ones. This is exactly how you teach kids to develop parochial, gregarious spirit. You don’t teach them to love a sport or to respect any player and to cheer any player for a good move he just did, no, you teach them to LOVE the GREEN ones and to HATE the RED ones. You teach kids to love similar people, kids who go to the same school, to the same church, who speak the same language, who eat the same thing, who think the same way, who live in the same country. You teach them to hate people who are different. Because they wear RED jerseys instead of GREEN jerseys, because they go to a different church or they don’t go to church at all; because they speak a different language and live in a different country. And so on…
I also wonder why the feminists groups of the seventies didn’t put an end to that chauvinistic activity. Do you know a more gender discriminatory activity than cheerleading: the guys are the ones who play; they are the champions, the new heroes; the girls only get to cheer them on, to say the praise of the strong warriors before they go to war…and to comfort them when they come back, at the end of the game. On and outside the football field.
And that is not all: cheerleading, as a respected and valued activity, comforts and perpetuates a very outdated, offensive and humiliating image of the “perfect” woman: a brainless Barbie doll[2]. The message is: better use your time learning to jump in the air, spread your legs, comb your hair, move your hips and boobs, display that stupid smile and vacant look at all times rather than using your time taking additional advance classes in whatever academic or artistic subject available in your school. It is such a wrong message to send to a young girl. It is the same old “Use your butt not your brain” again and again.
I’m appalled by the thought that schools (by definition, places of learning) can not only waste money on cheerleading programs but also consider cheerleaders as role models, as leaders. Any female monkey would certainly be able to become an awesome cheerleader. But to teach a monkey to become a leader, even with all the chicks from the Dallas Cowboys cheering on her/him that would be almost[3] impossible.
Yes, cheerleading is such a medievalist activity.
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