Rah-Rah Wretchedness

The Guardian on American cheerleading:

Cheerleading is a sport in crisis. Actually, in crises. There's a furious debate as to whether it's actually a sport at all. There's a blazing row about just how appropriate it is to have schoolgirls in short skirts perform dirty dancing moves. And there are those who argue that cheerleading reinforces gender roles that should have been mocked to death back when Rock Hudson was pretending to be aroused by Doris Day.

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.

I'm not sure its a "maelstrom," really, but this outsider's take on America is well written and cogently presented. I sure wish the sports section in any American paper included analyses like this one:

America's cultural conservatives are severely conflicted about cheerleading. On one hand the cheerleader is obviously as much a part of the Reaganite small-town wet-dream as soda fountains, white picket fences and letter sweaters. More than that, she reinforces the 1950s gender stereotypes beloved of the political right. Men play American football; girls stand on the sidelines, cheer and look pretty. That's the way it used to be. That's the way they feel it still should be... On the other hand, cheerleading is so obviously sexually titillating that there are those on the Christian right who want to police it, Iran style. But this is no clear-cut conflict - it's nostalgists v authoritarians v libertarians, with cheerleading exposing the ugly ideological mess at the heart of modern conservatism.