You might think that the most interesting thing in this morning’s New York Times was the photo essay about the Large Hadron Collider, but you’d be wrong. The most interesting article is this story about cheerleading.
Why is that, you ask? Because it’s written about my home town:
Thirty girls signed up for the cheerleading squad this winter at Whitney Point High School in upstate New York. But upon learning they would be waving their pompoms for the girls’ basketball team as well as the boys’, more than half of the aspiring cheerleaders dropped out.
The eight remaining cheerleaders now awkwardly adjust their routines for whichever team is playing here on the home court — “Hands Up You Guys” becomes “Hands Up You Girls”– to comply with a new ruling from federal education officials interpreting Title IX, the law intended to guarantee gender equality in student sports.
That actually makes them sound pretty bad, as if they’re opposed to cheering for the girls’ teams, but the article explains later on that the decision forced local schools to drop some of the attractive features of cheerleading: to fit in equal number of games for both teams, they now only have cheerleaders at home games, as do most of the other teams in the league. They don’t get to make road trips with the team, and they don’t get to meet cheerleaders from other schools, because they’re not making trips either.
Personally, I think the whole thing is deeply silly. When I played (well, when I sat the bench for the varsity), the cheerleaders weren’t really an essential part of the deal– mostly, they just took up space on the team bus. I would’ve happily done without, and I don’t think the girls team were really suffering from the lack of cheerleaders (as the story notes, when they voluntarily cheered at a girls game a few years ago, they were asked to leave because they were annoying the team).
Besides, I’m kind of iffy about the whole institution of cheerleading, which strikes me as kind of objectifying– young women in short skirts bouncing up and down to keep the fans fired up, and all that. In fact, it seems a little weird to send the female cheer squad to the girls games in the first place– shouldn’t a real Title IX challenge mandate the formation of a male cheerleading squad to go to the girls games and prance around in tight shorts?
But, hey, Whitney Point made the front page of the New York Times…