What cheerleaders and sorority movies say about America’s cultural anxieties

[ad_1] The primary ever cheerleader — in response to USA Cheer , the governing physique of American sport cheering — was a person from Minnesota. The game was born in 1898, when a male pupil on the College of Minnesota spontaneously received up and led the group in a cheer for the soccer group. Males have all the time been part of cheerleading; a number of US presidents, together with Ronald Reagan, were cheerleaders in college , and male cheerleaders have been part of the NFL sidelines for many years.

So how is it that Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn, the 2 male cheerleaders added to the Minnesota Vikings’ squad final Might, have obtained such widespread backlash ? After a latest social media promo , the vary of people that spoke out in opposition to the Vikings for including the duo to their squad included a former Viking , a senator , and loads of Fox News commentators . Instantly, the Vikings have been being blamed for serving to perpetuate, as one Instagram commenter put it , “the sissification of America.”

The group has additionally obtained loads of help from Vikings followers and different members of the general public, in addition to other men on NFL cheer squads. Some NFL groups have seized the second to brag about their very own mixed-gender dance squads. The backlash appears to be coming from a minority right here, and isn’t prone to change the NFL’s embrace of all-gender sidelines. However what’s fascinating right here is the timing. Males have been on NFL cheerleading groups for years. Why is that this sudden groundswell of anger occurring now ?

Alongside the Vikings backlash, social media customers have additionally been touting viral clips of sorority rush dances, claiming them as “wins” for conservative America and conventional values. How is it, precisely, that choreographed, celebratory group dance has develop into a entrance line, so to talk, of the tradition wars round gender and sexuality?

This motion to impose inflexible gender requirements and assumptions on teams of people that shake may be ahistorical, however it exemplifies the shifting boundaries of the tradition wars. Conservative commentators have been in battle with the NFL — which the Heritage Basis declared “ woke ” final yr — and the universities that home these sororities. Now, they’re seeking to reclaim the sidelines — and the road dancers.

Males have already been cheerleading within the NFL for many years

The Vikings inadvertently kickstarted the brouhaha on August 9 by posting a lively clip of their new dance squad on Instagram. The video featured Conn entrance and heart, smiling and doing a backflip earlier than becoming a member of the remainder of the squad of their routine. Each males are devoted dancers. Shiek has been dancing for a decade and was a part of his school dance squad at North Dakota State College. Conn simply led his Iowa State team to win the National Cheer and Dance Championship .

Cheerleading has all the time been related to soccer, however its origins as a masculine interest are sometimes ignored. Not solely was the game traditionally male-inclusive, however for many years after it started, it was exclusively a male hobby . It wasn’t till World Warfare II, when ladies stepped into roles beforehand designated for males, that all-women cheerleading groups became the norm .

“Cheerleading was the epitome of masculinity,” Dr. Natalie Adams , a uncommon cheerleading skilled and creator of the forthcoming guide Cheer Issues: Gender, Race, Intercourse and Belonging in an American Establishment , advised me. “As late as 1939 on the school stage, there was this premier cheerleading league that was… all male.”

The early twentieth century affiliation of cheerleading with collegiate Americana, patriotism, and athleticism has by no means actually pale, and males have remained part of the game. The Baltimore Ravens have had an entire multi-gender stunt team , devoted to tumbling, lifts, and acrobatics, on the sidelines for the reason that late ’90s. For some time, so did the Indianapolis Colts . The Dallas Cowboys have lengthy touted having the NFL’s solely multi-gender dance and drum line, the Rhythm & Blue Dancers.

In 2018, two NFL groups, the Rams and the Saints, quietly added men to their dance-focused cheerleading squads. The Rams took their new male dancers to the Super Bowl in 2019. Since then, 11 different groups across the NFL — together with the Vikings, which have had men on their squads earlier than — have joined in including male dancers to their sidelines. In 2022, the Carolina Panthers welcomed the NFL’s first trans cheerleader, Justine Lindsay. (She’s leaving to give attention to pageantry work.) The Ravens at present brag about having 19 men on their still-fire stunt squad.

On the time these modifications occurred, they ruffled few cultural feathers. Arguably the first causes for that have been the widespread cultural resurgence for gender equality sparked by Me Too and the loosening of gender norms that got here with a better societal embrace of the LGBTQ+ rights motion, each of which meant just a few groups including males to bounce groups wasn’t a trigger for concern. There have been different elements, as properly. Netflix’s 2020 documentary sequence Cheer sparked a wave of cultural respect for cheerleading as a sport (although aggressive cheer and pro-football cheer are typically very completely different). The NFL, in the meantime, confronted battles of a distinct kind: The cultural proper spent these years fixating on Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter protests within the sport.

And so, cultural outrage lay dormant till the Minnesota Vikings introduced its new fall cheerleading lineup in 2025.

The Vikings backlash attracts strains between female and male athletes

The substance of the backlash round Sheik and Conn has been targeted on their masculinity, with statements and on-line feedback which might be each homophobic, and — although each dancers are cis males — transphobic.

“I don’t have something in opposition to male cheerleaders ... There have been male cheerleaders round a very long time,” Fox pundit Will Cain said in a section on the backlash. “[But] if we’re actually being trustworthy, we’re speaking about male cheerleaders being feminine cheerleaders.”

Whereas the precise which means of Cain’s remark is unclear — once more, neither male cheerleader identifies as trans or nonbinary — he appears to be referring to Conn and Sheik’s type of dance, which matches their feminine counterparts’. If the priority is about supposed femininity, precisely how carefully ought to the squad’s coach police their athletes for indicators of gender fluidity? But once more, the red-blooded Dallas Cowboys have had men bumping and grinding alongside women on their dance group for properly over a decade, and few individuals appear to be questioning their masculinity.

The Vikings cheer squad appear to have picked up on the transphobic subtext of the arguments in opposition to them. One squad member, Brianna Putney, has since posted a viral TikTok video displaying Conn and Shiek dancing alongside their squadmates in a ladies’s lavatory. These arguments additionally appear to coincide with an underlying substrain of misogyny — the concept that “actual males” belong on the sector whereas ladies want to stay on the sidelines. As Putney’s video suggests, it’s the blurring of these gender roles that’s the true offense.

To know how this works in a sport that was as soon as completely male, we've to know that, traditionally, as soon as the make-up of cheerleading modified from male-only to women-only, cheerleading itself turned related to normative best femininity. “Fascinating traits for a cheerleader have been issues like allure, reputation, attractiveness,” Adams stated, “all feminized traits … nothing about athleticism.”

The place beforehand, male cheerleaders have been seen as campus leaders who have been able to crowd management, by 1955, the function had modified. Ladies have been seen as being incapable of main the group the way in which males might; their presence was more and more about being eye sweet. This modification solidified in 1972, when the Dallas Cowboys, which had beforehand had an unofficial co-ed squad of highschool cheerleaders, swapped them out for a line of choreographed dancers — a transfer that ushered within the trendy iteration of professional NFL cheerleading, catering to an viewers that was assumed to be straight male by default.

Cheryl Cooky , professor of American Research at Purdue, notes that this transfer coincided with the shift in interested by soccer itself as not simply sport, however leisure, alongside the emergence of broadcast sports activities. As soccer turned a type of cultural energy in the course of the chilly struggle, alongside social developments just like the Kennedy fitness test , the game highlighted “fears across the virility of American males, and the way we'd compete with [world powers],” Cooky stated.

That militarism, nonetheless on show in soccer at present, will get coded as masculine and conservative, whereas cheerleading will get coded as its female reverse — a stigma that arguably results in ladies on skilled cheerleading squads being minimized, disrespected, and underpaid . That’s lastly altering, however these modifications additionally threaten to destabilize the binary gender presentation that soccer gamers and cheerleaders conveniently represents. Thus, male cheerleaders who carry out choreography alongside ladies on the squad are doing much more to disrupt the gender order in a second the place politicization of gender is excessive.

If the NFL is changing into destabilized and “woke,” then the place else can we search for a reinforcement of that gender binary? Conservatives appear to have latched onto school sororities in its place — particularly, the sorority rush dance.

This yr, a number of rush movies have gone viral in right-leaning social media corners, with posters on Twitter and different platforms claiming each the movies and the ladies in them for right-wing culture and framing them as “wins” within the tradition struggle in opposition to liberalism. There’s no stable proof these ladies are politically conservative themselves (ladies who attend school have persistently leaned liberal for the reason that Eighties), however the wave of enthusiasm for these younger, engaging ladies appears immediately tied to the nervousness round gender in cheerleading.

“What conjures in my thoughts is preppy white youngsters going to soccer video games, being concerned in Greek life … quintessential ‘All-American,’ ‘massive man on campus’ [tropes],” stated Cooky. She argues that the pattern has ties to the tradwife motion, the “old money” trend , and different latest conservative aesthetic trends. If ladies on the NFL sidelines are demanding extra equality and higher pay whereas they carry out dances for a broader viewers, these sorority rush movies permit conservative males to renew the fantasy of a sublime, scorching girl dancing only for them.

Who will get to bounce? And why?

Underlying these two developments is the essential query: Who will get to bounce, and why? The concept appears to be that white, younger, lovely, conservative-coded ladies are allowed to carry out for a presumed straight cisgender male viewers, however solely in formation and solely on the sidelines. It’s additionally price mentioning that when proficient teams of Black ladies dancers go viral, they usually face backlash for performing the identical dance types that many conservatives appear to now be applauding.

Cooky additionally argues that the bigger dialog is equally about masculinity and how much man will get to profit from male privilege. “It’s not simply that [men are] dancing, it’s the place they’re dancing,” she stated. “It’s that they’re dancing inside the area of soccer.”

She factors out that no person’s upset that there are male ballet dancers. That’s as a result of “NFL soccer has this cultural dominance and visibility and capital in ways in which different areas [don’t].” In the meantime, whereas different points of upper training are underneath fireplace, Greek life and the faculty soccer milieu arguably nonetheless symbolize a model of Americana to conservatives that the NFL has been steadily transferring away from, which is why it’s so necessary to conservatives to assert them as their areas. “These are the anchors of universities for a cause,” Cooky stated.

It is sensible, then, that conservatives have a vested curiosity in dictating who will get to bounce on the soccer sidelines and on school campuses. Traditionally, in any case, dance has lengthy been used to problem societal constructions, from dances on protest lines to Hairspray ’s interracial sock hops .

But the act of motion, of claiming bodily autonomy, of expressing pleasure by way of movement — these are all issues which might be extraordinarily tough to wrangle or prohibit. Inevitably, drawing strains round who can and might’t dance solely incites extra of us to chop footloose.