Culture Study Meets 'America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders'
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Back in 2020, I got my hands on screeners of Cheer — the Netflix documentary following the national champion Navarro College cheerleading squad — and devoured it in two days. I was a cheerleader through junior high and high school, and I love watching the stunts and routines, feeling all the anticipation and release when a flyer lands safely, marveling at just how good everyone is. Maybe that’s what other people who played and loved a sport feel like when they watch the pros: it’s like regaining access to a well of old joy.
I could watch high school and college cheerleading forever. The athleticism is preposterous; the routines are hypnotic; the stakes are high. Pro football cheerleading does nothing for me — partly because they’ve eliminated the stunts and jumps, which are the most exhilarating (and dangerous) part. They also don’t, well, cheer. They pom dance. Which is fine! But less interesting to me, personally, particularly since the style of dance hasn’t really changed since 1980.
But America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, does what the best documentaries do: it widens the aperture. These women aren’t competing against other teams, and they’re fairly ambivalent about the success of the football team they ostensibly cheer for. But they are competing to embody a very specific, deeply Evangelical, and highly negotiated feminine ideal. They’re competing with each other to make the team, but that tension is secondary. They’re actually competing with themselves. These women have thoroughly internalized the male gaze, their to-be-looked-at-ness, and arrived at a place of incredible power — as objects. Their struggle, as evidenced by the ample time we spend with those who’ve “retired,” is figuring a sense of self outside of that objecthood.
I’ll explain more of what I mean by that below, but first I want to point you to this week’s episode of
, where Vibe Check’s Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford join me to answer a bunch of your America’s Sweethearts questions (and go deep on the Texas / Southern / Evangelical cultish elements of the show). The episode is fantastic, and not just because it features Sam lusting after the Bless Dallas / Bless the Cowboys pastor. You can listen to it here.
But there’s a lot we didn’t get to talk about, and a lot that’s better suited to newsletter form. So here are some takeaways from the show and the ideological function of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders (DCC) in culture today — and an invitation, as always, to share your own in the comments.
1.) Consummate Objects
If you grew up in the ‘80s or ‘90s, you understood the Cowboys Cheerleaders as a symbol of a certain sort of desirable-yet-unattainable woman. One would show up in a television show dream sequence as part of a punch line set-up: as if this guy could ever end up with a COWBOYS CHEERLEADER! How hilarious! Playboy Bunnies were deployed similarly, but in slightly more adult situations. The Cowboys Cheerleader was like Jessica Rabbit: immediately legible to a twelve year old boy as hot.
My memory of the Dallas Cheerleaders, then, is of an interchangeable sex object being watched. Which is the heart of Laura’s Mulvey’s classic theory of the male gaze: men look at women, and women learn about how they’re supposed to behave by watching men look at other women. If someone wants to make themselves desirable to men, they internalize that gaze, molding their various attributes and performance styles to attract it and maintain it through spectacle (in this case, dance).
The theory of the male gaze has been complicated and textured in so many ways, and wow would I love to hear from a queer DCC (or queer DCC fan) about their experience. But I’m fascinated by the way that the cheerleaders themselves have narrativized this sort of self-objectification: in all the talk about locking eyes with a spectator and giving them that special moment, in the focus on the happiness you provide just by existing, in the focus on sanding down just enough individuality (even height differentiation) to create an aura of sameness. There might be slight differences in skin and hair color, but it’s just enough to circumvent feelings of uncanniness. The bodies, the uniforms, the smiles, the dance moves make the whole become one, and the one is not a person but a nebulous object of desire.
How do you teach young women to be that way? Through example — seemingly all of the women interviewed mentioned watching the cheerleaders when they were young — but also through the DCC handbook, which is written as a sort of scripture. The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson paused the show to get a clear read of the page in the handbook titled WHAT AM I….?, and it’s a doozy:
I am a little thing with a big meaning * I help everybody * I unlock doors, open hearts, do away with prejudices—I create friendship and good will * I inspire respect and confidence * Everybody loves me * I bore nobody * I violate no law * I cost nothing * Many have praised me, none have condemned me * I am pleasing to everyone * I am useful every moment of the day
In other words, she’s a slightly better version of an AI Assistant. There’s no mention of who she actually is, just the services she provides and the feelings she inspires. And if you conceive of training for/moving through DCC as a years’ long tutorial in objecthood, you can see how difficult it is to transition away from the organization, and why an engagement ring becomes the coveted object in the fifth and final year. Marriage — at least in theory — allows a seamless transition within the patriarchal sphere.
As you age out of your supposed prime, you transition from the object of all men’s desire (allowable because you may attract men’s gazes, but they are prohibited from touching you) to the object of one man’s desire (who gets to touch you because he’s the only one touching you).
2.) Obviously Some Weird Purity Stuff Going On
Near the end of the series, a handful of the cheerleaders make a visit to an assisted living facility. They do what they always do: smile, sign calendars of themselves, and make people’s day through the sheer spectacle of their (immaculate) appearances. They pose for photos with anyone who asks. Watching this scene, I noticed a Dallas Cowboys football that would pop up in every shot — passed by some offscreen hand to whoever was posing with the cheerleader, who’d then grasp it with two hands and grin. I turned to Charlie and said: They’re giving them that football so they don’t touch the cheerleaders.
The next scene confirmed it: the football was a prop, a way of ensuring that men in particular would abide by the rule that they could look but not touch. To be clear, I think women should be able to dress however they want (including in a cheerleading outfit) and not need a football prop to prevent inappropriate touches. But the football highlights a tension in the Cowboys moral universe, where God and football and patriarchy and Texas quasi-nationalism all intermingle. The cheerleaders are supposed to suggest sex, but not be sexual.
They’re explicitly prohibited from “fraternizing” with the football players. They’re expected to maintain appearances on and off the field (and especially on social media). When they celebrate, it’s always without alcohol. The only relationships shown onscreen (at least in this documentary) are with long-term boyfriends or fiances. Their style of dance and dress is sanctioned, in other words, through the purity of their off-field behavior.
You can see this dichotomy most vividly in Reese: a rookie cheerleader straight out of Bama Rush Central Casting who arrives at tryouts with an engagement ring from the first boy who ever flirted with her. She’s a devout Christian and says “I just hope they look at me, and see Jesus” in a way that will be familiar to any of you who’ve spent time in or adjacent to evangelical culture. She has a Gen-Z version of Fundie Baby Voice. She’s incredibly earnest. And she’s a wicked dancer.
We’re talking the sort of dancer that you see perform and think that girl is freaky. As in: in bed. But the more I think about it, the more I think Reese — like so many of these women — is just very good at approximating the look of sexiness. She puts it on the same way she puts on her fake eyelashes.
Listen, I get it, people contain multitudes. But this sex/purity dichotomy teaches women to perform sexuality for others’ gaze instead of exploring it for themselves — and harshly disciplines any woman who acts on their own sexual desires. You can attract the gaze, but you can’t wield the power that comes with it.
3.) Still, This is The Most Power They Can Access
In the podcast, Sam, Zach and I try to answer a listener question about why someone would want to try out for DCC in the first place. The pay is shit, the hours are endless, it wrecks your body. Apart from the fact that a lot of these women really love to dance, and this is a sanctioned way to do it well into your 20s, I also think that part of loving to dance — particularly as a cheerleader — is reveling in the power it confers you.
I became a cheerleader because I was worthless at the three other sports offered for girls (volleyball, basketball, track) and desperate for some straightforward pathway to social prestige. I don’t think my logic is altogether dissimilar from some of the women in the show. Within the Cowboys moral universe, being a DCC is pretty much the most power a woman can hold unless they’re related to longtime Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. (Charlotte Jones, Jerry’s daughter, appears several times in the documentary, most memorably attempting to justify the cheerleaders’ low pay).
It’s significant that the two other women with power — the head coach, Kelli, and the head choreographer, Judy — were both DCC themselves, albeit several decades in the past. Both have a keen understanding of the stakes at hand: the endless well of effort these women will expend to experience the world, even for a second, with a level of power usually reserved for men.
Of course, all of the stuff I outlined above circumscribes that power: they can only hold on to it so long as they can attract the gaze. Which helps explain the undercurrent of desperation you feel in each episode, even after they’ve announced the final cuts to the squad. Regimenting your body, your skin, your hair, your face, all of it requires continual labor — labor that can be unpredictable and confusing, particularly for women in their early and mid-20s. No one ever told ever told me about the “second puberty that’s not actually a puberty” that would subtly rearrange my body at that age until after the fact, and no one’s probably told these women either. They’re just out there terrified two extra pounds is going to ruin their lives.
One of the main characters in the show — a veteran named Kelcey, in her fifth and final year — navigates the season with a muted sense of melancholy. She knows how to turn on her smile, but you can tell she also knows her life is never going to be the same. She’ll move to Los Angeles, get married to her uninteresting boyfriend, maybe continue her work nursing and maybe not — but she’ll never get to feel the way she does, right now, ever again.
DCC teaches women that their best years are always nearly over. That’s why the cheerleaders abuse their bodies, ignore muscle tears, and grind through the paid appearances. They believe it’ll never be better than this. And if they successfully transition from one patriarchal sphere of control into another, sublimating their desires in service to their husband’s of what their lives should be….well, that’s likely true.
The DCC get paid more than any other professional cheerleaders, but the work is only for part of the year, and is paid by the hour. Most need another full-time job in order to pay for their greige Dallas apartments. One of the women featured through tryouts is an orthodontist, and even though [SPOILER] she doesn’t make the team, I never doubted she’d be okay. She had a whole life, a whole sense of self and worth, apart from this team. Most of these women do not.
4.) Uniform as Cutting Mechanism
When I was a cheerleader, part of the fun was rummaging around in the school uniform closet to find the old uniforms, and marveling at all the different eras and norms. During my time, we were transitioning from big pleats to mini-pleats; now, the uniform is all about no pleats and crops. That’s true of most cheerleading squads, pro or not: the uniforms change with the era.
Not the DCC. Their uniforms have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s: the white cowboy boots, short white shorts, the blue blouse knotted to show off cleavage, and a little white mini-vest. There’s something about the blouse that just encapsulates the entire aesthetic: formal and Southern, but just a littttttle bit sexy? Like a slutty Hollywood costume before slutty Halloween costumes were a (widespread) thing.
Part of the resistance to change can be chalked up to the Cowboys’ fetishization of tradition. But part of it feels very MAGA-lite retrograde, like here in Texas, our cheerleaders still look like the good ol’ days. Only they don’t: the hair has changed, obviously, but so too have the body ideals. Today’s DCC are leaner, more toned, and generally smaller-breasted than the women you see in the footage from the ‘70s and ‘80s. But the uniform creates a through line — and provides a defensible means of exclusion.
Put differently, if your body doesn’t look “right” in the uniform, the problem isn’t the uniform. The problem is your body. If you can’t kick or dance in stiff cowboy boots, the problem isn’t the boots, it’s you. If your breasts are too small to create cleavage with the knotted blouse, if your thighs are too big for the short shorts, if your torso or legs look too long, if your stomach isn’t completely flat (even while bending over)….then the uniform cut you, not the coaches. It’s a brilliant and fucked-up deflection.
Clothes are never neutral. They are always designed to fit a certain type of body, even if that body differs with time and location. The DCC uniform was designed for the proportions of a slender, medium height woman with medium-sized boobs. Lots of different types of people have that body, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s a body type most common among white women. If you’re a Black or Brown woman with that body type, you can also (potentially) join the team. After all, from its inception, the DCC coaches have aimed to create a squad that “reflected America.” Or, you know, at least the skinny part.
5.) We Jump Split Because We Jump Split
“Legacy” also justifies the move that reliably destroys these women’s bodies: the jump split. The routine for AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” — the dance for which the cheerleaders are best known — ends with an old-fashioned Rockettes-style kick-line capped off with a jump split to the ground. The splits themselves are not the problem. The problem is all muscles in your hip flexors and hamstrings and quads doing stabilizing work as you jump and fall into the splits on turf, in fucking cowboy boots.
Everyone involved in the organization knows the move tears the cheerleaders’ bodies apart. They openly acknowledge as much on camera. But they keep doing it because 1) it looks cool and 2) they’ve always done it. They do it, in other words, because they do it. Like the football players with whom they share the field, these women’s bodies are ultimately disposable. There’s always another crop to fill the spots of anyone whose body can no longer absorb the daily damage.
The high kick itself also functions as a “neutral” cutting mechanism. [QUICK SPOILER] When Anisha, who’s Indian-American, gets cut, the coaches tell her that the root of her problem was her kicks: no amount of practice could change the fact that the other women out there had been practicing this style of kick since they were children. The implication: Anisha, whose try-out performance was to a Bollywood song, didn’t grow up in the “American” dance tradition, so she could never cut it as a DCC. (Here’s a brief window into Anisha’s skill, if you’re curious)
This is how organizations like DCC obsessed with “legacy” stay white as they do: by maintaining a status quo that requires investment and experience in a specific sort of American experience.
6.) A Problem Like Victoria
America’s Sweetheart’s director, Greg Whiteley, has an eye for character. He doesn’t give us reality-style hero and villain edits. Instead, he tries to offer a window into the everyday negotiation of this role: we see the hours of hair curling, the 10 o’clock microwaved chicken dinner, the barely contained resentment of the woman who blew her hip out after five years on DCC and is now helping her sister make the team.
And we see Victoria: the daughter of a DCC cheerleader, raised amongst other ex-DCC cheerleaders (including DCC head coach Kelli Finglass) to fulfill her certain destiny: to become a DCC herself.
It’s clear that Victoria was told that if she just worked hard enough, all her DCC dreams would come true. And after very publicly getting cut (and criticized for her weight) during tryouts on the longrunning CMT reality show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, she came back and actually made the squad. Coded language between Kelli and her chief choreographer, Judy Tramell, suggests that Victoria battled disordered eating throughout her time on the team, and even took a year off to try and figure out her shit in New York City, away from all things DCC, including her mom.
Within the world of the documentary, Victoria is framed as a sort of ugly duckling: she’s too eager, she tries too hard, something’s slightly off. No one likes her. She’s not “a leader,” which is another way of saying that she’s unlikely to be picked as one of the section captains if she comes back for a fifth year. In one of her primary interviews, she sits on a twin bed in her mom’s home, surrounded by pillows, wearing what a high schooler might wear to a sleepover. The camera shoots her up close but at a wide angle, which has the effect of making her look much too big for a small bedroom, stuck in a dream she (and her mother) created more than a decade ago.
Victoria’s hair, like the hair of many of the former DCC featured on the show, is fried from over-processing. She almost certainly has veneers of some sort, but they look unnatural with her face, like someone shoved a Disney Princess smile inside her jaw. You can tell she’s a kind and warm person — but one who’s been suffocated by others’ expectations of her. Being a part of DCC hasn’t allowed her to blossom; instead, it’s devoured any sense of self she’s ever had.
You can see something similar in a few of the other girls who were cut from the squad: the attempt to absorb and gloss over feelings of utter failure. There’s such a fine line between owning the ideal, and manipulating it to your own ends….and being eternally disciplined by it. And I admit, even with my own experiences on the sideline, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be in that stadium, with all those eyes on you — or the incredible surge of adrenaline that would go through you each and every time.
But I look at the coaches, and Victoria’s mom, and even Charlotte Jones, and I see women who’ve devoted their lives to the sort of discipline that’s torn Victoria apart. Women who’ve done their utmost to mask all signs of their weariness and their wisdom. What a way to life to you life, to live any life: devoted to upholding an ideal that becomes less and less accessible, but no less desirable, with every passing year. What a loss you must feel, what unspeakable lack. It’s easy, I think, to understand how patriarchy feeds on apathy, and jealousy, and white women protecting their small spheres of power. It’s harder, and sadder, to think about just how much of it runs on women’s deep, abiding sorrow. ●
Other Things I’m Dying To Discuss: DCC’s particular dance style, what happened to Charlie, the “fueling” discourse, how they handled/didn’t handle Kelcey’s stalker, “let’s do it for the brown girls,” the entire hair salon sequence, what the “It Factor” actually is, the shot of the coaches getting their makeup done, the final shot of the show, the recently retired girls ragging on everyone else for being boring and engaged, what Bama sorority Reese was in, truly the list is endless.
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I am so busy at work right now, but I have SO MANY MANY THOUGHTS. I won’t have time to get them all down. But please, ask me anything and I will respond as soon as I can!
I am 17 years removed from my stint as an NFL Cheerleader and so much of what you have written is spot on. That said, a lot of these women really do love to dance and the dance part is actually very challenging! Former college cheerleaders do not tryout for NFL squads because they don’t have the dance skills. I minored in classical dance in college and I still was one of the weaker dancers on the team.
I wish we could also talk about the joy and pleasure these women get from their dancing. I went into the show expecting to hate watch it and was surprised to find how much these women just genuinely love dance — a field that's very narrow and hard to get into with very few opportunities to perform on a stage the size of a football field.
The women were incredibly smart while also being compassionate and supportive towards one another, an unusual storyline on a reality show about beautiful, competitive women. There were so many scenes of them helping one another out, cheering each other and supporting each other when someone got cut. It was so tender and it surprised me.
I think what they are sad about losing of course is the fading power of idealized female beauty, but also the companionship and passion of having achieved mastery in their field — an activity that recently has been shown as a more successful treatment of depression than some medications (maybe this has something to do with why they love it so much)
I would love a take that explores why we don't dance culturally anymore and why dance has been pushed aside as a feminine wile instead of a community generating, joyful thing to do and behold.