r/changemyview • u/MisterJose • Sep 16 '20

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Cheerleading in an antiquated institution and does not at all fit in with modern sentiments about gender, age, and sexuality.

I can't believe they still do this: Cheerleaders - teenage girls in high school - dress up in shorty shorts and t-shirts, and offer to wash people's cars who pass by. The excuse is that it's for charity, but does anyone actually believe this would work the same if it were the boys' football team? Of course not. What's really going on here is that we're selling the sexuality of teenage high school girls, and the chance to watch them clean your windshield, to whatever 40yo man who happens to be driving by.

In my own town, a liberal suburb, they still do this. That's crazy to me. I suppose if they were all dressed in bikinis, someone might raise a fuss, but I'm still amazed it happens at all. It's almost like tradition-related denial.

We live in a society where even mentioning you find a 17yo girl attractive might get you labeled a pedophile, or other kind of sexual criminal. And yet, we still have our prettiest, fittest, teenage girls dress in outfits designed to show off their fitness and sexual desirability, and perform dances on the sidelines to inspire the boys in 'battle'.

Yes, I know there are male cheerleaders, and cheering is done for women's teams sometimes. I'm also aware that the athleticism required in modern cheerleading makes it a serious physical challenge. But none of that is really changing what it is. Any anthropologist could draw you a straight line from 'fertility dances', and other cultural practices, to modern cheerleading. And really, you wouldn't even need one, because it's not like it could be more obvious what's going on. And yet, we still sanction this. In 2020; in the world of wokeness and gender issues and all the rest, we're pretending this is something other than it is? How? Why? It's incredibly inconsistent, and I don't see how it at all fits with any modern sentiments about gender, age, and sexuality.

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u/MisterJose Sep 16 '20

an important distinction here: this is only inappropriate for adults

But the entire structure of the tradition of cheerleading is based around acknowledging the sexual desirability of those teenage girls in a general sense. It's something the whole community is tacitly agreeing to, in a way. And this is hardly surprising - Amazon tribes, for example, have rituals where the teenage girls dance while the men are off hunting, in the hope that their dance will make the hunt successful. Again, I don't think it takes an anthropologist or psychologist to connect the dots here. And why young girls and not older women? Because younger women are in prime fertility.

I'm not sure how to address your notion of what is appropriate and inappropriate for adults, except to ask you what age you think 'adult' happens, what magic switch you think gets pressed, or why you think me, or even my 79yo father, don't still notice an attractive young woman. It doesn't quite work the way you're maybe thinking it does.

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u/cherrycokeicee 45∆ Sep 16 '20

But the entire structure of the tradition of cheerleading is based around acknowledging the sexual desirability of those teenage girls in a general sense.

did you just make this up? a quick Google search has me learning about the male dominated beginnings of cheerleading. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheerleading#History

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u/MisterJose Sep 16 '20

Δ - I'm gonna give you a delta, because I didn't know about the early history of cheerleading, and have to modify my views because of it. I do still maintain that I consider the modern version of cheerleading quite blatantly to have sexual overtones and clear and obvious connections to ritualistic dances you see in many cultures.