Cheerleading, by nature, is a form of propaganda—I can say this, I think, having cheered in Texas for six years. But the North Korean cheerleading squad, which will perform at the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, this Friday, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, occupies its own stratosphere of weaponized comeliness and discipline. The squad, which has been dubbed, in South Korea, the “army of beauties,” presents a doll-house version of military service: girls in their late teens and early twenties are plucked from the country’s most prestigious universities and charged with making North Korea look good. The cheerleaders are chosen on the basis of appearance and ideology—they undergo background checks, to insure that there are no defectors or enemy sympathizers in their families, and they must be pretty (and at least five feet three). At this year’s Olympics, two hundred and thirty cheerleaders from North Korea will be in attendance. The country is sending about two dozen athletes.

The cheerleaders haven’t been seen outside North Korea for some time. A sparse collection of aughts-era photos and video shows them in unnerving numbers, as uniform and multitudinous as bees on a hive. They’re often dressed like golf caddies, in baseball hats and crisp polo shirts in bright red and white. Sometimes, they wear modernized hanbok. (At a 2002 basketball game against the Philippines, the girls wore singing-telegram outfits, and, at a 2013 basketball game in Pyongyang that put twelve North Korean players against four Harlem Globetrotters and ended, reportedly, in a 110–110 tie, Dennis Rodman watched the cheerleaders dance in miniskirts.) Instead of doing floor routines, they mostly stick to the stands, chanting and wielding a variety of props in unison: flags, tambourines, fans, megaphones that look like flowers.

Past cheer captains have inspired dedicated online fan clubs in South Korea, where the cheerleaders have been accumulating devotees since 2002. That year, two hundred and eighty-eight of them arrived in Busan, for the Asian Games—the largest group of North Koreans to arrive in South Korea since the Korean War. In 2003, three hundred cheerleaders, clothed in attire that the Washington Post described as “part Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, part Red Army,” travelled to the Universiade Games, in Daegu. “What do we want?” they shouted at the South Korean crowd. “Unification!” the crowd shouted back. They raised North Korean flags and chanted, “Skill! Technique! Focus!” On the same trip, the cheerleaders caused a scene when they spotted, mid-transit, a welcome poster featuring Kim Jong Il that was getting rained on. Six buses stopped on the side of the road. Thirty or so sobbing girls ran back to retrieve the poster. A South Korean police officer told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper that the cheerleaders were “wailing loudly as they got on the bus, like women who had just lost their husbands. People who were at the scene were saying that it was beyond their comprehension, and some even said it gave them the chills.”

In 2005, a hundred and one North Korean cheerleaders were sent to Incheon, South Korea, for the Asian Athletics Championship. Among these girls was sixteen-year-old Ri Sol Ju, the daughter of a top officer in North Korea’s Air Force, who, four or five years later, would go on to marry Kim Jong Un. (A commentator told Newsweek that Ri’s work as a cheerleader served as a sort of prequalification for marrying the dictator.) The next year, reports emerged that twenty-one cheerleaders who had travelled to Incheon had been sent to a prison camp for talking about what they saw in the South. The girls had apparently pledged, before leaving, that they would regard South Korea as “enemy territory” and would never speak about their experiences. The squad has not returned to South Korea since. (In 2014, North Korea withheld its cheerleaders from the Asian Games, in Incheon, after South Korea refused to pay for expenses. Fretting politicians told The Economist that the cheerleaders were an “essential condition” for the games’ success.)

A friend who grew up in Seoul told me that the cheerleaders’ appeal in South Korea is a matter of contrast: the girls are fresh-faced and traditional, seemingly unspoiled by materialistic concerns. (“Whereas our cheerleaders are sort of K-popped out,” my friend texted me.) The Korean phrase “nam nam buk nyeo” refers to the idea that North Korean women and South Korean men make the best mates—a term that hints at female bodies becoming a conduit for the larger reunification. About eighty-five per cent of defectors who have moved to South Korea since the Korean War have been women. There are even matchmaking agencies “specializing” in North Korean women: one C.E.O. told the Dong-A Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, that “North Korean women are highly likely to be matched because they value the character of their spouse and are less picky about age, vocation, and academic background than their South Korean counterparts.”

Cheerleading is always a site of gender struggle, often setting the desire of women to showcase their abilities against, or sometimes in tandem with, the obligation to make the world better for men. In America, professional cheerleaders are severely underpaid élite dancers—true athletes, dressed in knee-high boots and slips of spandex, who often end up effectively paying to support male athletes and their fans. Money aside, some cheerleaders seem to prefer a gender hierarchy: in 2007, more than half of the cheerleading squad at an upstate New York high school quit once a Title IX complaint forced them to cheer for girls’ teams, too. Then there are competitive cheerleaders, who, over the last few decades, have been making a largely unseen case for extraordinary athletic achievement on decidedly female terms. To see what good competitive cheerleading looks like these days, check out the University of Kentucky cheerleaders, who have won the Universal Cheerleaders Association’s national cheerleading championship twenty-three times since 1985. They will be representing the United States at these Olympics.

It’s always funny to recall that cheerleading actually originated, in the late nineteenth century, with men. In 1911, The Nation wrote that being a cheerleader was “one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college . . . it ranks hardly second to that of having been a quarter-back.” Eisenhower and F.D.R. were cheerleaders. Women weren’t even allowed to cheer until 1923. After that, the pastime changed. Cheerleaders began to seem decorative and submissive: the idea being that if women were cheerleaders, then cheerleaders must be there to look pretty, and to do what they’re told. By the twenty-first century, the idea of a powerful man being a cheerleader was something of a punch line.

Today, ironically, North Korea may be the nation that gives cheerleaders the most credit, in a way. The squad is supposed to have incredible power—but that power is directly connected to the degree to which the girls appear under control. It will be absurd, in Pyeongchang, to watch one of the world’s most repressive, totalitarian nations attempt to deploy two hundred and thirty smiling women as a diplomatic shield. The underlying idea is so ridiculous that it’s almost thrilling. Female youth, beauty, and obedience are supposed to be that distracting—a spectacle that could even dissipate thoughts of nuclear war.