Cheerleading used to be as central to the Reaganite small-town wet-dream as picket fences. But a growing maelstrom of sex, substance abuse and violence has rocked the sport to its core, argues Steven Wells

It's the half-time show at an indoor soccer game in America. The Frisbee-catching dog having done its stuff, a team of cheerleaders takes the floor. They bump. They grind. They shake their backsides and thrust their pelvises. The audience - overwhelmingly composed of 7-12-year-olds who've just finished singing the Spongebob Squarepants song - stare politely, munch hot-dogs and slurp their bucket-sized soft drinks.

Then little girls are pulled out of the crowd by the cheerleaders, lined up and taught a hip-gyrating dance routine that ends with pronounced pelvic thrusts. My female companion - a British sociologist who specialises in sport and gender - nearly chokes on her salted popcorn.

"Urk! What is this?" she yells. "What the fuck are they doing?!"

A mum in a nearby seat looks pointedly in our direction and scowls. Don't we know there are children present?

Cheerleading is a sport in crisis. Actually, in crises. There's a furious debate as to whether it's actually a sport at all. There's a blazing row about just how appropriate it is to have schoolgirls in short skirts perform dirty dancing moves. And there are those who argue that cheerleading reinforces gender roles that should have been mocked to death back when Rock Hudson was pretending to be aroused by Doris Day.

And then there's the fact that for the last five years America has been ripped apart by a maelstrom of cheerleader sex, substance abuse and violence.

In Iowa, a 15-year-old cheerleader was arrested for allegedly writing "Columbine-style" threats to blow up her school.

In Boston members of a high school cheerleading squad produced "a homemade lesbian porno video".

In Minnesota, a cheerleader paid $50 to have a rival beaten up.

In Brooklyn kids at a school "pep rally" heckled, punched, kicked and then battered a cheerleader they considered "mediocre" with a garbage can.

In Pennsylvania a mob of drunken cheerleaders, doped up with malt liquor by their coach, went on a car-trashing rampage.

In Texas, teen cheerleaders were accused of sending a "shit pizza" to their local rivals.

In Colorado two cheerleaders were arrested for dealing morphine.

And - most famously - last year in Florida two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders were arrested after one of them hit a woman who objected to the "Top Cats" having sex with each other in a bar toilet stall.



If you want to know how deeply these stories scar the American psyche - try reading any of the above and substituting "member of the royal family" for "cheerleader". Because while cheerleaders for cheerleading will point out that there are grinning teens in flimsy ra-ra skirts and tight tops forming human pyramids everywhere from Dagenham to Da Nang, that's like boasting that there are folks who play cricket in Connecticut. Cheerleading is quintessentially American. More than that, the bright-as-a-button, perma-grinning, pony-tailed cheerleader is the shining icon of idealised American femininity. And as such she is at the centre of some of the American Culture Wars' most savagely fought brawls.

In 2005 the Texas legislature became one such battleground. In scenes that bordered on the surreal, politicians waving pom-poms debated a "cheerleader booty bill" designed to stamp out "overtly sexually suggestive" cheerleading. "We are telling teenagers not to have sex, but are teaching them how to do it on the football field and applauding them when they do it," claimed the bill's sponsor, Democratic representative Al Edwards. "It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down." Edwards, who once suggested that drug dealers should have their fingers snipped off, also claimed that cheerleading leads to teen pregnancies, school dropouts and the spread of STDs.

His bill provoked a ferocious national debate. "Tiny pleated skirts = good. Tight cheerleading sweaters = good. Being considered in pop culture to be fluffbunnies and lacking athletic prowess = good. Gyrating your hips like Elvis = bad," mocked one feminist critic.

The cheerleader, says Mary Ellen Hanson, author of Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture, is the poster child for the virgin/whore dichotomy; simultaneously representing "youthful prestige, wholesome attractiveness, peer leadership, and popularity" as well as "mindless enthusiasm, shallow boosterism, objectified sexuality and promiscuous availability."

America's cultural conservatives are severely conflicted about cheerleading. On one hand the cheerleader is obviously as much a part of the Reaganite small-town wet-dream as soda fountains, white picket fences and letter sweaters. More than that, she reinforces the 1950s gender stereotypes beloved of the political right. Men play American football; girls stand on the sidelines, cheer and look pretty. That's the way it used to be. That's the way they feel it still should be. And that's the way it will be again if conservatives ever manage to repeal Title IX - the 1972 legislation that mandates equal funding for male and female sports in education. Then they could get girls off the soccer pitch (hideous foreign, socialist game that it is) and back on to the sidelines where they belong.

On the other hand, cheerleading is so obviously sexually titillating that there are those on the Christian right who want to police it, Iran style. But this is no clear-cut conflict - it's nostalgists v authoritarians v libertarians, with cheerleading exposing the ugly ideological mess at the heart of modern conservatism.

Then there are those who attempt to bridge the gap - like Rose Clevenger, president of the North Carolina-based Christian Cheerleaders of America ("Building PEOPLE Before Pyramids"). While it's true that secular cheerleading is polluted with "bare midriffs, very short shirts, bump and grind music with vulgar lyrics, authority abusive lyrics and totally inappropriate moves with sexual implications", says Rose, her organisation has "biblically based standards of dress, music and moves." (The mind boggles).

"One of the strange things about cheerleader culture is that it crosses with religious culture," muses 24-year-old American cultural critic Marty Beckerman, author of the book Death To All Cheerleaders (in which he describes cheerleaders as a "race of loose bimbos with the brain capacity of squirrel faeces"). As a 16-year-old, Beckerman was sacked from his job as a newspaper cub reporter for asking a 13-year-old cheerleader what it felt like to be "a urine stain on the toilet seat of America".

"It's a strange game the parents play, where they want the girls to be sexy but not too sexy," says Beckerman. "There's a definite paedophile element - or at least ephebophile - with these old lechers getting off on young girls, but if they get too sexy, then these same religious parents say it's obscene and want to ban the sexual element. Perfect example of how this country is sexually repressed and obsessed at the same time."

Of course, this debate had to happen in Texas - home of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, the troupe generally credited with turning professional cheerleading into the para-pornographic spectacle it is today. "The audience deserves a little sex with its violence," chuckled CBS TV producer Chuck Milton, after the 1976 Super Bowl X, when the Cowboys' cheerleaders first rocked America. And since then, sneers New York Times columnist Frank Rich, the NFL has been in the "sex business".

"They took the wholesome All-American good girl and dressed her very provocatively, put her in tight pants and tops that showed a lot of cleavage" says Adams, associate professor at Alabama University and co-author of Cheerleader: An American Icon. "It's like one ex-Cowboys cheerleader told us: 'We were the ultimate male fantasy girls that you wanted to take home to Mom - but you wanted to have sex with us on the way'."

Meanwhile, out in the hinterland, non-professional cheerleading has evolved and mushroomed. And so has the controversy. Natalie Adams, a former cheerleader herself, says cheerleading has split into two camps - the traditional and the competitive. Competitive cheerleaders don't cheer; they just compete with other cheerleaders. It's a strange situation perhaps analogous to English soccer hooliganism carrying on in the absence of any soccer.

"Over 20 state athletic associations now classify cheerleading as a sport," says Adams. Which has led to some feminist critics arguing that this is a blatant attempt to roll back Title IX, drag girls away from "real sports" and turn them back into rah-rahing female eunuchs.

Alternative America has long despised the cheerleader. In the 1991 video for Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana used anarchy symbol adorned cheerleaders (they originally wanted them "overweight and ugly") to symbolise sterile conformity. In his writings, singer Kurt Cobain fantasised about "cheerleaders and... football jocks" being stripped naked and humiliated at gunpoint. "They must be petrified to ever think of being the stuck-up, self-righteous, segregating, guilt-spreading, ass kissing, white right-wing republicans of the future."

A Baltimore punk band called Die Cheerleader released a record titled Down With Pom Poms. On hip American teen websites, conformist females are denigrated as "chimbos" (cheerleading bimbos"). And there's even an Anti-Cheerleading Association operating out of Arkansas, which claims that "cheerleading is kept strong by the forces of Hitler from beyond the grave".

But so strong is the appeal of the cheerleader that in recent years she has even conquered the hearts of radical America. The Nirvana-style "punk cheerleader" - such an absurd and subversive oxymoron in 1991 - now makes semi-regular appearances at the Super Bowl pre-game and half-time shows (surely the acme of cultural co-option). Meanwhile the spiky, transgressive (and occasionally satanic) alternative cheerleader has become a counter-cultural cliché. She's a regular at roller derby games, anti-war demonstrations, alternative karaoke evenings, psychobilly gigs and wherever hipsters gather to knit, sip Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and bitch about the straights.

Some alternative cheerleaders - like the milky-eyed, tombstone-toothed and prison-tattooed Texas "trailer-trash" cheerleaders "MiLi and TilduH" are clearly parodies of mainstream cheerleading's sanitised girly-girliness. But others, says Natalie Adams, refuse to condemn their mainstream sisters. Even while they take part in demonstrations with chants like: "Lube me up and bind those wrists/to fuck like this is to resist/give a cop a golden shower/come on baby, fight the power!" these feminist and queer activist cheerleaders claim solidarity with rah-rahing straight girls in smalltown America, whose passions and pastimes - they claim - have always been mocked, trivialised and abused, precisely because they're seen as female.

Which brings us to the final battlefield in the Cheerleading Wars.

"If a daughter of mine wanted to be a cheerleader I would boil her alive," claims Marty Beckerman. "But not 'till I killed her, just until I killed her dreams. But if it was my son I'd drag him behind my truck 'till he died."

When the Sacramento Kings basketball team tried to introduce male cheerleaders, they were, according to one report "booed off the court by scandalised fans whose beer-addled brains were fixated on seeing cheerleaders' bouncing jugs." And when pictures of George W Bush in male cheerleading gear started circulating on the web, at least one right-wing blogger was convinced it was a PhotoShop stitch-up concocted to demean Dubya's sexuality.

The irony is that, until the second world war, cheerleading was almost exclusively male - and in some places male cheerleading flourished well into the 1960s. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin D Roosevelt, Jimmy Stewart, Michael Douglas, Samuel L Jackson, Steve Martin and George Bush senior were all teenage cheerleaders. But nowadays it's like Billy Elliot never happened. The mere presence of a man in a cheerleading jersey is enough to start most male American sports fans pounding on the closet door.

Meanwhile, out there in cheerleading land, the few boys who do gain entrance are forbidden to dance. Their movements are straight-armed, jerky and militaristic. Their haircuts are short and neat - GI Joe to the girls' scrunchie-restrained Malibu Barbie. Stepford gender is alive and well in 21st-century America.

But so is the alternative. While the cheerleader might give us a fascinating snapshot of the American Culture Wars, Natalie Adams reckons there might only be as few as 1.8m cheerleaders in the entire country. This contrasts with probably more than 10m female soccer players. Like the soda fountain and the letter sweater, as an icon the cheerleader is well past her sell-by date. But it might be a while before America wakes up and smells the Ralgex.