Anyway....
Today I worked at the Brighton Centre for a conference called Future Cheer. It was strange. Whilst I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me (or the corporate hire that pays my wages), I can't help but be slightly disturbed by an odd event.
Future Cheer celebrate the small, but sizable minority of people across the UK into the US sub-sport (it is the female bit before the 'real business' of American Football/Baseball/Basketball matches take place). I find it disturbing in several ways. Firstly, it is a hugely obvious example of cultural imperialism. Whilst I am in no way a nationalist (indeed I believe a world without nation states would be better than today's system) I feel this is a blatant erosion of culture by an unpleasant Yankee import. It is crude, bitchy and heavily sexualised. Girls from 5-18 dress in unpleasantly skimpy outfits and prance about to songs about blow jobs by Flo Rida (lyrics: You spin my head round baby when you go down). I believe sexuality is an important part of growing up and people should not be naive about such issues. Children of 12 should at the very worst know how sex works, that it is natural and that it is not morally wrong and should really be helped to know how to handle their hormones, but this event strikes me as highly sexist. The boys that do it are dressed in t-shirts and long trousers but the girls wear short skirts. It seems to mirror society in some disturbing ways. Women are on the back foot to be the more overtly sexual of the two genders.
I don't mind this sort of event occurring, indeed it seems to bring people together, it just unsettles my views of society. To me 'cheerleading' is a celebration of oppression - both in terms of gender and social status (below 'real sports').
1 comment:
Whilst I do agree with your sentiment (Having been utterly disgusted to see a playboy logo on a baby’s bib, I s**t you not) I do feel some need to play the devils advocate.
Baseball, American Football and other American style huge stadium sports are incredibly boring. That’s why there are ‘just about fit enough to be considered attractive by drunk, desperate, middle age, balding men’ women wearing skimpy, shinny outfits: to keep them entertained for long enough for a substantial conclusion to be drawn from the game so that the testosterone filled males know to punch each other in the face on account of having “won” or “lost”. There is defiantly a need for cheerleaders…
And where are you going to get cheerleaders?
Well if we went around educating all women from a young age instead of sexualising them, then they wouldn’t want to present their bodies as a material object in front of a bunch of morons who genuinely, without any trace of insincerity, thinks that it makes sense to cry because someone managed to carry the skin of a pig from one end of a patch of grass to another, whilst trying not to get his neck snapped by a bunch of morording [sic] tossers wanked up on steroids, more times than another man was able to do so in the other direction.
There is a clear argument for the need to brain wash young women into thinking that the best way to get respect in this world, is to slap on a bunch of make up, put on a very small amount of lycra, and jiggle those “bazooka’s” for the fans.
And Ralph, your sceptical days are numbered, the advent of the combination of the internet with pornography means that ever more young people are being exposed and desensitised to adult physical relationships than ever before.
Further more Ralph, if you insist on spreading your anti-cheerleading hate, I will be forced to arrange for a team of cheerleaders to perform outside your house, drawing in hoards of hooligans who will be thrown into a rage when I suddenly cut the music and will resultantly riot there way into your living room…
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