OT I Thought I Would Share This Article I Wrote From Tumblr

[wide-worlds-joy]

I am on Tumblr as wide-worlds-joy. On there I follow a bunch of cheer blogs and CPs just because I love reading about cheer and the teams. But some were gettting a bunch of hate from random people who just seem down on Cheer in its entirety.

So I wrote this article.

I share it here with you so you can read/critique/share it with others.

Oh, and I must note, I am just a random fan. I don't have a CP, I wasn't a cheerleader when I was young, I have no horse running in this race, I just had to say this because the hate was getting intolerable.

The link to the original article is here: On Cheerleading

On Cheerleading


I would like to talk a bit on Cheerleading.
In my time surfing around Tumblr, I see a lot of cheer blogs and I see even more people being down on cheer. There’s a persistent myth that those who are cheerleaders are somehow more stuck up than others and that the girls are bitches. And I must say in all honesty that I have encountered that “more popular and stuck up than thou” attitude among the cheerleaders when I was in school.
But that was also a long time ago. Cheerleading then was cute girls shaking their poms to get crowds of rowdy boys excited about football, basketball, soccer, and other sports. There was flips, toe touches, maybe a pyramid done by getting on the backs of each other, but not any of the tosses and catches and so on.
It was performed in all kinds of weather, rain, snow, cold, ice or boiling hot. I had a lot of respect for those ladies. We also didn’t have anyone to do the spotting for them when they would do jumps and so on. If they fell, they fell.
Time passed from 1986 and now we have the cheerleaders of today. All Star, College, Professional, special squads for each team, even when it’s the same school, recreational cheer and more. In each case, these girls are doing athletic stunts that make trained Olympic athletes go “How in the hell did they do that?”
Everyone gets all awestruck when the gymnasts do triple doubles and then stick a landing, or do a run and a vault and get all kinds of air. No one gets impressed when a 110 lb girl gets thrown 40 feet into the air, does a triple twist and a pike while also doing a double summersault, to land, going an excess of 90 miles an hour, in the arms of three other girls who weigh about what she does. Everyone thinks it’s amazing when a diver sticks a handstand two and a half pike, but when the same 110 lb girl does a sequence of backflips and summersaults, cartwheels and jumps in a crowd of 30 other girls who are also doing the same thing at her, no one thinks anything of it.
People are amazed when the figure skater does a routine of two minutes at how much control they have and how they do the spins. But when a Cheerleader does the same routine with 30 other people, spinning and flipping, jumping and dancing for two and a half minutes, it’s nothing.
I have been following the sport of cheerleading for a while now. I was never a cheerleader when I was growing up and I wanted to be. Let me ask you a serious question, have you looked at these girls at some point? They are TONED, their bodies are hard, muscular without being weightlifter like (which I find attractive, although too much muscle bulk in a woman tends to turn me off), but when they are toned, well defined, I love it. They have to be strong to lift each other over their heads, to assist them with jumps and flips, to catch these girls who are moving rapidly through the air at them and to make sure these other girls, their teammates, are safe.
Then if one of them DOES get injured, they KEEP GOING. I saw a collision between two girls not too long ago. They were both doing flips at each other. The goal was to pass by each other, but something was thrown off where they were flipping at each other instead. They impacted and both split their heads open. One, who was the person being tossed around up front, went on through her routine, even though blood was pouring out of her skull. Meanwhile the other girl got off the mat and was passing out backstage. Two other girls, one blew her knee out and a fourth dislocated her shoulder.
But the routine went on.
Now, take this and put it in an NFL football game. Have you ever seen a linebacker break his arm, blow out his leg, and KEEP RUNNING PLAYS? Keep charging as hard as he could, even though he’s dazed, bleeding, arm hanging limp and keep running into other people as hard as he can? No. Usually the game gets stopped and they get taken off the field on a stretcher. But in Cheerleading, the girl who gets injured are expected, routinely, to keep going and to deal with it later.
Someone gets hit in the face in a basketball game, it’s a foul and the person hit gets some free shots on the basket. If it’s bad enough to draw blood, the person who hit them is penalized and possibly ejected from the game. If there’s cursing involved they are fined as well. In Cheerleading, kicking one of your teammates in the face happens all the freaking time, and the routine goes on, the music never stops, and no one is ejected or penalized for it. Even though both are accidents.
And through all of this the cheerleaders are expected to have a bright smile on their face, cheer like nothing is wrong and that they aren’t hurting.
But these girls are routinely called bitches, stuck up, nasty and insincere, whores and sluts, called every kind of degrading name under the sun. They are told they are fat every day, even though most are underweight, the only ones that get any admiration are the fliers, the ones being tossed up, even though if it weren’t for the girls on the bottom holding the fliers by their foot, the flier would be hurt a LOT.
Think about how much mental preparation you have to go through to do a trust fall backwards. Now, do a trust fall off the third story balcony and KNOW that someone is going to catch you, without most safety equipment.
Yeah, many of you are starting to get it.
Then add in the boys.
Males in cheerleading are considered to be the lowest of the low, gay and effeminate, not a man, emasculated. Have you actually LOOKED at them at any point. Most are more built than professional wrestlers, and I would not want to put a sumo wrestler up against any of them, I think the sumo would lose. These guys routinely pick up 110 lb girls and throw them up in the air, 15-20-30 feet up and catch them BY THEMSELVES. I mean, that’s friggin' impressive. Caber toss, where the Scott throws a pole away from themselves to see how far they can get it, is the ONLY sport where this big man throws something that heavy high into the air.
But they are called effeminate and not a man.
Want to know who is effeminate? George Herbert Walker Bush Jr., former president of the United States. He was a cheerleader for his college. Gay? Really?
Those male college cheerleaders are some of the most masculine people I know of, and further they know how to treat a woman the way they should be treated. I mean, High School cheer does have all these stunts, and have some boys who are doing the tosses and so on. But when you get to fully mature women, who are like 5’6” or so, probably in the order of 140 lbs or so, and these guys are tossing them around as though they weigh nothing? Not a job I would do.
Why is there such a stigma associated with this sport? Why is it NOT considered a sport? Why do people automatically think that cheerleaders are stuck up snobs and bitches? Or even worse, whores? I’ve seen almost no evidence that any of the accusations are accurate or even deserved.
Understand that just because this is viewed as cute girls jumping around and getting the crowd riled up, that does not mean that they are not athletes. In many ways they are better conditioned athletes than professional athletes on teams and celebrated in song, story and posters. They are certainly more fit than many athletes out there, and they have more endurance and sheer guts to stick it out than others. I KNOW they are better team players than most star athletes also. It’s only in the last couple years that you start hearing about celebrity cheerleaders, but you can probably name most of a team of sports players just because of endorsements and so on that they do. Don’t see Maddie up there talking about her favorite razor to shave her legs.
Yes, the poofs are silly, the bows should be on the back of the head not the front, the uniforms are getting even more skimpy than they need to, and the “professional” cheerleaders are nothing more than professional dance teams with poms. But cheerleading, High School, College, All Star and Rec, are athletes that should be respected as such. They aren’t just sex objects or bitches.
Cut them a break and give them some respect.