What cheerleaders and sorority videos say about America’s cultural anxieties

The primary ever cheerleader — in keeping with USA Cheer, the governing physique of American sport cheering — was a person from Minnesota. The game was born in 1898, when a male pupil on the College of Minnesota spontaneously received up and led the group in a cheer for the soccer workforce. Males have at all times been part of cheerleading; a number of US presidents, together with Ronald Reagan, had been cheerleaders in faculty, and male cheerleaders have been part of the NFL sidelines for many years.So how is it that Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn, the 2 male cheerleaders added to the Minnesota Vikings’ squad final Might, have obtained such widespread backlash? After a current social media promo, the vary of people that spoke out towards the Vikings for including the duo to their squad included a former Viking, a senator, and loads of Fox Information commentators. Out of the blue, the Vikings had been being blamed for serving to perpetuate, as one Instagram commenter put it, “the sissification of America.”The workforce has additionally obtained loads of help from Vikings followers and different members of the general public, in addition to different males on NFL cheer squads. Some NFL groups have seized the second to brag about their very own mixed-gender dance squads. The backlash appears to be coming from a minority right here, and isn’t more likely to change the NFL’s embrace of all-gender sidelines. However what’s attention-grabbing right here is the timing. Males have been on NFL cheerleading groups for years. Why is that this sudden groundswell of anger taking place now?Alongside the Vikings backlash, social media customers have additionally been touting viral clips of sorority rush dances, claiming them as “wins” for conservative America and conventional values. How is it, precisely, that choreographed, celebratory group dance has grow to be a entrance line, so to talk, of the tradition wars round gender and sexuality?This motion to impose inflexible gender requirements and assumptions on teams of people that shake could be ahistorical, however it exemplifies the shifting boundaries of the tradition wars. Conservative commentators have been in battle with the NFL — which the Heritage Basis declared “woke” final 12 months — and the schools that home these sororities. Now, they’re trying to reclaim the sidelines — and the road dancers.Males have already been cheerleading within the NFL for decadesThe Vikings inadvertently kickstarted the brouhaha on August 9 by posting a full of life clip of their new dance squad on Instagram. The video featured Conn entrance and heart, smiling and doing a backflip earlier than becoming a member of the remainder of the squad of their routine. Each males are devoted dancers. Shiek has been dancing for a decade and was a part of his faculty dance squad at North Dakota State College. Conn simply led his Iowa State workforce to win the Nationwide Cheer and Dance Championship.Cheerleading has at all times been related to soccer, however its origins as a masculine pastime are sometimes ignored. Not solely was the game traditionally male-inclusive, however for many years after it started, it was solely a male pastime. It wasn’t till World Warfare II, when girls stepped into roles beforehand designated for males, that all-women cheerleading groups grew to become the norm.“Cheerleading was the epitome of masculinity,” Natalie Adams, a uncommon cheerleading skilled and creator of the forthcoming ebook Cheer Issues: Gender, Race, Intercourse and Belonging in an American Establishment, advised me. “As late as 1939 on the faculty degree, there was this premier cheerleading league that was… all male.”The early Twentieth-century affiliation of cheerleading with collegiate Americana, patriotism, and athleticism has by no means actually light, and males have remained part of the game. The Baltimore Ravens have had a whole multi-gender stunt workforce, devoted to tumbling, lifts, and acrobatics, on the sidelines for the reason that late ’90s. For some time, so did the Indianapolis Colts. The Dallas Cowboys have lengthy touted having the NFL’s solely multi-gender dance and drum line, the Rhythm & Blue Dancers.In 2018, two NFL groups, the Rams and the Saints, quietly added males to their dance-focused cheerleading squads. The Rams took their new male dancers to the Tremendous Bowl in 2019. Since then, 11 different groups across the NFL — together with the Vikings, which have had males on their squads earlier than — have joined in including male dancers to their sidelines. In 2022, the Carolina Panthers welcomed the NFL’s first trans cheerleader, Justine Lindsay. (She’s leaving to deal with pageantry work.) The Ravens at present brag about having 19 males on their still-fire stunt squad.On the time these adjustments occurred, they ruffled few cultural feathers. Arguably the first causes for that had been the widespread cultural resurgence for gender equality sparked by Me Too and the loosening of gender norms that got here with a higher societal embrace of the LGBTQ+ rights motion, each of which meant just a few groups including males to bounce groups wasn’t a trigger for concern. There have been different components, as nicely. Netflix’s 2020 documentary collection Cheer sparked a wave of cultural respect for cheerleading as a sport (although aggressive cheer and pro-football cheer are typically very completely different). The NFL, in the meantime, confronted battles of a unique type: The cultural proper spent these years fixating on Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter protests within the sport.And so, cultural outrage lay dormant till the Minnesota Vikings introduced its new fall cheerleading lineup in 2025.The Vikings backlash attracts strains between female and male athletes The substance of the backlash round Sheik and Conn has been centered on their masculinity, with statements and on-line feedback which can be each homophobic, and — even if each dancers are cis males — transphobic.“I don’t have something towards male cheerleaders … There have been male cheerleaders round a very long time,” Fox pundit Will Cain stated in a section on the backlash. “[But] if we’re actually being sincere, we’re speaking about male cheerleaders being feminine cheerleaders.”Whereas the precise which means of Cain’s remark is unclear — once more, neither male cheerleader identifies as trans or nonbinary — he appears to be referring to Conn and Sheik’s type of dance, which matches their feminine counterparts’. If the priority is about supposed femininity, precisely how carefully ought to the squad’s coach police their athletes for indicators of gender fluidity? But once more, the red-blooded Dallas Cowboys have had males bumping and grinding alongside girls on their dance workforce for nicely over a decade, and few individuals appear to be questioning their masculinity.The Vikings cheer squad appear to have picked up on the transphobic subtext of the arguments towards them. One squad member, Brianna Putney, has since posted a viral TikTok video exhibiting Conn and Shiek dancing alongside their squadmates in a girls’s toilet. These arguments additionally appear to coincide with an underlying substrain of misogyny — the concept that “actual males” belong on the sphere whereas girls want to stay on the sidelines. As Putney’s video suggests, it’s the blurring of these gender roles that’s the actual offense.To know how this works in a sport that was as soon as solely male, now we have to know that, traditionally, as soon as the make-up of cheerleading modified from male-only to women-only, cheerleading itself grew to become related to normative superb femininity. “Fascinating traits for a cheerleader had been issues like attraction, reputation, attractiveness,” Adams stated, “all feminized traits … nothing about athleticism.”The place beforehand, male cheerleaders had been seen as campus leaders who had been able to crowd management, by 1955, the function had modified. Ladies had been seen as being incapable of main the group the way in which males may; their presence was more and more about being eye sweet. This transformation solidified in 1972, when the Dallas Cowboys, which had beforehand had an unofficial co-ed squad of highschool cheerleaders, swapped them out for a line of choreographed dancers — a transfer that ushered within the fashionable iteration of professional NFL cheerleading, catering to an viewers that was assumed to be straight male by default.Cheryl Cooky, professor of American Research at Purdue, notes that this transfer coincided with the shift in fascinated with soccer itself as not simply sport, however leisure, alongside the emergence of broadcast sports activities. As soccer grew to become a type of cultural energy through the Chilly Warfare, alongside social developments just like the Kennedy health take a look at, the game highlighted “fears across the virility of American males, and the way we’d compete with [world powers],” Cooky stated.That militarism, nonetheless on show in soccer in the present day, will get coded as masculine and conservative, whereas cheerleading will get coded as its female reverse — a stigma that arguably results in girls on skilled cheerleading squads being minimized, disrespected, and underpaid. That’s lastly altering, however these adjustments additionally threaten to destabilize the binary gender presentation that soccer gamers and cheerleaders conveniently represents. Thus, male cheerleaders who carry out choreography alongside girls on the squad are doing much more to disrupt the gender order in a second the place politicization of gender is excessive.If the NFL is changing into destabilized and “woke,” then the place else can we search for a reinforcement of that gender binary? Conservatives appear to have latched onto faculty sororities in its place — particularly, the sorority rush dance.This 12 months, a number of rush movies have gone viral in right-leaning social media corners, with posters on Twitter and different platforms claiming each the movies and the ladies in them for right-wing tradition and framing them as “wins” within the tradition struggle towards liberalism. There’s no stable proof these girls are politically conservative themselves (girls who attend faculty have constantly leaned liberal for the reason that Eighties), however the wave of enthusiasm for these younger, engaging girls appears instantly tied to the anxiousness round gender in cheerleading.“What conjures in my thoughts is preppy white children going to soccer video games, being concerned in Greek life…quintessential ‘All-American,’ ‘large man on campus’ [tropes],” stated Cooky. She argues that the pattern has ties to the tradwife motion, the “previous cash” pattern, and different current conservative aesthetic developments. If girls on the NFL sidelines are demanding extra equality and higher pay whereas they carry out dances for a broader viewers, these sorority rush movies permit conservative males to renew the fantasy of a chic, scorching girl dancing only for them.Who will get to bounce? And why?Underlying these two developments is the fundamental query: Who will get to bounce, and why? The thought appears to be that white, younger, stunning, conservative-coded girls are allowed to carry out for a presumed straight cisgender male viewers, however solely in formation and solely on the sidelines. It’s additionally price stating that when proficient teams of Black girls dancers go viral, they typically face backlash for performing the identical dance types that many conservatives appear to now be applauding.Cooky additionally argues that the bigger dialog is equally about masculinity and what sort of man will get to learn from male privilege. “It’s not simply that [men are] dancing, it’s the place they’re dancing,” she stated. “It’s that they’re dancing throughout the area of soccer.”She factors out that no one’s upset that there are male ballet dancers. That’s as a result of “NFL soccer has this cultural dominance and visibility and capital in ways in which different areas [don’t].” In the meantime, whereas different features of upper schooling are below hearth, Greek life and the faculty soccer milieu arguably nonetheless symbolize a model of Americana to conservatives that the NFL has been steadily transferring away from, which is why it’s so necessary to conservatives to assert them as their areas. “These are the anchors of universities for a motive,” Cooky stated.It is smart, then, that conservatives have a vested curiosity in dictating who will get to bounce on the soccer sidelines and on faculty campuses. Traditionally, in spite of everything, dance has lengthy been used to problem societal constructions, from dances on protest strains to Hairspray’s interracial sock hops.But the act of motion, of claiming bodily autonomy, of expressing pleasure by movement — these are all issues which can be extraordinarily tough to wrangle or prohibit. Inevitably, drawing strains round who can and might’t dance solely incites extra of us to chop footloose.