The newest sex scandal on the horizon: NFL Cheerleaders

Politics and religion
61

Pretty much what I’ve heard, and seen. The Patriots Cheerleaders and the mascot would regularly do these events at bars and car dealerships and shit, basically places where scummy dudes congregate. They’d have to pose for photos with guys, who always got grabby, and they’d sell those calendars for $25 and they’d all have to sign them.

Since this was all for “charity” they didn’t get paid. But you can be sure the bar owners sold plenty of drinks (not for charity) and the car dealers got many leads on customers (not for charity) so the whole thing is sketchy as fuck.

Still, they made it a point to tell me that the Patriots org forbade the pimp like behavior. No employee of the Patriots was allowed to date them or really even interact with them. If a player and a cheerleader hooked up the player would be benched or cut. If an employee tried to flirt with one they would be fired.

62

Deadspin had a bit about cheerleader pay and their insane rules a few years ago, including getting a copy of their employment manual:

2009 pay was $100 per game, uniforms cost $250, and you aren’t reimbursed for any mileage or expenses incurred getting to mandatory practices. A minimum of 20 unpaid “appearances” during the season. Also, you’re required to be at the game 5 hours before kickoff, so that’s like 8-9 hours of work that day.

63

Nothing is required of these girls, they can quit anytime. Mandatory appearances for no pay? Boo hoo, quit. Make $1000 per year? Boo hoo, quit. Sponsor makes a pass at you? Boo hoo, quit. This is not a job, it’s a platform for vapid, pretty girls to try and land a rich husband or be a model. Gimme a break.

Now taking their passports is terrible. But right when they get asked to go on a date with a sponsor, or get topless, or do blow with a tiger, they can go ahead and tell the team to fuck off. It’s not like millions of dollars are being dangled in front of them, or health insurance, or the promise of a career or advancement. They are all narcissists, to a tee. Who would do this stupid job? A stupid person.

So yes, this was completely innappropriate by the team and that slimeball Redskins owner. Those girls should be outraged and tell all their friends not to be Redskins cheerleaders. But sex trafficking? Sex slaves?

That girl didn’t cry because she felt like she was being forced into prostitution overseas. She cried because she had this idea of an all expenses paid glamourous beach vacation and then found out all she was to the team was a piece of candy they could dangle in front of a rich guy. Her hopes and dreams of her $1000 a year job turning into a million dollar model contract evaporating before her eyes.

Calling this sex trafficking in my opinion really muddies it up with the victims of real forced prostitution. Maybe this will be a wake-up call and less women will want to to be cheerleaders and more women will want to be accountants.

64

That sounds exactly like what she described. Also the part about no dating players or staff, etc. It’s strange that they have those fraternization rules, but they are completely oblivious to those NOT with the team and their grabass behavior.

That article on the Redskins cheerleaders is fucked up beyond belief.

65

I guess I’d respond by saying that the treatment of women as property isn’t a zero sum game. Using strong language to describe the horribly fucked up treatment of female employees by a giant corporate brand like the Washington Redskins doesn’t have to mean that we’re reducing the issue or seriousness of human sex slave trafficking throughout the US and the world.

It’s possible to see that both are fucked up beyond belief, and that they share attributes even while parsing that there are gulfs of difference between them.

66

I’m not the one who mentioned sex trafficking, maybe that was Triggercut?

They are employees of the NFL. They get pay stubs. In a job where you or I work, if any boss told a woman she had to have pictures taken naked, then let others watch, then told the same woman to be a forced date for someone at an event, without a way for her to easily get help (another country) or leave (no passport) it would be an immediate sexual harassment case, if not more. There would be people fired, probably as soon as the news was broken.

Regardless of if a young woman of less that 25 years of age didn’t have the courage to say no, even multiple times, most everything mentioned was illegal. Sexual harassment of an egregious amount is absolutely, 100% a crime. It is so at the federal level and applies to all states.

67

Yes, agree this is on a spectrum of horrible behavior and sexual harrassment sounds right.

68

The faster sports leagues get rid of their cheerleaders, the better. There’s really no need for them, and as most ex-pro cheerleaders will tell you, the job is shitty, exploitative, and almost never leads to a modeling career beyond what the women could get on their own.

Also, I’ll reiterate what others have said. There’s a wide gulf between what NFL/NBA cheerleaders do and the cheer teams that compete with full-on dance routines and death-defying acrobatics. If the NFL changed their cheerleaders to that kind of thing, I’d be all for their continued presence.

69

That was my reaction, starting with the “they took our passports” part. Holy shit

The other ‘holy shit’ part is that happened five years ago, and only now is anyone hearing about it. The NFL basically controls much of the media covering it.

In any case, I hope the solution to this isn’t, “So we should fire all the cheerleaders – problem solved!”

70

Forced nudity and going on dates with strangers is not the same thing as performing dances in a stadium. If you think those are equivalent, then you’d have to toss womens’ beach volleyball, tennis, figure skating and almost every other women’s sport in there, as ‘revealing outfits’ and some degree of sex appeal are present in all of them.

I assume we’re not advocating for burkhas, or elimination of any job that you consider demeaning to the people who chose to take it?

71

Also, consider that these young women are in a foreign country, and someone in power over them has taken their passports. If they say no way to something, then what? They get dumped on street? Whether or not the Redskins would have actually ditched the women there (unlikely, given the potential fallout), i’m pretty sure that one, the women would have ended up being treated even more wretchedly had they refused, and pretty much humiliated and sent home by the most annoying and uncomfortable way possible, and two, that the women involved were justified in being very apprehensive about how much leverage they had in terms of what they said yes to. Taking all the context into mind, I have a hard time blaming these women for much of anything.

72

I disagree with this. There are a lot of shitty, poorly paid jobs out there. I don’t think the answer is to forbid people from taking part-time jobs you judge to be a bad choice. As with every other workplace, the focus should be on making sure the kind of exploitation seen in this story never happens.

Yeah, this is the part that puts it completely over the top. Sure, they can refuse to be naked or to go on these ‘dates…,’ or can they? There’s a serious implication of coercion involved here.

73

With most terrible, low-wage jobs, the solution to make them better is to pay the workers more and improve work conditions. If both those things happened with NFL cheerleaders, then I’d be fine with it. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen as long as young women are willing to join these squads despite the shit pay and well-publicized issues.

I personally see no value in these cheerleaders. No one is going to stop watching the games if they didn’t exist, and the women would do better for themselves taking almost any other part-time job while looking for modeling opportunities. Heck, some teams got rid of their cheerleaders years ago and they’re doing fine.

74

That was a given, at least to me. But this isn’t an either/or situation. In the context of this being an nfl team, as opposed to some other company, that’s what needs to happen here, imo.

75

I am a season ticket holder for a WHL hockey team (ages 16-20), and we have our own little group of cheerleaders, called the Rosebuds. They use shoes with small spikes in them to allow them to dance on the ice. it’s a nice short entertainment.

They practice 2x a week, and then do games, mostly on the weekends. For free. It’s all volunteer. I honestly do not think they are chasing modeling contracts.

I think they honestly get enjoyment by being in the spotlight and performing routines they’ve practiced on. I can count on 1 hand the mistakes they’ve made in 10 years of watching - and as with any other group, their membership changes probably 20-25% every year. There are no weigh-ins, and that’s fine.

So, saying they should just give up and quit, I don’t think it’s in their vocabulary. I would imagine they look at being at a pro event much like the pinnacle of their craft, and that it gives them a stage or rather recognition of all the hard work they’ve done to get to that point. They truly are the best at what they do.

It’s a shame they are exploited, and the example here with the Redskins is so bad on so many levels, I hope that there are charges brought forth because these scum should be held fully accountable.

It sucks this was happened 5 years ago because this type of behavior likely continued on this & other teams during this time frame but now that it’s out in the open, particularly with everything else, that the retribution will be swift and harsh and very public.

76

Outfits, coaches, competitions etc all need paying for. Cheerleaders actually compete against other cheerleaders in weekly competitions during the “off season”. High schools, at least in my area, don’t pay for most of the costs of those items. Also many schools will compete region wide so you need to add travel costs and then there is cheerleader summer camp. Yea, that’s a thing.

From my experience with my kids (they were in the band) nothing is more expensive in high school than having a daughter be a cheerleader.

77

It is “interesting” to see the reaction to cheerleaders being abused, to say the least.

Personally i think that it’s offensive to see cheerleading as being as Guap puts it “narcissists, to a tee”. OTOH, it’s probably wrong to go too far in the other direction and deny that cheerleading conveys a certain cachet of attractiveness and popularity.

Almost all the girls in my extended family who became cheerleaders were groomed to do so from a very early age, going into gymnastics and continuing gymnastics until their adolescence. To a certain extend they becoming cheerleaders was part and parcel of a “sorority mother” helicopter parent lifestyle, making sure they were always doing the “right” and popular things and being around the right people so that they could got to the right college and get into the right sorority and marry the right sort of person and have kids who they would raise to do the same.

Even around high school there developed a split between the tumble cheerleaders and the taller pom-pom cheerleaders. The tumble girls had strict height and weight requirements but were gymnasts and athletic; the pom-pom girls tended to be taller and more conventionally attractive and much less demanding athletically. Some of these programs were as intense and time demanding as actual sports, and sometimes probably even more so since there were sports year round as well as gymnastic / dance competitions to attend. The amount of work and time high school cheerleaders are compelled to do certainly outpaced my comparatively slacker lifestyle as a high school student.

OTOH there is no doubt that part of the reason to become a cheerleader is to fulfill a female desire for popularity and attractiveness, and it’s understood by everyone that attractiveness is part of what makes a girl a cheerleader. I find it weird that i’ve occasionally read feminist arguments arguing that cheerleading is empowering; but you’ll find a random person to speak in defense of anything women do that relates to their sexuality as being empowered as long as it’s consensual.

When my cousin tried out for the cheerleading squad at LSU they were literally being paraded in front the governor and senior politicians, girls being brought with entourage of dressers and clothiers, their uniforms in glass encased boxes, and their acceptance or rejection to the LSU cheer squad long predetermined by nepotism, politicking, bribery or under the table deal making by their connected parents. College level cheerleading was an invisible gateway into the higher tiers of Louisiana society for young women of a conventional nature. (And i’m suspect, though i have literally no information about this, this was a highly segregated affair).

Many of cheerleaders i’ve known have 0 understanding of the actual game they were cheering - many of the girls whom attended every football game in high school had literally never watched a single game of football. Also, there has always been a strong bias against cheerleaders (females) cheering girls sports (other females); it just didn’t “feel right”. The unspoken assumption about what cheerleading represented from a gender role and sexuality perspective were and still present. Cheering is more than just cheering your team, it seems.

The only NFL cheerleader i’ve known, and i suspect what many NFL cheerleaders stories are, seems to be about extending that lifestyle a couple more years. They’ve been in gymnastics and cheering literally since they’ve been able to walk, they accepted and enjoyed this, and they want to keep it going for a while longer. I don’t get the sense they’re “scheming” to snag a man or a modeling career (i’d bet that just an easy answer); i’d suspect it’s just because this is all they’ve known for most of their lives. OTOH, at least the girl i did know, she stood out like a sore thumb among the flock of girls around her; she had clearly begun dressing and doing her makeup like, to put it a certain way, a woman whose job involved looking attractive to men. I suspect places like the NFL can take advantage of the huge attrition going on from matriculating undergraduate college cheerleaders to find girls still willing to cheer a while longer for cutrate prices. The problem for the girls is that the social cachet has completely flipped; NFL cheering has none of the upward social mobility that college level cheerleading often implies. Probably too late do the girls realize this themselves.

78

Well, until they have their passports taken away.

79

Sorry man, I didn’t know you meant both, in which case I agree!

80

OK. But the cheerleaders themselves do see value in these ‘jobs.’ It sounds like you’re ready to override their judgment with yours?