![]() ![]() cheerleaders, there’s a further twist: They must stand on the sidelines, in high heels, cheering for the men for very little money in a world where players rake in millions and even the mascots make up to $65,000 a year.Īs The Times and others have noted, the rules placed on cheerleaders today are reminiscent of a different era, with weigh-ins, mandatory manicures, advice on the proper use of tampons and suggestions for how to politely respond to fans who are prying or engaging in harassment. To make it in a man’s world, the saying goes, women must do everything men do - but backward and in high heels. “It’s time to rethink N.F.L cheerleaders and their barely covered breasts being ogled on the sidelines by drunken men with binoculars,” she wrote. Margery Eagan, a radio host, put it more bluntly in a recent column for The Boston Globe. struggles with an ongoing crisis over domestic violence and sexual harassment charges - and legions of women proclaim #MeToo - a kind of feminist awakening may be emerging in the world of cheerleading, too, with some now questioning the rigid and seemingly sexist rules that accompany it at the professional level. A “large measure of bubbly or charm” was a must.įour decades later, the world may have changed, but the rules of professional cheerleading appear to be essentially the same. ![]() “A Cowboys cheerleader, above all else, is beautiful,” the article said, at a time when the squad was perhaps the most iconic sideline show in the N.F.L. They had stringent practice schedules - as much as five hours a night, five nights a week - and they could not appear where alcohol was served, attend parties of any sort or wear jewelry with their uniforms. The visitor, a New York Times reporter, noted that the cheerleaders were paid next to nothing: $15 a game ($14.72 after taxes). The women spoke of starvation diets that had lasted for weeks. Forty years ago this month, a visitor at the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleading tryouts described a scene that was “as tense as that at an open casting call for a Broadway production,” with 150 women - “the most envied, celebrated and sought‐after” in the country - shivering in an overly air-conditioned room.
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