I expected to watch America’s Sweethearts, the Netflix documentary on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (“DCC” to initiates) with horrified fascination, but not admiration.
There’s plenty to horrify. For starters, the damage wreaked by routines, including “jumping in the air then landing on the ground in the splits”, as a recent veteran recovering from hip and foot operations explains. “Some girls’ backs and necks are messed up – a lot of girls get surgery,” says another. And abysmal pay – even the multimillionaire team-owner, Charlotte Jones, accepts “they’re not paid a lot” – reportedly as little as $400 a game. Many cheerleaders work tough care and service jobs on top of a punishing schedule of kicks and smiles, while the average NFL player’s annual salary is about $2.8m.
Then there’s the objectification – teeny outfits; men on a stadium tour being invited to pick their favourite; a calendar of shots straight out of a 90s lads’ mag – and its implications for their personal safety. A man put a tag on one cheerleader’s car to track her, and another reports being groped as she danced. And the chilling, archaic expectations of their behaviour: “What am I?” a page from a thick binder of DCC conduct rules shown on screen reads. “I bore nobody … I cost nothing … I am pleasing to everyone … I am COURTESY.”
So what is there to admire? It’s the way they take criticism and rejection. I watched talented young women who had uprooted their lives to try out for the squad get rejected based on subjective takes on their attitudes and personalities. They responded with smiling grace and apparently sincere gratitude. Even successful candidates had their physical characteristics and performances regularly pulled apart by the flinty, hypercritical coaches, and they reacted every time with a smiling “Yes, ma’am”, as I screeched: “Tell them to sod off!” at the screen.
It’s a superpower more jaw-dropping than any high kick. How on earth do they manage? It’s either Jesus (there’s a lot of God talk) or, I suspect, those jump-splits. These women know pain I can barely imagine; a few verbal knockbacks are nothing.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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