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For NFL cheerleaders, rigid rules start to grate

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

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.

“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 NFL. A “large measure of bubbly or charm” was a must.

Four decades later, the world may have changed, but the rules of professional cheerleading appear to be essentially the same. And yet as the NFL struggles with a 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, with some now questioning the rigid and seemingly sexist rules that accompany it at the professional level.

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That questioning is happening even as hundreds of women head into cheerleading auditions this weekend for a number of NFL teams. Per team guidelines, they will show up in mandated crop tops, skin-colored nylons and hot pants with “hair and makeup complete,” as handbooks like the one for the Arizona Cardinals advise.

They will be judged on their technique, showmanship and poise, but also their appearance, as many of the guidelines put it. They will know that “a lean figure is demanded by our uniform,” according to the audition pamphlet of the Cowboys.

If those women are lucky, they will join teams with names like the Ben-gals (that’s a play on Cincinnati’s Bengals), the Raiderettes (Oakland), the Falconettes (Atlanta) and the Saintsations (New Orleans). They will be issued a rule book that prohibits them from fraternizing with players, and, in some cases, being too opinionated, or chewing gum.

Many of them will still relish the experience: the camaraderie, the fandom and the technical skill — yes, skill; many NFL cheerleaders are trained dancers — that is required for the job.

“There’s pretty much nothing like it in terms of a rush,” said Flavia Berys, who cheered for the San Diego Chargers from 2000 to 2002 and has published a number of books about cheerleader-audition secrets. “You get to feel all the energy of every single fan that’s in that stadium.'’

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“It was an instant sisterhood,” said Toni Washington, who was a cheerleader and tour secretary for the Cowboys in the 1980s.

Still, there is evidence of misgivings, beginning with the case of a 22-year-old ex-New Orleans Saints cheerleader named Bailey Davis, who was fired in January for posting a photo on Instagram that showed her in a lace bodysuit, which was a violation of the team’s social media rules. In response, she filed a gender discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the NFL of having two sets of rules: one for cheerleaders, almost all of whom are female, and one for its players, who are male.

“I’m not making enough for them to control every aspect of my life outside of the Superdome,” Davis said. Many NFL cheerleaders are paid as little as $75 a game, with additional money for appearances; had she remained on the team, Davis would have made $10.25 an hour, or $3 above the minimum wage in Louisiana.

Backward and in High Heels

Davis’ case is not the first to highlight the gender disparities of the NFL. As far back as the 1970s, the National Organization for Women picketed the Cowboys’ cheerleader tryouts and feminists were denouncing cheerleaders as “sexist tools,” as The Times once put it.

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The Chicago Bears got rid of their cheerleading squad, the “Honey Bears,” in 1985, after the daughter of the owner George Halas, one of the original founders of the NFL, inherited the team. (Halas had declared that “as long as I’m alive, we will have dancing girls.” Virginia Halas McCaskey took over upon his death.)

In recent years, former cheerleaders have sued the NFL over pay. In 2016, the New York Jets agreed to pay their cheerleaders almost $325,000 in back pay, while the Oakland Raiders agreed to a $1.25 million settlement with the Raiderettes. Among the six NFL teams that do not have cheerleaders are the Buffalo Bills, whose cheer team was disbanded following a class-action suit over pay. Another of the six is the New York Giants, whose co-owner John Mara has noted that “philosophically, we have always had issues with sending scantily clad women out on the field to entertain our fans.”

Margery Evan, a radio host, put it more bluntly in a recent column for The Boston Globe. “It’s time to rethink NFL cheerleaders and their barely covered breasts being ogled on the sidelines by drunken men with binoculars,” she wrote. “It’s embarrassing for us all. Or should be.”

To make it in a man’s world, the saying goes, women must do everything men do, but backward and in high heels. For NFL 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.

As The Times and others have noted, the rules placed on cheerleaders are reminiscent of a different era — complete with weigh-ins, mandatory manicures, advice on the proper use of tampons and suggestions for how to politely respond to prying or harassment by fans. Were a person to sift through the 1960s-era rule books of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy clubs — rules created for the female servers called “bunnies” — they would find striking similarities: The bunnies were issued “demerits” for chewing gum, dirty fingernails or unkempt hair. But even they got a salary and benefits.

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“What’s so hard about being an NFL cheerleader is that not only do you have to be a technically trained dancer but you have to look good while doing it,” Davis said. “You have to wear three-inch heels while doing it. Your makeup has to be full on, you have to constantly be smiling, even when you’re just standing there.”

“It’s such a double standard,” said Kate Mayfield, 37, a former cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens who is now a hedge fund consultant. “They explain it to us like the rules are in place to keep us out of trouble, because the league is going to protect the player if something happens. Because the players are, if it comes down to it, more important, even though we’re also on the field. I don’t think I questioned it back then. I was 22.”

A 2012 Raiders etiquette handbook reviewed by The Times advises cheerleaders to “sit in a ladylike manner — cross your ankles or cross your legs but keep your legs together.” A rule book for the Bengals, submitted as part of a lawsuit in 2014, noted “you are given a 3 lb leniency weight” “no gum chewing” “no slouching breasts.”

Both teams said last week that the rule books had been revised but would not provide specifics.

“For me, and many of my teammates, the real killer was body dysmorphia and eating disorders, and the depression and anxiety which stem from that,” said Lyndsey Raucher, a college student who cheered for the New England Patriots from 2016 to 2017. “I fear that I will never fully be the same.”

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A ‘Split Personality’

Cheerleading began as a sport for men — “one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college,” as The Nation put it in 1911. At least five presidents — Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes — were college cheerleaders, as were other political figures like Rick Perry, Tom DeLay and Mitt Romney.

It was after World War II that men with megaphones began to be replaced by young, perky women with pom-poms, as sociologist Lisa Wade has written. In part, that was because cheerleading was one of the few ways women could participate in college athletics before the passage of Title IX, the federal law enacted in 1972 that mandated equal access, said Laura Grindstaff, a professor at the University of California, Davis.

In the years since, two distinct kinds of cheerleading have emerged: a competitive version, which is often coed and more like gymnastics — full of complicated tumbling exercises, basket tosses and human pyramids — and sideline cheerleading, or dance, which in the NFL is almost entirely populated by women. (The Ravens have male stunt men on their cheerleading squad, while the Los Angeles Rams announced the addition of two men last month, both of them classically trained dancers.)

“This is an activity that sort of has a split personality,” said Kate Torgovnick May, the author of “Cheer!: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders.” “On one side you have this very gymnastic, athletic endeavor. They’re doing these acrobatic skills in the air. And then you have this other part, which are the sideline elements, this crowd-leading, these small outfits, and these kind of charged looks that go with it. It’s more about the pageantry. And I don’t mean to imply this isn’t real dance — it absolutely is — but it’s kind of a different thing.”

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It was that kind of cheerleading, with the hot pants and the go-go boots, that owes its origins to the Cowboys of that 1970s era — and specifically to Suzanne Mitchell, who oversaw the squad for more than a decade. “She was sort of the godmother of modern cheerleading,” said filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro, whose documentary about the Cowboys cheerleaders, “Daughters of the Sexual Revolution,” premiered last month at South by Southwest.

The breakout moment for the Dallas squad came in 1976, during Super Bowl X, when a TV cameraman, looking for what was known as the “honey shot,” panned to the sideline and a cheerleader named Gwenda winked into the camera. Suddenly, the world “forgot there was a football game going on,” as Cowboys chronicler Joe Nick Patoski has put it — confirming what Tex Schramm, the Cowboys’ president and general manager, had suspected: that a bolder, sexier look would create enormous buzz.

Under Mitchell’s leadership, the Cowboys cheerleaders appeared on the cover of Esquire, performed in the “Love Boat” TV series and were famously portrayed, without permission, in the 1978 pornographic film “Debbie Does Dallas.” (There were three Debbies on the team at the time, according to Shapiro’s documentary. But none of them was that Debbie.)

Mitchell’s rules, meanwhile, became famous: No fraternization. No chewing gum. No jeans. You were not to wear curlers in public. Weigh-ins were standard, and sometimes she would circle cheerleaders’ body parts in photos to show where they needed to trim down. “Your shorts were custom fitted to you, and they’d always say, ‘We’ll take it up but we won’t let it out,'” said Washington, now 57. “It was like a finishing school.”

But there was a darker side to it, too. In the documentary, former Cowboys cheerleaders described stalkers who sent letters, followed them and called them at home — ostensibly part of the reason many of today’s NFL cheerleaders are forbidden to use their full names.

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“Most fans are respectful, but there’s always the odd fan here and there who seems to think cheerleaders are there to be merely objects,” said Berys, the author, speaking to her experience as a cheerleader from 2000 to 2002.

Davis, for her part, believes not that NFL cheerleading should be done away with altogether — but that the NFL needs to adjust to the times.

“This is not normal,” Davis said. “I just think nobody had any idea how bad we were treated.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

JESSICA BENNETT © 2018 The New York Times

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