SIS-BOOM-BAH?

November 2, 2007 7:48 AM

Are high school cheerleaders portrayed correctly in movies?

Regarding the typical stereotype;

1) Is the squad leader stuck up, snobby, blonde, has rich parents, takes advantage of her underlings, is usually regarded as the best looking girl in school.

2) Some new girl moves to town and tries out to be on the squad ultimately being rejected by the alpha girl even though being really good.

3) Bad girl cheerleader (i.e. not preppy, has dark hair, tattoos, etc.) becomes friends with rejected new girl.

Is there really a crazy hierarchal structure to cheersquads?

Just asking because every movie I watch that has cheerleaders in it seem to follow this stereotype. Apologies if this is too chatfiltery.

posted by Totally Zanzibarin' Ya to grab bag (29 comments total)

#1 is 100% true. #2 and #3 only happen in 80's movies and Sweet Valley High books. piss
posted by pieoverdone at 7:50 AM on November 2, 2007 [1 favorite]

Not particularly true in my high school (class of 1989, a long time ago but the movies haven't changed much since then!)

My impression is that cheerleading is reasonably hard to do correctly, so I think the squad was selected from athletic girls who were devoted enough to come to practice -- the most popular and stuck-up didn't always meet these requirements.

On the other hand, I do think that AMONG the different cheering squads there was a loose division by social heirarchy, with the most popular kids being the actual cheerleaders, the middle group being pommies, and the least popular being majorettes. This did not result in the majorettes being the people most able to catch the baton, I can tell you.
posted by escabeche at 8:01 AM on November 2, 2007

I think that Valley Girl pretty much set the stage for the line of thought that you laid out in #1 on your list.

Lately, I think more focus has been put on academics (and the physical benefits of all that exercise) to get past the stereotype at least in our area.
posted by msbaby at 8:01 AM on November 2, 2007

Actually, #1, #2 and #3 all happened in Heroes, last week.

I would say that, like most depictions in movies, this is just a convenient stereotype. It's a meme in US culture that everyone understands without explanation. This makes it an easy way to establish the role of a character within the film without relying on actual character development. (That is, this is an easy way for a lazy writer to tell the audience who to like and dislike.)

Are some schools like this? Maybe. Are many schools like this? That's very unlikely.
posted by oddman at 8:02 AM on November 2, 2007

Yes, cheerleading is more athletic but dangerously so. My daughter was a gymnast (and a gymnastics coach) and cheerleading teams would come to the gym centers to work out. I was appalled at the lack of spotting and safety. The gymnasts would pretty much cringe at what the cheerleaders were doing. We also saw cheerleading at many other gymnastics centers and I saw enough crashing and burning that I would think long and hard about letting my kid do today's cheerleading. My impression is that cheerleading is still primarily a social thing and therefore subject to all the hierarchal shenanigans ... and that's what's overblown into movie types.
posted by lpsguy at 8:14 AM on November 2, 2007

IANAC, but I'd bet you can treat the stereotype associated with them as severely as the stereotypes associated with Jews, lawyers, Eskimos or any other category of human.
posted by Terminal Verbosity at 8:15 AM on November 2, 2007

In the high school I went to, #1 was true, #2 was my sister, and #2 and #3 never made it off the Junior Varsity squad to the full Varsity squad because they wouldn't sleep with the entire football team.
posted by SpecialK at 8:16 AM on November 2, 2007

I went to a large highschool on the rural outskirts of a big Southern city (Charlotte, NC) in the early 80s. It was considered a huge social faux pas to be snobby. Oh, no, we band geeks didn't get invited to the cheerleaders' parties, and there was definitely the hierarchy described by escabeche, but there was almost zero (open) snobbery. Our cheerleaders were all quite athletic, too--pretty, yes, but not really the prettiest girls in school.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:26 AM on November 2, 2007

Are high school cheerleaders portrayed correctly in movies?

Honestly, think about the question. Is anything portrayed correctly in movies? I'm a comptuer programmer, and my life has never even vaguely resembled anything that programmers do on the silver screen.

[end comment]
posted by blue_beetle at 8:28 AM on November 2, 2007

I wonder how much this schema affects how cheerleaders think they should be acting. In other words, do cheerleaders watch the same stereotyped scenes and start thinking that this is the way that they should be acting? Not to single out cheerleaders as I am sure we are all a little guilty of taking cues from tv shows and movies. Whats particularly troubling is that these shows are being produced mainly to sell advertising. We are kind of being programmed by people who take over our culture in order to make money. Even though the same people perverting our culture are victims of the same process in different settings. I believe that this is at the heart of whats eating away at our countries solidarity.
posted by pwally at 8:32 AM on November 2, 2007 [2 favorites]

Totally not true. Obviously there is some bitchiness, but no more than any other kind of team. The reality shows about cheerleading teams (True Life, Cheer Nation, etc) have been much more accurate.
posted by elvissa at 8:35 AM on November 2, 2007

Oh, sorry about that 'piss' at the end of my comment. I installed a Tourette's extension for Firefox and most of the time I catch everything and clean it up. Missed that one, though.
posted by pieoverdone at 8:40 AM on November 2, 2007 [5 favorites]

I've always been mystified by Hollywood cheerleader stereotypes, because the girls in the squad at my school were considered dorks- maybe only a rung or two above the band geeks or the mathletes on the social ladder. Very few of them were blonde, even fewer were attractive, and they certainly weren't popular or highly-coveted prom date material.
posted by MiaWallace at 8:48 AM on November 2, 2007

1. Generic question version 1: AskMeFi, is X always just like it's portrayed in the movies?

Answer: No.

2. Generic question version 2: Is X sometimes like it's portrayed in the movies?

Answers: Yes, in my experience; no, in my experience; no, because it's physically impossible.

Personally, I would be surprised if cheerleading squads didn't generally tend toward some forms of hierarchy, given the setting. I'd also expect that the particular context -- the relative visibility, the lingering emphasis on popularity, the feminine ideal, etc. -- make this more likely than the average high school activity.
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 8:49 AM on November 2, 2007

In other words, do cheerleaders watch the same stereotyped scenes and start thinking that this is the way that they should be acting?

I think that works in reverse, too, though. Cheerleaders are aware of the negative stereotypes and go out of their way not to confirm them. My sense is that cheerleaders and people involved in cheerleading tend to be hypersensitive about cheerleading's negative image and really invested in depicting it as a real sport that works like other sports.
posted by craichead at 8:50 AM on November 2, 2007

Sorry, forgot: "piss"
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 8:50 AM on November 2, 2007 [1 favorite]

Actually, #1, #2 and #3 all happened in Heroes, last week.


That's what got me thinking about it.
posted by Totally Zanzibarin' Ya at 8:55 AM on November 2, 2007

Some things to keep in mind about #1:

Cheerleaders need to be extremely physically fit. They wear a lot of make-up to look good under stadium lights. For these reasons alone they tend to be attractive.

Cheerleaders are usually drawn from the pool of girls who took classes in ballet and gymnastics as kids. They have cars (or moms with cars) to get them to practice. So, yes, they often have wealthy, involved parents.

The head cheerleader is usually chosen, like all other positions of power in high school (class president etc.), by popularity contest.

Statistically, then, it is not unlikely for the squad leader to be pretty, wealthy, and popular. Whether she's petty and vindictive I think has nothing to do with being a cheerleader and everything to do with, well, being a teenage girl. Pettiness pretty much defined my high school experience. This speaks to your #2.

And #3 is just the condensed Hollywoodization of the fact that there are, of course, a zillion individual exceptions to the above generalizations.
posted by miagaille at 8:55 AM on November 2, 2007

if you really wanna know what it's all about, watch People Like Us.
posted by klanawa at 9:12 AM on November 2, 2007

I think it's a pretty outdated stereotype. When my mom was in high school, I think it was pretty much standing on the sidelines and shaking pompoms and shouting rah rah cheers, so being pretty was a predictable qualification; not much else was really going on.

Cheerleaders today have pretty serious athletic cred. They're combining a ton of training with acrobatics and gymnastics and dance and choreography and all kinds of stuff.

Plus in addition to the physical aspects, there's the competitive aspect as well. So for #2, I think competitive squads are looking for talent wherever they can find it, probably down to poaching cheerleaders and getting them to change schools.

You might want to watch some episodes of Cheerleader Nation so you can see some of these girls in action. I'm assuming that the producers are going for an (artificial) diverse vibe, but I remember noticing how many not-white, not-blonde not-particularly-pretty girls there were on these squads, especially compared to the stereotyped team snapshot in my head.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:14 AM on November 2, 2007

In my experience, rather than rely on outright snobbery, the cheerleaders in high school just had a lot of social power. They were in tight with the teachers, the coaches, the principal, and the school's administrative staff. They had a way of getting what they wanted. People in less school-spirit oriented activities (warning: bitter former theater nerd speaking) never had anything like that kind of support, funds, and leniency. They had way more influence than, for instance, the student council, and I think it certainly went to their heads from time to time.

There were also indeed very athletic and very hard working, and that was pretty impressive. Still, a social hierarchy was certainly present. Unless your parents could afford to send you to professional cheerleading trainers (and unless you had the perfect haircut and perfect tanning bed tan) you didn't have a shot.
posted by mostlymartha at 9:24 AM on November 2, 2007

Maybe I was just a phenomenal social reject in high school, but I never got the impression that many people cared about the cheerleaders, outside of them showing their stuff and the teams for whom they would cheer.

We didn't really have any super rich head cheerleaders whom everyone was trying to impress or whatever. I honestly don't think anyone outside of their immediate social circle gave a shit. We didn't really have Popular kids per se.

OTOH, our foreign exchange students from Germany all found it incredibly hilarious that, nonetheless, we did have varsity jacketed athletes leaning on lockers talking to their cheerleader girlfriends. To them, it was like Saved By The Bell come to life. We regarded this notion as folly whilst sipping Cokes at the Max.

American high school student from a lower-to-upper-middle class high school representing.
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:36 AM on November 2, 2007

Actually, #1, #2 and #3 all happened in Heroes, last week.


That's what got me thinking about it.

Hereos is pretty much a comic book. Everyone on it is in one way or another a broad stereotype. (not heroesist, I watch the show religiously) Doofy Japanese Businessman with Cold Traditional Japanese Father. Aspiring Politician with Embarassing Younger Brother and Manchurian Candidate StageMom. It goes on and on. The cheerleaders shown on the show are no different.
posted by 23skidoo at 9:56 AM on November 2, 2007

It's one of those stereotypes that depends on how "serious" the cheerleading team is. You'll find cheerleading squads that do little more than strut and yell... the stereotype comes from those. It doesn't hold up as well on squads that are filled with serious athletes throwing dangerous tricks, and those are increasingly the norm.

At my high school they actually broke this up along obvious lines: there was an athletic "cheerleading team" and a less-so "pom-pon squad." The stereotypes you mention held up well for the pom mon girls, but not for the cheerleaders -- they were mostly serious students and athletes who left the high-school-y "social responsibilities" to the pom-pon squad.

It's like all stereotypes, just a lazy way for us to assign people to comfortable boxes of expected behavior. In reality, it's rarely that simple.
posted by Pufferish at 9:57 AM on November 2, 2007

It's also worth mentioning that cheerleading (like football) is incredibly, incredibly regional--what you need to do (and by extension, what type of person you probably are) to get on a cheerleading squad in Texas is just totally different from, say, Maryland.

Some states are well-known for taking cheerleading very seriously; in order to make the squad, you generally need to be former gymnast or dancer, or have spent some major time and dough on a cheering coach. (Yes, they have private coaches to train people to get on squads. In certain places, girls spend years preparing to try out for a high-school cheerleading squad.) You're not even going to make the first cut unless you can do some pretty serious athletics, like jumping from a still position into the splits in the air while touching your toes and landing back with feet together (a toe-touch) without breaking a sweat. Squads from these states tend to be the ones that would win the national cheerleading competitions (run by UCA, and they used to be televised on ESPN when I was in high school). I would hazard a guess that at a school like this, you're much more likely to find people on the cheerleading squad who do fit the stereotype of blond, very popular, and so forth, just because there are many many more people who want to be on the squad and because the prerequisites for making it tend to involve things you need a lot of money to really have access to in your early teens.

In other states or regions, cheerleading is just not as big of a deal, and getting on the squad pretty much involves being someone who wants to be on the squad and is willing to come to practice. Cheerleaders in those states are much, much less likely to fit the stereotypes, I think, in terms of either popularity or conventional attractiveness. Cheerleading in these places is also much less focused on competitive cheering (winning state and national competitions) and the crazy athletics you need to pull off in order to win, and more focused on having people on the sidelines of games to yell out cheers.

And, on a school-by-school basis, the composition of a cheerleading squad is really heavily dependent upon what other women's sports are available. There's a huge proportion of young women, just like young men, that really like the idea of being involved in physical pursuits on a team; if funding has been cut and there's no longer gymnastic, basketball, cross-country, tennis, or field hockey teams for women, then you'll see a lot more girls end up on a cheerleading squad that may have joined other sports had they been available.
posted by iminurmefi at 10:30 AM on November 2, 2007

At my high school (nigh unto 10 years ago), it was the Pom Squad that was the popular girls. Cheerleading had dropped in popularity because of the negative stereotypes (also the time they dropped the girl at a pep assembly didn't help).
posted by drezdn at 10:45 AM on November 2, 2007

When I was in HS (c/o 2002), the cheerleading squad was mostly popular girls, but there were a few non-attrative, non-blondes on it. (The captain was actually a 5' stout black girl.) They were relatively athletic, but most of the student body knew that the cheerleaders just shook their poms, whereas the Poms were actually doing the gymnastic type stuff.
Story: I played volleyball in HS and my freshman year (the same year this school opened, with only 9th and 10th grades) we had a scrimage with another school (from the ghetto). Their cheerleaders started a fight with our cheerleaders and we tore their asses APART.
posted by sperose at 12:18 PM on November 2, 2007

My last job was in an office building just adjacent to a gym where several local cheerleading squads practiced every day. Just from watching these girls walk by the office every day I can tell you that they really spanned the gamut. Most were pretty nice, if a little loud, but there was the odd asshole in the group (as there will be in any). There was also the usual high school social stratification that one would find in any group of girls that age. Some of the girls were hot, some were not; most were average. Some had cars, some had their mother's drive them.

It was essentially like any other group of girls that age, with the exception that they were all athletic and boisterous enough to want to jump around shouting vacuous slogans in front of a stadium full of people.

The real monsters were the mothers, who were almost uniformly unpleasant and convinced that I and my co-workers (all men) were trying to sneak looks up their daughter's short skirts. A bunch of haughty harpies, them. I got the impression that most of them had pressured their daughters into becoming cheerleaders in the first place, as well, though that's just an guess.
posted by Pecinpah at 12:58 PM on November 2, 2007

In my district, the cheerleaders were the dorks/non-athletes/chubby girls who couldn't dance well enough to get on the pom squad. We all mostly felt bad for them. (And were mostly horrified by the pom squad - the school could have installed a set of poles for them to dance around and they would have looked more at home.)
posted by restless_nomad at 1:57 PM on November 2, 2007