But There Have Always Been

male cheerleaders. Way, way back, all cheerleaders were male. Geedub and more U.S. presidents were cheerleaders.

Male Cheerleaders Are the Right’s Latest Absurd Distraction by Charlotte Clymer

Don’t fall for it. Read on Substack

The excellent Minnesota Vikings cheer squad. Image credit: David Berding // Getty Images)

The American economy has become sluggish, Trump’s foreign policy has been abysmal, and we still don’t have the Epstein files that likely implicate Trump’s role in a massive sex operation that targeted children.

Thus, the distractions keep on comin’, and the latest culture war fiasco being trial-ballooned by rightwing media is… male cheerleaders in the NFL.

If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the predictable, manufactured outrage over the Minnesota Vikings adding two men to their cheer squad this season.

Fox News, conservative influencers, and even Republican elected officials are getting in the mix, desperate to find any damn distraction they can to keep folks from paying attention to the massive failures and glaring scandals of the Trump administration and Republican Party across-the-board this year.

But this ain’t a new thing. There have been male cheerleaders in the NFL since 2018, when the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints became the first franchises to add men to their cheer squads.

Since then, the Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots, Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens have selected male cheerleaders.

This season, a full third of NFL teams have men on their cheerleading squads, but what I find truly hilarious is that the past eight winners of the Super Bowl have male cheerleaders.

In fact, the past eight Super Bowls have only featured teams with male cheerleaders.

Yesterday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—a former college coach—weakly attempted to fear-monger over the issue with one of the more bizarre claims he’s made in a while:

But if you’re going to be woke and you’re gonna try to take the men out of men’s sports, which is what you’re doing. They’re trying to take gender and say, ‘OK, we’re going to make it more about gender than we are about masculinity.’ Then, you’re going to have a huge problem. It’s coming.

I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, either. I caught the oblique reference to trans women in women’s sports, but good lord, what an awkward way of framing the argument.

This is all the more amusing when you consider the long history of Republican politicians who were male cheerleaders.

That includes four Republican presidents in their college years: both George W. Bush and his father George H. W. Bush at Yale, Ronald Reagan at Eureka, and Dwight D. Eisenhower at West Point.

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was a cheerleader at Texas A&M. So was Senator Trent Lott at Ole Miss. So was Mitt Romney at Stanford.

The Republican Party has a long and proud history of producing the nation’s finest male cheerleaders. In the past 50 years, more Republican presidents have been male cheerleaders than seen combat.

So, what’s the play here? We all know it’s a distraction, but why are Republicans and conservative media hoping this’ll stick?

Some rightwing men are angry over male cheerleaders because male cheerleaders distract from their open lusting toward women cheerleaders.

They see male cheerleaders as a distraction because they might “accidentally” objectify a male cheerleader amidst all the pretty ladies and that puts them on edge.

Yet they’re openly lusting for women cheerleaders at a public venue in front of kids.

These are the same dudes who claim any LGBTQ content in any public context is harmful to kids because from the warped and sad perspective of these dudes, merely the presence of LGBTQ visibility is always sexual in nature.

But they’re actually very pleased to ogle sexy women and see no problem doing so in front of kids. Sexual performance is never a problem when it caters to straight men.

As always, this goes back to the male gaze and some straight men being entirely incapable of reconciling their own sexuality and religious hypocrisy and using the “safety of kids” to alleviate their own discomfort.

The problem isn’t the presence of sexy cheerleaders, regardless of gender. It isn’t the presence of children. It isn’t even supposed religious teachings.

The problem, as always, are some straight, conservative men needing the entire world to cater to all their whims and all their discomforts and holding up a Bible to cover for that, which immediately gets set back down the moment there are sexy ladies to ogle.

It’s pathetic, but what would you expect from a political party that’s doing everything it can to distract from its leader, Donald Trump, being connected to a massive sex trafficking operation?

The Republican Party is in desperate need of better crowd chants. Maybe they should ask their own male cheerleaders to help them out.