On a Saturday in this early autumn, I attended with some colleagues a football game featuring two local colleges. The seats were quite good – close to the field on the 40-yard line. The game was entertaining, but my eyes were frequently drawn to the cheerleading squads on the sidelines.
The erotic appeal of nubile creatures in short skirts and tight tops, impressively displaying their physical flexibility and athletic stamina, goes without saying.
Even within the confines of my conservative Christian high school, I was enraptured by Summer in her cheerleading uniform: her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail; the contours of her ample breasts protruding from her vest; the top of her long tanned legs disappearing in a short pleated skirt, which barely concealed the spankies that hugged her rear. Summer became an object of masturbatory fantasy.
One sociologist noted that “the cheerleader is a disturbing erotic icon….She incarnates, in a word, the basic male-voyeuristic fantasy.” In her short skirt and tight vest, her sexually provocative gyrations (the pelvic thrusts and spread eagle jumps didn’t escape my notice on Saturday) invite the male gaze. Even the cheers mimic the cries a female would emit during sex:
Do it! Do it!
Do it! Do it!
Yet she is packaged as an icon of wholesome all-American femininity, a patina of purity that only heightens her erotic potential. The cheerleader has become “the ultimate male fantasy: the woman who is both a virgin and a vamp.” (That facade of innocence is easily dismantled. A few years ago, it came to light that several cheerleaders at a university in the South were moonlighting as strippers and escorts.)
Lutheran Guilt 