Autumn has arrived. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” as Keats put it. It also marks the return of America’s secular religion, football. And I suppose it could be said that the priestesses of this religion are prancing on the sidelines in outfits that expose a tantalizing amount of skin, gyrating their taut bodies.
A reality show about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is titled America’s Sweethearts, which implies that these particular priestesses are vestals. The squad does market itself with a cloying wholesomeness designed, as one critic suggests, to appeal to a Southern evangelical subculture. The cheerleaders’ off-field behavior is strictly controlled (fraternizing with the players is verboten) to preserve their clean-cut image. One of the show’s stars striving to make the team was a cute sorority girl engaged to her college boyfriend who earnestly says, “I hope they look at me and see Jesus.”
Seeing her in her skin-tight white hotpants, sexy white cowboy boots, and knotted blue blouse that reveals her cleavage, I doubt that the first thing that comes to mind is the carpenter from Nazareth. Her dance routines evoke for one journalist (and former cheerleader) the thought “that girl is freaky. As in: in bed.” Admiring video of her in action, I was struck about how her moves on the field weren’t far removed from those of a stripper on stage.
That’s because the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have always been about sex. Introduced in the early 1970s (around the same time Deep Throat introduced “porno chic” into the culture), they brought bare midriffs, cleavage, and suggestive leg kicks to the staid National Football League. One of their foundresses was a former model who explicitly wanted sexy uniforms and dancing. Their come-hither looks and seductive winks were captured on camera in “honey shots” broadcast on network television (the brainchild of a self-admittedly perverted ABC Sports director). Some preachers condemned the revealing outfits. Feminists bemoaned their sexual objectification. Most other teams in the league soon copied them, but the Cowboys cheerleaders were the gold standard of gridiron titillation.
By the end of the Seventies, their latent sexuality predictably turned pornographic. In the December 1978 issue of Playboy, five former Cowboys cheerleaders untied their blouses for a feature entitled “NFL Cheerleaders Bare All!” That same year, Bambi Woods (the nom de porn of a young woman who had unsuccessfully auditioned to be a Cowboys cheerleader in real life) starred in Debbie Does Dallas, in which an aspiring “Texas Cowgirl” fucks her way onto the squad. (The Cowboys sued the film’s distributors for trademark infringement: “In the movie’s final scene Debbie dons a uniform strikingly similar to that worn by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and for approximately twelve minutes of film footage engages in various sex acts while clad or partially clad in the uniform.”)
Meanwhile two members of the Denver Broncos’ “Pony Express” also showed off their pom-poms in Playboy. The squad was disbanded after some of the cheerleaders were discovered to have been engaging in prostitution.
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