Cheerleaders Gone Wild?

A guest post from my awesome friend, Kate Torgovnick!
Earlier this year at Bothell High School in Seattle, two photos made their way across the student body via text message. The first featured one of the school’s cheerleaders topless; the second showed another cheerleader in the buff. When the school’s co-principals found out about the photos, they suspended both cheerleaders from the squad–asking the first to forfeit her pom-poms for 30 days and the second to leave the team for the entire year. Conveniently, the football players who were suspected of circulating the photos weren’t punished at all.
Last week, the parents of the two girls decided to sue the school, calling for them to wipe the incident from the girl’s permanent records, reinstate them to their positions on the squad, and apologize for not punishing anyone else involved in the incident. “My clients fully realize what they did was stupid,” said Matthew King, the lawyer for both families. “But there should have been some punishment meted out to those who were in possession of the photos. It seems the girls are getting the brunt of it.”
“When you sign up to be a cheerleader–or for any student activity–you agree to certain codes of behavior,” fired back school district spokeswoman Susan Stolzfus. “We consider them student leaders, and we want them to be role models.”
Stolfus does have a point. But if these photos were of women in the math club or student council, it’s hard to imagine that the photos would have had the same appeal or incurred the same punishment. For anyone who follows cheerleaders in the news–and as the author of CHEER!: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, I do–this incident sounds remarkably familiar. Remember the Fab Five cheerleaders from McKinney, Texas? They terrorized their school for months, but what seemed to set off an investigation (and national media attention) was them taking photos of themselves fellating penis-shaped candles at a sex store. Or what about the Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who in 2006 were making out in a bar bathroom and got in a fight with another patron who was waiting to use the stall? They were both dismissed from the team after newspapers ran with the story.
So why all the interest in cheerleaders gone wild? Cheerleaders are American icons, up there with the bald eagle and the McDonalds arches–they appear in every city, in almost every high school, which is our culture’s lowest common denominator. Think through all of the images of cheerleaders in American pop culture. They fit neatly into two categories: the chaste A-student and the miniskirt-wearing slut. For every squeaky-clean Kelly Kapowski on Saved by the Bell, there’s an Ali Larter in Varsity Blues, strolling into a room wearing a whipped-cream bikini. For every Claire on Heroes, whose safety is the key to saving the world, there’s some anonymous women in Playboy’s video special Cheerleaders and College Girls (not the other way around). Cheerleaders straddle the fault line between virgin and whore. They’re a group onto which our culture projects its very complicated beliefs about women–that we can only be one extreme or the other.
So should these teens be punished for taking nude pics? In my opinion, no–they’ve no doubt learned their lesson. Is it a school’s place to punish students for sexual activity? I just don’t think so. But what I think schools can and should do is recognize that, so-called “sexting” is something their students are no doubt doing. It couldn’t hurt to remind teenagers that a photo they think will be kept private can very easily make the rounds with just a click of a send button. And not everyone bounces back like Paris Hilton.