January 11, 2022 • 43 mins
From honey shots to swimsuit calendars, sex has long been part of the cheerleaders’ brand. But is the provocative tease a relic of another era? For episode transcripts and bonus content related to the show, visit texasmonthly.com.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Texas Monthly.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Report and learn from the at and sixteens.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It's gonna be a I've been watching the cheerleaders since
I was five, but I'd actually never seen them live
until late last year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Walking around today, it's like you can reveel no Cowboys,
this energy about this place, bringing people together.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
It was at a Cowboys game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Finally I'm going in. This was in the thick of
the pandemic and the NFL had a rule that cheerleaders
couldn't be on the field, but the Cowboys wanted to
make sure the cheerleaders could still perform, so they put
them on stages behind each end zone, right next to
(00:58):
the seats, actually right next to my seat. There was
nobody sitting between me and the cheerleaders, and it was
kind of a revelation from the moment they walked out
and welcomed the jungle came up on the sound system.
They didn't stop moving. They swayed their hips and flicked
their long hair. Their shaking pom pom sounded like a
(01:21):
rattlesnake ready to strike. The game was happening down on
the field, but I couldn't stop gawking of the cheerleaders.
Maybe I had always done this, but sitting that close
to them without a video screen between us, it also
felt a little weird, maybe because the dances are kind
of flirtatious. It took me by surprise because it was like,
(01:43):
after all these years I'd spent staring at the cheerleaders,
they were suddenly able to stare back each time one
of them made eye contact with me. I felt like
I'd been busted. The game was pretty amazing, the Cowboys won.
At one point, I got swept up in the excitement
of a touchdown by Ceedee Lamb. I actually stood up. Okay,
(02:08):
so I just got out of the stadium. But it
was the experience of watching the cheerleaders up close that
stayed with me. And they were so beautiful. I feel
like I should have a more descriptive word for it, but.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
You know, they were just the way that they move
is so beautiful, and I'm really struck by like the
marvel of their bodies, you know. And it's that weird
thing about women's bodies, where like you want to look
at them, but you don't want to look too much,
and so you look away, but you don't want to
(02:47):
insult them by not looking at them, and then you've
been looking too long, and now you've been ogling them.
And it's that really tricky thing of what do you
do about the beauty.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Of a woman's body? A year later, I'm still asking
that question. It's on my mind every time I sit
here in my recording studio, which is actually my closet,
looking at the photos of these women that I've pinned
to the wall. This tension was there early on. It's
what d Brock knew when she first hatched the idea
(03:19):
of a sexy new uniform. She told me she wanted
those women to show off their bodies. It was there
when Texi Waterman described what she was looking for at
those early tryouts. And it's what pro football is grappling
with today. As NFL cheerleading squads move away from the
hot pants and cleavage that the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders introduced,
(03:40):
and its pro cheerleading becomes more athletic and less about
looking a certain way. The question of what we want
little girls to become is fraught. Was embracing your sex
appeal savvy or vapid? Was it dangerous to encourage girls
to flaunt their own bodies or was it a sign
of progress and power? We don't all agree on what
(04:02):
a strong woman looks like, but the way you answer
that question may change how you see those cheerleaders.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
I I.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Son, this is America's Girls from Texas Monthly. I'm Sarah Heppela,
Episode seven, All American Sexy Girls. Sex has been a
(04:43):
part of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders brand since the original
seven debuted in nineteen seventy two, and it might be
the part people think of first. I was reminded of
that when I was talking with Gia Tolentino. She's a
writer for The New Yorker and a best selling author,
and she grew up in Houston. Before we spoke, I
sent her a bunch of pictures of the Cowboys cheerleaders
(05:05):
through the years. So like, I don't know if you've
got a chance to look at those photos. I wondered
what went through your head as you were looking at them?
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Okay, so just pure word association. Great, Okay, let's see
like Baywatch flight attendant, wonder Woman, Rodeo queen stripper.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Like that was beautiful. I asked a number of people
to play that word association game and Ja's list struck
me as very on point.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
I think about them in tandem with the fair flacet poster,
with the you know where she's in the red bathing
suit and her hair is tossed to the side, like
something that is just burned into your mind as a
landmark in the pop sexualization of women. And I think
I also vaguely associated Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders a little bit
(06:06):
with the mainstreaming of sort of strip club culture in
a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
A lot of the cheerleaders, current and former leaders will
be horrified to hear that. I think of Debbie Bond Hanson,
the assistant director through the eighties, who went sneaking around
Dallas strip clubs just to see if a particular cheerleader
candidate was working there. That's how important it was not
to have that kind of girl on the squad. But
the cheerleaders are a jumble of contradictions, kind of like
(06:36):
the place they came from. Even in GA's hometown of Houston,
a four hour drive from Dallas Cowboys Country, the Cowboys
cheerleaders reigned supreme.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
I think there was a dress up day at my
school and like you know, in fifth grade, like in
fifth grade and girls would come in Dallas Cowboys cheerleader's outfits,
you know, and it was just this kind of vague
emblem of an extremely Texas thing of spangle and blue
and white and big hair and big boobs, fake eyelashes,
(07:09):
the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Texas has a way of shaping little girls. It's not
as though kids in other states don't dress up as
cheerleaders or bedazzle their wardrobe. It's just the little girls
in Texas do it so much.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
If you're a girl in Texas, the likelihood of you
being thrust toward dance or pageant or big hair or
you know, just generally, you know, it's like you there's
so many women who have been prepped for this.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It's no coincidence that a lot of hugely popular female
entertainers grew up in Texas working small venues, rodeo shows,
talent contests and beauty pageants. Kelly Clarkson, Casey Musgraves, Selena Gomez, Beyonce,
and Demi Lovado, whose mother, Diana de la Garza, was
(07:59):
a Dallas Boys cheerleader. The push toward beauty and performance
is pretty powerful in this place.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I know. Yeah, it's like I learned to put my
face on honestly at age six, Like you know.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh, I loved makeup so much and me too.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
For Gia, it wasn't just Texas steering her this way.
It was her Evangelical high school where she became a cheerleader.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Like I just I remember because I loved it. I
mean the thing. I was always on the brink. I
had so many conflicting feelings about cheerleading all the time.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
This is why I wanted to talk to her. I'd
read a piece she wrote once about being a high
school cheerleader. It was such a beautiful story about that
complicated jumble of being part of something sacred and profane
at once, something that brought her joy but also made
her wary.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
Like I took such an almost animal pleasure on being
on the football field every Friday at sunset and just
feeling like I was drifting into the wind, like I
can still very much feel like exactly what you know,
the the lights and the band you know, off that way,
and all of us standing in a line with our
hands clasped behind our back, and the megaphones in front
(09:12):
of us, and the pomp poms below the megaphones and
you know there and there's whistles, and there's all of
this you know, ritualized violence on the field, and you
can feel your ponytail flapping in the breeze like a
horse's tail, and yeah, there was just this absolute, almost transcendence.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
The way she describes this, it sounds to me almost
like a religious experience. But a private Christian school was
about a different kind of religion. It was a place
of abstinence pledges and purity rings and strict dress codes.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Like my skirt was always too short, and I would
get in trouble and I would get detention and they
would make you kneel on the ground and put your
you know, to see if your fingertips were longer than
your skirt and all of this, you know, stuff that
I found incredibly offensive. But on game days, every time
there was game we were cheering for, we were required
to wear our uniforms to school, and our uniforms were very,
(10:07):
very small, like they were to bring it on uniforms,
you know, like short sleeves, skin tight, really short skirt
hiding nothing, and you know, you'd walk up the stairs
and everyone could see your underwear.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So on those game days, she'd wear pajama pants under
her uniform.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
You know, it was cold, you know, Texas keeps every
indoor building like you know, at sixty degrees anyway, And
so I was always like wearing a blanket, wearing my
pajama pants, and I would always get trouble. So on
days when I wasn't wearing the uniform, I would get
in trouble for showing too much skin. And then on
days where I was wearing my pajama pants under my
cheerleading uniform, I would get in trouble for not showing
(10:45):
the uniform.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I remember the dress code at my conservative public high
school in Dallas. Skirts had to be within two inches
of the knees, and if they thought a girl was
off sides, it'd send her to the assistant principal, who
pulled out a ruler.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
You know, it was so clear that what we want
from women showing their body is a so context dependent
it has nothing to do with any real logic. It
bothered me that I was supposed to sexualize myself on
game days and not allowed to any other days, you know,
(11:19):
And it was very clear. It was like, Okay, I'm
supposed to be appropriately decorative in service of men's sports.
But as far as how I felt about the uniform
when I wasn't at school, I loved it.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Gea told me she liked how the uniform looked and felt,
and even though it was revealing, she also said she
felt kind of hidden, like the uniform was a disguise
she could step in and out of. People would look
at her and only see the role she was playing,
and there was freedom in that.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
But there was something particular about being a teenage girl
at a conservative Christian school where everything that was demanded
of us was purity, and no one was admitting that
what they were simultaneously demanding of us with sexualization.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
I wondered what the Cowboys cheerleaders thought about this question too,
But when I first started talking to them, I was
surprised by how many didn't see their uniform as provocative.
These were cheerleaders from the Oughts, and they'd say, I
don't really think about being sexy. I think the uniform
is just normal. But I mean, their official pantihos are
(12:25):
sold at Hooters. A cheerleader from the Aughts told me
that's where she went to buy them, from a vending
machine in the back. And yet they're not sexy. I
kept wondering, did the cheerleaders just not want to go
there with me? Or had skimpy uniforms and thumping dance
moves been part of the culture so long that their
(12:47):
sexiness had become invisible to them. The cheerleader's racist era
was probably the Oughts. It was a decade of visible
thongs and victorious sea angels and pole dancing classes compared
to everything else happening in the culture at the time.
Maybe that uniform was normal, but two leaders didn't just
(13:09):
appear in uniforms. The Cowboys released a swimsuit calendar each year.
I remember seeing those calendars on display tables at Barnes
and Nobook next to sports illustrated pin ups and far
side desk calendars. The Cowboys cheerleaders say they were the
first NFL squad to sell swimsuit calendars. The next evolution
(13:30):
of this merchandising came in the late nineties, when sports
channels began airing behind the scenes specials. It's wild to
watch the products I'd only seen in bookstores brought to
life on sandy beaches with crashing waves and women in
tiny bikinis. It turned the flat office calendar into a
frolicking beach adventure. Here's director Kelly Finnglass and a special
(13:55):
that aired on ESPN.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
For me and the two Mouths Calendar were really wanted
this year's calendar to be special. We wanted it to
be classy and elega and to expose the cheerleaders as
the premieer group of women in.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
All w and the Cowboys kept right on exposing those cheerleaders.
They filmed their own making of DVD. At one point,
a few lucky fans could even buy their own tickets
to the swimsuit shoots. For six nine and ninety nine dollars,
you could enjoy a three day trip to rivere A Maya,
Mexico for an exclusive look the making of the calendar.
(14:32):
Amber Gosden, a cheerleader you heard from in the last episode,
went to Mexico for two swimsuit calendar shoots in the
mid adds.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
My first one was in Kozimal. My second calendar shoot
was in Cabas and Lucas, and that was incredible. I
mean we were on top of Pedro gall and this beautiful, beautiful,
I mean multimillion dollar home, all these I mean Picasso's
hanging on the walls edge like pools that dropped off
into waterfalls over this big mountain.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
It was just like a lot of young women growing
up in the eighties. Amber had swimsuit models in her
bedroom wall as a girl, and getting to pose in
a calendar of her own was something like a dream.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I mean, it was the best time having someone dode
all over you into your makeup and you know your hair,
one little hair out of the way. It's it's fun.
It's fun to feel like that for a little bit.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It was two thousand and three and she'd just rejoined
the squad after a few years away. When she first auditioned,
she hadn't even finished high school. Now she'd graduated from SMU,
she was twenty five. She was much more self confident,
and she'd finally been picked to appear in the Swimsuit calendar.
The Cowboys put out a making of DVD from that shoot,
(15:42):
and you can watch Amber by a pool that overlooks
the ocean. She's posing in stilettos in a white swimsuit
that kind of criss crosses over her tan stomach. She
looks amazing. And the shot of Amber they picked for
the calendar is striking.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
It was actually pretty random because we had shot at
this house all day and then I guess that was
the makeup artist David. He was like, look at those
guys over there, and he just like over there on
the beach and there was this kind of big tank truck,
and he goes, this will be a cool shoot. And
I saw him over there whispering to Kelly, and I
(16:18):
see them kind of game planning, and here we go.
We go over there and do this kind of you know,
fly by the seat of our pants photo shot, and
that's the one that made the calendar.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Ambers in that white swimsuit flanked by men and fatigues
carrying automatic weapons. The first time I saw it, I
thought these were soldiers headed to Iraq, since two thousand
and three was the start of that war and the
height of a certain post nine to eleven patriotism. But
they're actually Mexican Federalis.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I'm a very feminine person, so it was very hard
for me to see like that was my calendar shot.
I just looked very rambo ish kind of and it
was very intense, and I'm like, I, you know, just
wanted to be feminine and pretty.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And the next year amber swimsuit photo was exactly that.
She liked it so much she got her own copy
of it blown up to post her size. She keeps
it in her attic these days, but she got it
out to show me. She's lying on her stomach in
a white and black bikini, resting her elbows on the sand,
and her cleavage front and center. If you told me
that was a professional swimsuit model, I would have believed you.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
We talked about this being sort of like the realization
of a dream and to be beautiful and sexy, and
I think a lot of women share that. And then
I wonder, I'm thinking about like the rule book and
how you dress and different. Was there ever any part
of you that felt like you were only allowed to
(17:45):
be sexualized during certain times and not others.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
I guess I never really felt. I mean, I felt beautiful,
like during calendar shoots and things like that, but I
never really felt sexualized art like. I really always felt
all American.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I felt all American. Hearing Amber say that, I immediately
thought of Texi Waterman at the tryouts in nineteen seventy six,
when a reporter asked what she was looking for and
she said.
Speaker 7 (18:19):
We're looking for an all American sexy girl.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Sexy was a core part of the identity, but maybe
it was a little tricky to own. I never heard
Kelly Finnglass use that word with reporters. She said classy
and elegant, but the sexiness is unmistakable. I have a
copy of the making of DVD from Amber Shoot. On
the cover, it shows a cheerleader tugging down the side
(18:47):
of her bikini bottom with a smoldering look on her face.
A friend of mine saw that DVD at my house
and he asked if it was porn, even though the
title said America's Sweethearts. Amber does remember situations when being
a cheerleader felt uncomfortable, but she doesn't blame the cowboys.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
I never felt over sexualized by the organization, not even
in this swimsuit calendar. I don't know why, but it
was more of a person thinking that That's when I
started to feel dirty and I would get very like
if a man were to come up and be, like,
say something sexual, that's when I all of a sudden
kind of like it would snap me out of character.
(19:29):
I mean, one time, I feel like we were doing
a player intro line. There was a photographer and I
looked down and saw that part of my breast was
like my areola was like out and he was started
taking pictures of it. And he was from another He
was not our team photographers. All I had to do
(19:52):
was go and get my security officer, and I told
him when he went over there and took the camera
and took the film out, you know, they don't want
anything out there like that. They were very protective of
the image, to keep it all American.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
While most cheerleaders I talked to felt this way, I
did meet one who has a very different perspective. More
after this, I met a cheerleader named Sarah clay Long.
She made the squad in two thousand and seven. She
was excited at first, but something happened while she was
(20:28):
on the squad that really changed her perspective. She came
to my place to talk.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Okay, come on in, so we're going to do the
interview down here.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Sarah grew up in Houston and she lives in Dallas
now with her husband and four children. She told me
she started dancing at a young age. Her mom taught
drill team.
Speaker 8 (20:50):
And so I lived in the studio. I was there
at least four or five nights a week. That's what
my life kind of revolved around. It was and I
identity that I took on. And I know that that's
probably the case for a lot of young girls in Texas.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Like the football players, the cheerleaders have recruiters who keep
an eye out for beautiful and talented dancers across Texas.
Speaker 8 (21:13):
And when I was a senior in high school, I
had done really well at a competition and because of
that was given like a letter requesting that I come
an audition for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
A few years later, she tried out. On her second attempt,
she made the team. It was two thousand and seven.
On my coffee table, I'd set out pictures from her
two seasons with the cheerleaders. I found them on the internet.
By the way, Yeah, I see this. I know it's
been waiting for you.
Speaker 8 (21:45):
You haven't flipped through them, but I see that top one.
I know. I remember the first thing I yelled. I
can't believe I said it, but the first thing I
yelled was, oh my gosh, my boobs.
Speaker 9 (21:55):
Like then they don't look like that?
Speaker 5 (21:57):
What do you mean they like?
Speaker 7 (21:58):
I just.
Speaker 8 (22:00):
Have never you know done this with them, and you know,
we have this like Victoria's Secret Braw push up Braw
that we like die blue and then tie the shirt
through the front and then pull it and squeezes the
goods together apparently. And so I saw this and was like,
oh my.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
The Cowboys have a partnership with Victoria's Secret And in
twenty twelve, AT and T Stadium became the first professional
sports stadium to have a Victoria's Secret store in it.
There's a clear overlap between Victoria's Secret models and the cheerleaders,
but unlike those sultry angels, the cheerleaders had to maintain
an appearance of sweetness and wholesomeness. Sarah told me it
(22:44):
wasn't an act.
Speaker 8 (22:46):
But so, I think the first thing that really surprised
me was just the authenticity of most of the women
there And there's a lot of good that can come
out of it. You can make someone's day or you know,
visit someone in a nursing home or in a hospital
and that just brings him a lot of joy. Like
(23:07):
that was just really really sweet.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
But while Sarah was still in training camp, she was
having a hard time at home and she didn't want
to get into specifics.
Speaker 8 (23:18):
But there was a lot of hurt, and there was
a lot of pain for me, and to mask that,
I really just entered into a time of partying, of drinking,
and yeah, that was probably a good two years of
my life where I just didn't want to feel anything.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
One night, she goes out drinking with friends and drives
herself home. She was hesitant to share this part of
her story. She really hates that she did this. But
that's when she gets pulled over. She takes a breathalyzer
test and fails it, and she's arrested and taken to jail.
That's where she had an experience that changed her life.
Speaker 8 (24:04):
I was sitting in a jail cell and just felt
the presence of God, just go are you done? Running?
Are you done? And so I was really wrestling with
just questioning who I am, questioning choices that I've made,
you know, am I doing the right thing?
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Like with my life, she stopped hanging out with a
college friends she'd partied with. She started going to a
church where she found a new community and purpose.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
And so that was a huge, huge part of my story.
But that happened simultaneously as I was a rookie on
the DCC.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Along with her constant cheerleader practices. She's going to church
twice on Sundays, and over the next year she starts
to see the uniforms and the performer in a very
different way.
Speaker 8 (25:02):
That old self, to me, was just this desire to
be somebody, and it's just vanity.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Even on the good will trips to nursing homes and hospitals,
as much as she feels called to help, she realizes
she doesn't want to be in that uniform while she
does it.
Speaker 8 (25:28):
Just wanted to love on and care for and minister
to these people, and it was really hard to do that,
you know, just being so exposed.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
One day, her dad was in the stands and doing
those sexy dances in front of him. It was just weird.
It's like the sexual tease, the inherent provocativeness of the
role she was playing suddenly became visible to her.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
And just to remember, like, man, my dad was so
excited that I was a cheerleader, you know, and they
had like ticket sin. I just remember the dance that
we were doing, you know, in front of my dad,
and I just felt like, man, this is.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Just feels wrong, and it wasn't just dancing for her
dad that made her uncomfortable.
Speaker 8 (26:14):
It was very awkward, you know, to have a male
who is there, you know, with his family or something
like wanting a picture with you, and you know that,
I mean, his wife is right here. Like I know
that there's like this culture, you know, in this iconic
views of this organization, but if you take a step back,
(26:34):
I think that we are all desensitized to it.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Not everyone was desensitized to this. In two thousand and five,
a group of Texas lawmakers introduced a bill nicknamed the
Booty Bill, aimed at what they perceived to be a
hyper sexualized culture that had trickled down into the way
girls dressed and moved on cheer squads, marching bands, and
drill teams. It didn't pass, but it reflected a growing
(27:00):
concern over how girls behave and dress, and the years
that followed, cheerschools started banning the bear midriffs that the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders made popular. I spoke to a lot
of cheerleaders who described themselves as Christian, but they never
had a problem with the uniform. Sarah's the only cheerleader
I met who did such a one to eighty while
(27:20):
she was on the squad. And what's fascinating about her
transformation is that suddenly she saw the uniform and even
the nature of the cheerleaders work with the critical eye
that a lot of people outside the squad share, and
not just conservatives anymore, but progressives too.
Speaker 8 (27:39):
So like, yes, I want little girls to have dreams,
but I especially want my children, you know, my daughters,
but my sons also to know that they are so
much more than just.
Speaker 5 (27:54):
What they look like.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
But just as these tensions were coming to a head
for Sarah, she got an invitation she wasn't expecting. She
was chosen to pose for the squad swimsuit calendar.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
So I had I did have a meeting with a
staff person and just said, you know, I am concerned
about this. I'm not sure I should go on the
trip anyways. Yeah, what was kind of told to me
was kind of like, oh, that's cute, you know, and
don't worry about it. Just go have a good time,
take pictures for yourself. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity,
you know, And.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
So I did.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Sarah tried to make the best of the situation. She
lounged on the sand in a red bikini with her
dark hair long and loose, but inside she was struggling
should she be doing this. Sarah knows a lot of
women would have been thrilled to have this opportunity, but
for her, it was a breaking point.
Speaker 8 (28:51):
There's more than just what you see on the calendar.
There are real lives in real women, in real hearts,
and real concerns and real disappointments, real you know, winds
and stuff like behind that picture.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders swimsuit calendars gave rise to a
whole industry across the NFL. Other teams followed the Cowboys
lead and sold videos documenting the shoots. Each of them
were ramping up the sex. It was at another calendar
shoot around the same time Sarah was posing for the
Cowboys that another team went way too far. It was
(29:27):
in Aruba in two thousand and eight, where cheerleaders for
the Washington football team were posing for their calendar. Like
the Cowboys, Washington put its cheerleaders in fancy swimsuits in
a dream setting. You can see it in the video
they released, where cheerleaders pose on the sand and against
the crashing waves of the surf, but the team's staff
(29:49):
cut another video with that footage that they didn't release publicly.
According to people interviewed by The Washington Post, this cut
was for senior management. The Washington Post sources alleged that
team employees were told by someone high in the organization
to cut together moments with the cameras caught cheerleaders uncovered
by their swimsuits. Two years later, the team did it again.
(30:14):
According to a former producer and the team's broadcast department,
those videos were for Washington owner Dan Snyder. Washington's staff
denied the allegations, and Snyder told The Post he hadn't
asked for or seen the videos. He said he wasn't
even aware of them. But images like this also seemed
to have been passed around. An investigation revealed that someone
(30:36):
sent a picture of topless Washington cheerleaders to NFL coach
John Gruden, who didn't even work for Washington, and this
kind of creepy voyeurism likely went back decades. In the
early eighties, someone allegedly put a peephole in the locker
room of the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders so the visiting players
(30:57):
could spy on the cheerleaders while they changed. It was
apparently an open secret among football players who visited the
Philadelphia Stadium. It went on for almost twenty years until
news reports in a lawsuit finally brought it to an end.
But the past two decades have made a low key
voyeurism even easier in clickbait slide shows and videos of
(31:19):
the hottest cheerleaders all over the Internet. And then there's
the JumboTron at AT and T Stadium. When the Cowboys
open stadium in two thousand and nine, it was the
biggest high definition video board in the world. The screens
are one hundred and sixty feet wide and seventy two
feet tall.
Speaker 9 (31:40):
I can tell you this, most anyone I've ever talked
to who goes to the game ends up watching the
game on the jumbo tron.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
This is Sharon Grigsby. She's the Metro columnist for the
Dallas Morning News.
Speaker 9 (31:53):
We're not talking about a big screen at the end
of the stadium. We are talking about something that goes
almost from ends on to end zone.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
It seems the board really lets you see the action
on the field, but between plays with the cheerleaders up there,
the effect isn't subtle. Sharon heard about it from a
friend of hers, the late Dallas journalist and author Karen Blumenthal.
Speaker 9 (32:18):
And she had some concerns about what she and her
husband had come to call the breast board at Cowboys Stadium.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
And Sharon went to see for herself.
Speaker 9 (32:28):
And what I saw was shots where the camera is
positioned shooting up on an individual cheerleader, to the point
that there was very little that was not revealed. In
other words, it's one thing to see breasts and slinky
outfits when they're down on the field, but when they're
(32:49):
blown up that large. In Karen's mind, that was on
the edge of pornographic.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
TV sports had invented honey shots. You could get them
live in the stadium too. One guy I spoke to
about this said it was like the entire stadium getting
a lap dance.
Speaker 9 (33:08):
I saw guys with their cell phones photographing what was
on the big screen, and you could see them enlarging
further various close crotch or breastshots of the women. I
did come away feeling that there was an exploitative piece
(33:29):
to what the video crew was doing with those women.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Sharon's impression was that a lot of fans just ignored
the cheerleaders, and then some fans treated them with this
uncomfortable fixation. She wrote about this in a column that
ran in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 9 (33:47):
The column said that for all that women should have
pride in our bodies, we should feel that empowerment, we
do have to bow's that against how systems and institutions
can exploit our appearances, our bodies for men's pleasure.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
But the piece was more about the latest version of
that old tension it's been with the cheerleaders from the beginning.
A woman owning her sexuality was empowering, but a woman's
body used for men's pleasure was seen as exploitation. In
her column, Sharon called the squad quote a twentieth century
throwback dragged into a new era that doesn't want or
(34:32):
need them.
Speaker 9 (34:33):
I've been a columnist a long time, and so I
know what hits people's hot buttons. And I knew people
had really strong opinions about the cheerleaders, and I have
to say this exceeded all of my worst expectations.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
She got about as much hate mail for this story
as she's ever gotten. She got dragged on Twitter for
days that column came out more than two years ago,
but she still gets nasty letters.
Speaker 9 (35:05):
It's interesting one segment of the people that die hard. Oh,
she's writing negative about beautiful women, so she's got to
be jealous, an old fogie, and so there was all
of that. Then there was the young women who were like,
(35:26):
you know, immediately wanted to equate my column with that's
like blom and women for ripe if they get drunk.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
But she says her discomfort with the cheerleader's uniforms was
rooted in her own experience of being harassed at work.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
In those years seventy five to eighty there were a
lot of women I know who felt that in the workplace,
our bodies were personal property of the men who worked
alongside us. There's no doubt that is that imprinted for
me a discomfort with the fact that women were in
(36:05):
such scandally clad outfits for men's enjoyment.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
But one wrinkle here is that, probably now more than ever,
the cheerleaders aren't just there for men's enjoyment. Thanks to
their reality show and their social media lives, the cheerleaders
have a huge following among women. I talked about this
with one of them. When did you first see the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and what did you think of them?
Speaker 7 (36:33):
I have no idea. That's like asking me when I
first saw the grass.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Paige Skinner is a big fan of the squad, and
she's a journalist in Dallas. Over the last few years,
she's covered the Cowboys cheerleaders more than probably anyone else.
She has a family connection to the cheerleader's history. Her dad,
Greg Skinner, is the guy you heard earlier in the
series who was there at the Cotton Bowl for the
Bubbles Cash Game. But Paige came to love the cheeerleaders
(37:00):
on her own as a teenager on our high school
drill team in the mid two thousands. What was it
that appealed to you?
Speaker 7 (37:07):
It showed that dancing was a real sport and it
actually was hard, and that these women should be taken
seriously as athletes and performers. And I think I related
to it because my drill team director was a lot
like Kelly Finlass, very tough and didn't like excuses.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
She isn't just a fan. She's interviewed cheerleaders and written
deeply reported pieces about fair pay and race and sexual harassment,
all the complications of modern NFL cheerleading. She has strong
feelings about the problems in pro cheer, but she did
not agree with Sharon Well.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
When I read Sharon's piece, I was infuriated because just
because some things are wrong doesn't mean the entire thing
has to be shut down. And she implied that the
women were there for the male gaze, which was definitely
how it started, but I think the women have taken
(38:06):
it back and are there because they want to be.
And then she, essentially I felt victim, blamed the women
for the way the men in the stands were treating them.
If anything, the problem is the fans and how they're
treating the cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
This was such an interesting shift to me. Back in
the early days, the idea that men would be titillated
by the cheerleaders was part of the game plan, but
in a me too era, that idea had become problematic.
Speaker 7 (38:38):
One NFL cheerleader told me that she can't if she
thinks about it too long, she'll go crazy. But essentially,
how many men have touched her ass at corporate events
and so I think that's just another level of harassment
these women go through. And I think it goes back
to like in my opinion men need to change.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
What Page is seen up close in her own reporting
is how precarious the situation is today for pro cheerleaders.
Sharon told me she never actually thought the Cowboys would
get rid of their cheerleaders, but Page has seen teams
shut down their squads after cheerleaders came forward to complain
about being harassed and exploited. We'll hear her talk about
that more next week. But I had to wonder, is
(39:26):
the behavior of eighty thousand fans something a team can
realistically police. Is there a future where a stadium of
people can look up at those women on the video
board and appreciate their performance, because what they bring to
the game it's a lot more than shaking their pom poms.
Speaker 7 (39:42):
It's been ten years since I'd lasted a jump split,
and I still have to wake up in the middle
of the night and pop my head back into place
like it's an incredibly difficult thing that they're doing. And
these women wouldn't train their entire lives just to shake
their ass on the field. It's complicated choreography and complicated
dance training, and they are the best of the best.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
There's another important distinction here, Page told me she'd actually
never been to a Cowboys game. She's not a football fan.
She mostly knew the cheerleaders from the reality show, where
they were portrayed in one way, while a stadium of
sports fans might see them another way. It's confusing what
those cheerleaders mean and how they're seen. It really depends
(40:27):
on the context. Sharon actually quoted me in her Dallas
Morning News column We're friends, and she knew I'd grown
up loving the cheerleaders. I told her then that when
I was young and my dad would watch football, the
only place I'd see myself was in those beautiful girls
on the sideline. But I also told her we don't
need that place anymore. We have other places in sports.
(40:50):
And I'm not sure I believe that anymore, because while
it's true that women have made tremendous strides in sports,
it's also true that's not my passion. What I love
is watching women dance. I love their bodies, which are beautiful,
and I love their graceful, feminine energy on that field
where men smash into each other. And I'm not convinced
(41:12):
we have to lose that in order for other women
to rise in the games where they bring their own excellence.
But the politics of this are complicated. I think it's
hard to own your sexuality, as the saying goes, because
sexuality is something that is shared and who knows what
someone else will do with it. Women's bodies have tremendous power.
(41:35):
The sexuality they exude brings up questions I can't possibly
solve about how our culture sees women, how we value women,
what we want from women. And while sex can be
both easily commodified and painfully repressed, and the cheerleaders have
done plenty of both in their time, it's also a
life force that cannot be denied. And when I find
(41:58):
myself unable to take my eyes off those women as
they dance, that's what I see next week on the
final episode of America's Girls.
Speaker 5 (42:14):
Oh yeah, the reality show. I used to watch that
when I was stoned in college with my friend Susie
and I was scrolling through the channels one day. I
remember like, WHOA like seeing them, and I was like
taken back, like I've never seen on TV? What I do.
We thought we might be watching it like in a
sort of snarky we will laugh at these people a way,
And then we were like I would fucking die for
(42:35):
these women.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
I saw, I Saw, I Saw funny.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Thanks to Bill Zeebel for additional production on this episode.
Footage from the Cowboys Cheerleaders Swimsuit Calendar documentary. It's from
ESPN and How's Did the Inner Archive For a transcript
of this episode, visit Texasmonthly dot com slash America's Girls.
America's Girls is a Texas Monthly production. I'm your host,
(43:11):
writer and reporter Sarah Heflin. Executive producer is Megan Kriich,
Produced and edited by Patrick Michaels and edited by JK. Nichol,
Produced and engineered by Brian Stanffer, who also wrote the music.
Additional research and audio editing by podcast intern Harpercarlton. America's
Girls art is by Emily Kimbrow and Victoria Milner and
(43:33):
marketing by Tory mum Our theme song is Enough by
the bra Letts. If you like the show, please subscribe
and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and rate the
show there. See you next week.
Texas Monthly.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Report and learn from the at and sixteens.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
It's gonna be a I've been watching the cheerleaders since
I was five, but I'd actually never seen them live
until late last year, and.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Walking around today, it's like you can reveel no Cowboys,
this energy about this place, bringing people together.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
It was at a Cowboys game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Finally I'm going in. This was in the thick of
the pandemic and the NFL had a rule that cheerleaders
couldn't be on the field, but the Cowboys wanted to
make sure the cheerleaders could still perform, so they put
them on stages behind each end zone, right next to
(00:58):
the seats, actually right next to my seat. There was
nobody sitting between me and the cheerleaders, and it was
kind of a revelation from the moment they walked out
and welcomed the jungle came up on the sound system.
They didn't stop moving. They swayed their hips and flicked
their long hair. Their shaking pom pom sounded like a
(01:21):
rattlesnake ready to strike. The game was happening down on
the field, but I couldn't stop gawking of the cheerleaders.
Maybe I had always done this, but sitting that close
to them without a video screen between us, it also
felt a little weird, maybe because the dances are kind
of flirtatious. It took me by surprise because it was like,
(01:43):
after all these years I'd spent staring at the cheerleaders,
they were suddenly able to stare back each time one
of them made eye contact with me. I felt like
I'd been busted. The game was pretty amazing, the Cowboys won.
At one point, I got swept up in the excitement
of a touchdown by Ceedee Lamb. I actually stood up. Okay,
(02:08):
so I just got out of the stadium. But it
was the experience of watching the cheerleaders up close that
stayed with me. And they were so beautiful. I feel
like I should have a more descriptive word for it, but.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
You know, they were just the way that they move
is so beautiful, and I'm really struck by like the
marvel of their bodies, you know. And it's that weird
thing about women's bodies, where like you want to look
at them, but you don't want to look too much,
and so you look away, but you don't want to
(02:47):
insult them by not looking at them, and then you've
been looking too long, and now you've been ogling them.
And it's that really tricky thing of what do you
do about the beauty.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Of a woman's body? A year later, I'm still asking
that question. It's on my mind every time I sit
here in my recording studio, which is actually my closet,
looking at the photos of these women that I've pinned
to the wall. This tension was there early on. It's
what d Brock knew when she first hatched the idea
(03:19):
of a sexy new uniform. She told me she wanted
those women to show off their bodies. It was there
when Texi Waterman described what she was looking for at
those early tryouts. And it's what pro football is grappling
with today. As NFL cheerleading squads move away from the
hot pants and cleavage that the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders introduced,
(03:40):
and its pro cheerleading becomes more athletic and less about
looking a certain way. The question of what we want
little girls to become is fraught. Was embracing your sex
appeal savvy or vapid? Was it dangerous to encourage girls
to flaunt their own bodies or was it a sign
of progress and power? We don't all agree on what
(04:02):
a strong woman looks like, but the way you answer
that question may change how you see those cheerleaders.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
I I.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Son, this is America's Girls from Texas Monthly. I'm Sarah Heppela,
Episode seven, All American Sexy Girls. Sex has been a
(04:43):
part of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders brand since the original
seven debuted in nineteen seventy two, and it might be
the part people think of first. I was reminded of
that when I was talking with Gia Tolentino. She's a
writer for The New Yorker and a best selling author,
and she grew up in Houston. Before we spoke, I
sent her a bunch of pictures of the Cowboys cheerleaders
(05:05):
through the years. So like, I don't know if you've
got a chance to look at those photos. I wondered
what went through your head as you were looking at them?
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Okay, so just pure word association. Great, Okay, let's see
like Baywatch flight attendant, wonder Woman, Rodeo queen stripper.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Like that was beautiful. I asked a number of people
to play that word association game and Ja's list struck
me as very on point.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
I think about them in tandem with the fair flacet poster,
with the you know where she's in the red bathing
suit and her hair is tossed to the side, like
something that is just burned into your mind as a
landmark in the pop sexualization of women. And I think
I also vaguely associated Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders a little bit
(06:06):
with the mainstreaming of sort of strip club culture in
a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
A lot of the cheerleaders, current and former leaders will
be horrified to hear that. I think of Debbie Bond Hanson,
the assistant director through the eighties, who went sneaking around
Dallas strip clubs just to see if a particular cheerleader
candidate was working there. That's how important it was not
to have that kind of girl on the squad. But
the cheerleaders are a jumble of contradictions, kind of like
(06:36):
the place they came from. Even in GA's hometown of Houston,
a four hour drive from Dallas Cowboys Country, the Cowboys
cheerleaders reigned supreme.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
I think there was a dress up day at my
school and like you know, in fifth grade, like in
fifth grade and girls would come in Dallas Cowboys cheerleader's outfits,
you know, and it was just this kind of vague
emblem of an extremely Texas thing of spangle and blue
and white and big hair and big boobs, fake eyelashes,
(07:09):
the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Texas has a way of shaping little girls. It's not
as though kids in other states don't dress up as
cheerleaders or bedazzle their wardrobe. It's just the little girls
in Texas do it so much.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
If you're a girl in Texas, the likelihood of you
being thrust toward dance or pageant or big hair or
you know, just generally, you know, it's like you there's
so many women who have been prepped for this.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
It's no coincidence that a lot of hugely popular female
entertainers grew up in Texas working small venues, rodeo shows,
talent contests and beauty pageants. Kelly Clarkson, Casey Musgraves, Selena Gomez, Beyonce,
and Demi Lovado, whose mother, Diana de la Garza, was
(07:59):
a Dallas Boys cheerleader. The push toward beauty and performance
is pretty powerful in this place.
Speaker 5 (08:06):
I know. Yeah, it's like I learned to put my
face on honestly at age six, Like you know.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Oh, I loved makeup so much and me too.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
For Gia, it wasn't just Texas steering her this way.
It was her Evangelical high school where she became a cheerleader.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Like I just I remember because I loved it. I
mean the thing. I was always on the brink. I
had so many conflicting feelings about cheerleading all the time.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
This is why I wanted to talk to her. I'd
read a piece she wrote once about being a high
school cheerleader. It was such a beautiful story about that
complicated jumble of being part of something sacred and profane
at once, something that brought her joy but also made
her wary.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
Like I took such an almost animal pleasure on being
on the football field every Friday at sunset and just
feeling like I was drifting into the wind, like I
can still very much feel like exactly what you know,
the the lights and the band you know, off that way,
and all of us standing in a line with our
hands clasped behind our back, and the megaphones in front
(09:12):
of us, and the pomp poms below the megaphones and
you know there and there's whistles, and there's all of
this you know, ritualized violence on the field, and you
can feel your ponytail flapping in the breeze like a
horse's tail, and yeah, there was just this absolute, almost transcendence.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
The way she describes this, it sounds to me almost
like a religious experience. But a private Christian school was
about a different kind of religion. It was a place
of abstinence pledges and purity rings and strict dress codes.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Like my skirt was always too short, and I would
get in trouble and I would get detention and they
would make you kneel on the ground and put your
you know, to see if your fingertips were longer than
your skirt and all of this, you know, stuff that
I found incredibly offensive. But on game days, every time
there was game we were cheering for, we were required
to wear our uniforms to school, and our uniforms were very,
(10:07):
very small, like they were to bring it on uniforms,
you know, like short sleeves, skin tight, really short skirt
hiding nothing, and you know, you'd walk up the stairs
and everyone could see your underwear.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So on those game days, she'd wear pajama pants under
her uniform.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
You know, it was cold, you know, Texas keeps every
indoor building like you know, at sixty degrees anyway, And
so I was always like wearing a blanket, wearing my
pajama pants, and I would always get trouble. So on
days when I wasn't wearing the uniform, I would get
in trouble for showing too much skin. And then on
days where I was wearing my pajama pants under my
cheerleading uniform, I would get in trouble for not showing
(10:45):
the uniform.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
I remember the dress code at my conservative public high
school in Dallas. Skirts had to be within two inches
of the knees, and if they thought a girl was
off sides, it'd send her to the assistant principal, who
pulled out a ruler.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
You know, it was so clear that what we want
from women showing their body is a so context dependent
it has nothing to do with any real logic. It
bothered me that I was supposed to sexualize myself on
game days and not allowed to any other days, you know,
(11:19):
And it was very clear. It was like, Okay, I'm
supposed to be appropriately decorative in service of men's sports.
But as far as how I felt about the uniform
when I wasn't at school, I loved it.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Gea told me she liked how the uniform looked and felt,
and even though it was revealing, she also said she
felt kind of hidden, like the uniform was a disguise
she could step in and out of. People would look
at her and only see the role she was playing,
and there was freedom in that.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
But there was something particular about being a teenage girl
at a conservative Christian school where everything that was demanded
of us was purity, and no one was admitting that
what they were simultaneously demanding of us with sexualization.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
I wondered what the Cowboys cheerleaders thought about this question too,
But when I first started talking to them, I was
surprised by how many didn't see their uniform as provocative.
These were cheerleaders from the Oughts, and they'd say, I
don't really think about being sexy. I think the uniform
is just normal. But I mean, their official pantihos are
(12:25):
sold at Hooters. A cheerleader from the Aughts told me
that's where she went to buy them, from a vending
machine in the back. And yet they're not sexy. I
kept wondering, did the cheerleaders just not want to go
there with me? Or had skimpy uniforms and thumping dance
moves been part of the culture so long that their
(12:47):
sexiness had become invisible to them. The cheerleader's racist era
was probably the Oughts. It was a decade of visible
thongs and victorious sea angels and pole dancing classes compared
to everything else happening in the culture at the time.
Maybe that uniform was normal, but two leaders didn't just
(13:09):
appear in uniforms. The Cowboys released a swimsuit calendar each year.
I remember seeing those calendars on display tables at Barnes
and Nobook next to sports illustrated pin ups and far
side desk calendars. The Cowboys cheerleaders say they were the
first NFL squad to sell swimsuit calendars. The next evolution
(13:30):
of this merchandising came in the late nineties, when sports
channels began airing behind the scenes specials. It's wild to
watch the products I'd only seen in bookstores brought to
life on sandy beaches with crashing waves and women in
tiny bikinis. It turned the flat office calendar into a
frolicking beach adventure. Here's director Kelly Finnglass and a special
(13:55):
that aired on ESPN.
Speaker 6 (13:57):
For me and the two Mouths Calendar were really wanted
this year's calendar to be special. We wanted it to
be classy and elega and to expose the cheerleaders as
the premieer group of women in.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
All w and the Cowboys kept right on exposing those cheerleaders.
They filmed their own making of DVD. At one point,
a few lucky fans could even buy their own tickets
to the swimsuit shoots. For six nine and ninety nine dollars,
you could enjoy a three day trip to rivere A Maya,
Mexico for an exclusive look the making of the calendar.
(14:32):
Amber Gosden, a cheerleader you heard from in the last episode,
went to Mexico for two swimsuit calendar shoots in the
mid adds.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
My first one was in Kozimal. My second calendar shoot
was in Cabas and Lucas, and that was incredible. I
mean we were on top of Pedro gall and this beautiful, beautiful,
I mean multimillion dollar home, all these I mean Picasso's
hanging on the walls edge like pools that dropped off
into waterfalls over this big mountain.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
It was just like a lot of young women growing
up in the eighties. Amber had swimsuit models in her
bedroom wall as a girl, and getting to pose in
a calendar of her own was something like a dream.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
I mean, it was the best time having someone dode
all over you into your makeup and you know your hair,
one little hair out of the way. It's it's fun.
It's fun to feel like that for a little bit.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It was two thousand and three and she'd just rejoined
the squad after a few years away. When she first auditioned,
she hadn't even finished high school. Now she'd graduated from SMU,
she was twenty five. She was much more self confident,
and she'd finally been picked to appear in the Swimsuit calendar.
The Cowboys put out a making of DVD from that shoot,
(15:42):
and you can watch Amber by a pool that overlooks
the ocean. She's posing in stilettos in a white swimsuit
that kind of criss crosses over her tan stomach. She
looks amazing. And the shot of Amber they picked for
the calendar is striking.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
It was actually pretty random because we had shot at
this house all day and then I guess that was
the makeup artist David. He was like, look at those
guys over there, and he just like over there on
the beach and there was this kind of big tank truck,
and he goes, this will be a cool shoot. And
I saw him over there whispering to Kelly, and I
(16:18):
see them kind of game planning, and here we go.
We go over there and do this kind of you know,
fly by the seat of our pants photo shot, and
that's the one that made the calendar.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Ambers in that white swimsuit flanked by men and fatigues
carrying automatic weapons. The first time I saw it, I
thought these were soldiers headed to Iraq, since two thousand
and three was the start of that war and the
height of a certain post nine to eleven patriotism. But
they're actually Mexican Federalis.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
I'm a very feminine person, so it was very hard
for me to see like that was my calendar shot.
I just looked very rambo ish kind of and it
was very intense, and I'm like, I, you know, just
wanted to be feminine and pretty.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And the next year amber swimsuit photo was exactly that.
She liked it so much she got her own copy
of it blown up to post her size. She keeps
it in her attic these days, but she got it
out to show me. She's lying on her stomach in
a white and black bikini, resting her elbows on the sand,
and her cleavage front and center. If you told me
that was a professional swimsuit model, I would have believed you.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
We talked about this being sort of like the realization
of a dream and to be beautiful and sexy, and
I think a lot of women share that. And then
I wonder, I'm thinking about like the rule book and
how you dress and different. Was there ever any part
of you that felt like you were only allowed to
(17:45):
be sexualized during certain times and not others.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
I guess I never really felt. I mean, I felt beautiful,
like during calendar shoots and things like that, but I
never really felt sexualized art like. I really always felt
all American.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I felt all American. Hearing Amber say that, I immediately
thought of Texi Waterman at the tryouts in nineteen seventy six,
when a reporter asked what she was looking for and
she said.
Speaker 7 (18:19):
We're looking for an all American sexy girl.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Sexy was a core part of the identity, but maybe
it was a little tricky to own. I never heard
Kelly Finnglass use that word with reporters. She said classy
and elegant, but the sexiness is unmistakable. I have a
copy of the making of DVD from Amber Shoot. On
the cover, it shows a cheerleader tugging down the side
(18:47):
of her bikini bottom with a smoldering look on her face.
A friend of mine saw that DVD at my house
and he asked if it was porn, even though the
title said America's Sweethearts. Amber does remember situations when being
a cheerleader felt uncomfortable, but she doesn't blame the cowboys.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
I never felt over sexualized by the organization, not even
in this swimsuit calendar. I don't know why, but it
was more of a person thinking that That's when I
started to feel dirty and I would get very like
if a man were to come up and be, like,
say something sexual, that's when I all of a sudden
kind of like it would snap me out of character.
(19:29):
I mean, one time, I feel like we were doing
a player intro line. There was a photographer and I
looked down and saw that part of my breast was
like my areola was like out and he was started
taking pictures of it. And he was from another He
was not our team photographers. All I had to do
(19:52):
was go and get my security officer, and I told
him when he went over there and took the camera
and took the film out, you know, they don't want
anything out there like that. They were very protective of
the image, to keep it all American.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
While most cheerleaders I talked to felt this way, I
did meet one who has a very different perspective. More
after this, I met a cheerleader named Sarah clay Long.
She made the squad in two thousand and seven. She
was excited at first, but something happened while she was
(20:28):
on the squad that really changed her perspective. She came
to my place to talk.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Okay, come on in, so we're going to do the
interview down here.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Sarah grew up in Houston and she lives in Dallas
now with her husband and four children. She told me
she started dancing at a young age. Her mom taught
drill team.
Speaker 8 (20:50):
And so I lived in the studio. I was there
at least four or five nights a week. That's what
my life kind of revolved around. It was and I
identity that I took on. And I know that that's
probably the case for a lot of young girls in Texas.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
Like the football players, the cheerleaders have recruiters who keep
an eye out for beautiful and talented dancers across Texas.
Speaker 8 (21:13):
And when I was a senior in high school, I
had done really well at a competition and because of
that was given like a letter requesting that I come
an audition for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
A few years later, she tried out. On her second attempt,
she made the team. It was two thousand and seven.
On my coffee table, I'd set out pictures from her
two seasons with the cheerleaders. I found them on the internet.
By the way, Yeah, I see this. I know it's
been waiting for you.
Speaker 8 (21:45):
You haven't flipped through them, but I see that top one.
I know. I remember the first thing I yelled. I
can't believe I said it, but the first thing I
yelled was, oh my gosh, my boobs.
Speaker 9 (21:55):
Like then they don't look like that?
Speaker 5 (21:57):
What do you mean they like?
Speaker 7 (21:58):
I just.
Speaker 8 (22:00):
Have never you know done this with them, and you know,
we have this like Victoria's Secret Braw push up Braw
that we like die blue and then tie the shirt
through the front and then pull it and squeezes the
goods together apparently. And so I saw this and was like,
oh my.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
The Cowboys have a partnership with Victoria's Secret And in
twenty twelve, AT and T Stadium became the first professional
sports stadium to have a Victoria's Secret store in it.
There's a clear overlap between Victoria's Secret models and the cheerleaders,
but unlike those sultry angels, the cheerleaders had to maintain
an appearance of sweetness and wholesomeness. Sarah told me it
(22:44):
wasn't an act.
Speaker 8 (22:46):
But so, I think the first thing that really surprised
me was just the authenticity of most of the women
there And there's a lot of good that can come
out of it. You can make someone's day or you know,
visit someone in a nursing home or in a hospital
and that just brings him a lot of joy. Like
(23:07):
that was just really really sweet.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
But while Sarah was still in training camp, she was
having a hard time at home and she didn't want
to get into specifics.
Speaker 8 (23:18):
But there was a lot of hurt, and there was
a lot of pain for me, and to mask that,
I really just entered into a time of partying, of drinking,
and yeah, that was probably a good two years of
my life where I just didn't want to feel anything.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
One night, she goes out drinking with friends and drives
herself home. She was hesitant to share this part of
her story. She really hates that she did this. But
that's when she gets pulled over. She takes a breathalyzer
test and fails it, and she's arrested and taken to jail.
That's where she had an experience that changed her life.
Speaker 8 (24:04):
I was sitting in a jail cell and just felt
the presence of God, just go are you done? Running?
Are you done? And so I was really wrestling with
just questioning who I am, questioning choices that I've made,
you know, am I doing the right thing?
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Like with my life, she stopped hanging out with a
college friends she'd partied with. She started going to a
church where she found a new community and purpose.
Speaker 8 (24:37):
And so that was a huge, huge part of my story.
But that happened simultaneously as I was a rookie on
the DCC.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Along with her constant cheerleader practices. She's going to church
twice on Sundays, and over the next year she starts
to see the uniforms and the performer in a very
different way.
Speaker 8 (25:02):
That old self, to me, was just this desire to
be somebody, and it's just vanity.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Even on the good will trips to nursing homes and hospitals,
as much as she feels called to help, she realizes
she doesn't want to be in that uniform while she
does it.
Speaker 8 (25:28):
Just wanted to love on and care for and minister
to these people, and it was really hard to do that,
you know, just being so exposed.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
One day, her dad was in the stands and doing
those sexy dances in front of him. It was just weird.
It's like the sexual tease, the inherent provocativeness of the
role she was playing suddenly became visible to her.
Speaker 8 (25:52):
And just to remember, like, man, my dad was so
excited that I was a cheerleader, you know, and they
had like ticket sin. I just remember the dance that
we were doing, you know, in front of my dad,
and I just felt like, man, this is.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Just feels wrong, and it wasn't just dancing for her
dad that made her uncomfortable.
Speaker 8 (26:14):
It was very awkward, you know, to have a male
who is there, you know, with his family or something
like wanting a picture with you, and you know that,
I mean, his wife is right here. Like I know
that there's like this culture, you know, in this iconic
views of this organization, but if you take a step back,
(26:34):
I think that we are all desensitized to it.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Not everyone was desensitized to this. In two thousand and five,
a group of Texas lawmakers introduced a bill nicknamed the
Booty Bill, aimed at what they perceived to be a
hyper sexualized culture that had trickled down into the way
girls dressed and moved on cheer squads, marching bands, and
drill teams. It didn't pass, but it reflected a growing
(27:00):
concern over how girls behave and dress, and the years
that followed, cheerschools started banning the bear midriffs that the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders made popular. I spoke to a lot
of cheerleaders who described themselves as Christian, but they never
had a problem with the uniform. Sarah's the only cheerleader
I met who did such a one to eighty while
(27:20):
she was on the squad. And what's fascinating about her
transformation is that suddenly she saw the uniform and even
the nature of the cheerleaders work with the critical eye
that a lot of people outside the squad share, and
not just conservatives anymore, but progressives too.
Speaker 8 (27:39):
So like, yes, I want little girls to have dreams,
but I especially want my children, you know, my daughters,
but my sons also to know that they are so
much more than just.
Speaker 5 (27:54):
What they look like.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
But just as these tensions were coming to a head
for Sarah, she got an invitation she wasn't expecting. She
was chosen to pose for the squad swimsuit calendar.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
So I had I did have a meeting with a
staff person and just said, you know, I am concerned
about this. I'm not sure I should go on the
trip anyways. Yeah, what was kind of told to me
was kind of like, oh, that's cute, you know, and
don't worry about it. Just go have a good time,
take pictures for yourself. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity,
you know, And.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
So I did.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Sarah tried to make the best of the situation. She
lounged on the sand in a red bikini with her
dark hair long and loose, but inside she was struggling
should she be doing this. Sarah knows a lot of
women would have been thrilled to have this opportunity, but
for her, it was a breaking point.
Speaker 8 (28:51):
There's more than just what you see on the calendar.
There are real lives in real women, in real hearts,
and real concerns and real disappointments, real you know, winds
and stuff like behind that picture.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders swimsuit calendars gave rise to a
whole industry across the NFL. Other teams followed the Cowboys
lead and sold videos documenting the shoots. Each of them
were ramping up the sex. It was at another calendar
shoot around the same time Sarah was posing for the
Cowboys that another team went way too far. It was
(29:27):
in Aruba in two thousand and eight, where cheerleaders for
the Washington football team were posing for their calendar. Like
the Cowboys, Washington put its cheerleaders in fancy swimsuits in
a dream setting. You can see it in the video
they released, where cheerleaders pose on the sand and against
the crashing waves of the surf, but the team's staff
(29:49):
cut another video with that footage that they didn't release publicly.
According to people interviewed by The Washington Post, this cut
was for senior management. The Washington Post sources alleged that
team employees were told by someone high in the organization
to cut together moments with the cameras caught cheerleaders uncovered
by their swimsuits. Two years later, the team did it again.
(30:14):
According to a former producer and the team's broadcast department,
those videos were for Washington owner Dan Snyder. Washington's staff
denied the allegations, and Snyder told The Post he hadn't
asked for or seen the videos. He said he wasn't
even aware of them. But images like this also seemed
to have been passed around. An investigation revealed that someone
(30:36):
sent a picture of topless Washington cheerleaders to NFL coach
John Gruden, who didn't even work for Washington, and this
kind of creepy voyeurism likely went back decades. In the
early eighties, someone allegedly put a peephole in the locker
room of the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders so the visiting players
(30:57):
could spy on the cheerleaders while they changed. It was
apparently an open secret among football players who visited the
Philadelphia Stadium. It went on for almost twenty years until
news reports in a lawsuit finally brought it to an end.
But the past two decades have made a low key
voyeurism even easier in clickbait slide shows and videos of
(31:19):
the hottest cheerleaders all over the Internet. And then there's
the JumboTron at AT and T Stadium. When the Cowboys
open stadium in two thousand and nine, it was the
biggest high definition video board in the world. The screens
are one hundred and sixty feet wide and seventy two
feet tall.
Speaker 9 (31:40):
I can tell you this, most anyone I've ever talked
to who goes to the game ends up watching the
game on the jumbo tron.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
This is Sharon Grigsby. She's the Metro columnist for the
Dallas Morning News.
Speaker 9 (31:53):
We're not talking about a big screen at the end
of the stadium. We are talking about something that goes
almost from ends on to end zone.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
It seems the board really lets you see the action
on the field, but between plays with the cheerleaders up there,
the effect isn't subtle. Sharon heard about it from a
friend of hers, the late Dallas journalist and author Karen Blumenthal.
Speaker 9 (32:18):
And she had some concerns about what she and her
husband had come to call the breast board at Cowboys Stadium.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
And Sharon went to see for herself.
Speaker 9 (32:28):
And what I saw was shots where the camera is
positioned shooting up on an individual cheerleader, to the point
that there was very little that was not revealed. In
other words, it's one thing to see breasts and slinky
outfits when they're down on the field, but when they're
(32:49):
blown up that large. In Karen's mind, that was on
the edge of pornographic.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
TV sports had invented honey shots. You could get them
live in the stadium too. One guy I spoke to
about this said it was like the entire stadium getting
a lap dance.
Speaker 9 (33:08):
I saw guys with their cell phones photographing what was
on the big screen, and you could see them enlarging
further various close crotch or breastshots of the women. I
did come away feeling that there was an exploitative piece
(33:29):
to what the video crew was doing with those women.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Sharon's impression was that a lot of fans just ignored
the cheerleaders, and then some fans treated them with this
uncomfortable fixation. She wrote about this in a column that
ran in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 9 (33:47):
The column said that for all that women should have
pride in our bodies, we should feel that empowerment, we
do have to bow's that against how systems and institutions
can exploit our appearances, our bodies for men's pleasure.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
But the piece was more about the latest version of
that old tension it's been with the cheerleaders from the beginning.
A woman owning her sexuality was empowering, but a woman's
body used for men's pleasure was seen as exploitation. In
her column, Sharon called the squad quote a twentieth century
throwback dragged into a new era that doesn't want or
(34:32):
need them.
Speaker 9 (34:33):
I've been a columnist a long time, and so I
know what hits people's hot buttons. And I knew people
had really strong opinions about the cheerleaders, and I have
to say this exceeded all of my worst expectations.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
She got about as much hate mail for this story
as she's ever gotten. She got dragged on Twitter for
days that column came out more than two years ago,
but she still gets nasty letters.
Speaker 9 (35:05):
It's interesting one segment of the people that die hard. Oh,
she's writing negative about beautiful women, so she's got to
be jealous, an old fogie, and so there was all
of that. Then there was the young women who were like,
(35:26):
you know, immediately wanted to equate my column with that's
like blom and women for ripe if they get drunk.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
But she says her discomfort with the cheerleader's uniforms was
rooted in her own experience of being harassed at work.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
In those years seventy five to eighty there were a
lot of women I know who felt that in the workplace,
our bodies were personal property of the men who worked
alongside us. There's no doubt that is that imprinted for
me a discomfort with the fact that women were in
(36:05):
such scandally clad outfits for men's enjoyment.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
But one wrinkle here is that, probably now more than ever,
the cheerleaders aren't just there for men's enjoyment. Thanks to
their reality show and their social media lives, the cheerleaders
have a huge following among women. I talked about this
with one of them. When did you first see the
Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and what did you think of them?
Speaker 7 (36:33):
I have no idea. That's like asking me when I
first saw the grass.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Paige Skinner is a big fan of the squad, and
she's a journalist in Dallas. Over the last few years,
she's covered the Cowboys cheerleaders more than probably anyone else.
She has a family connection to the cheerleader's history. Her dad,
Greg Skinner, is the guy you heard earlier in the
series who was there at the Cotton Bowl for the
Bubbles Cash Game. But Paige came to love the cheeerleaders
(37:00):
on her own as a teenager on our high school
drill team in the mid two thousands. What was it
that appealed to you?
Speaker 7 (37:07):
It showed that dancing was a real sport and it
actually was hard, and that these women should be taken
seriously as athletes and performers. And I think I related
to it because my drill team director was a lot
like Kelly Finlass, very tough and didn't like excuses.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
She isn't just a fan. She's interviewed cheerleaders and written
deeply reported pieces about fair pay and race and sexual harassment,
all the complications of modern NFL cheerleading. She has strong
feelings about the problems in pro cheer, but she did
not agree with Sharon Well.
Speaker 7 (37:45):
When I read Sharon's piece, I was infuriated because just
because some things are wrong doesn't mean the entire thing
has to be shut down. And she implied that the
women were there for the male gaze, which was definitely
how it started, but I think the women have taken
(38:06):
it back and are there because they want to be.
And then she, essentially I felt victim, blamed the women
for the way the men in the stands were treating them.
If anything, the problem is the fans and how they're
treating the cheerleaders.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
This was such an interesting shift to me. Back in
the early days, the idea that men would be titillated
by the cheerleaders was part of the game plan, but
in a me too era, that idea had become problematic.
Speaker 7 (38:38):
One NFL cheerleader told me that she can't if she
thinks about it too long, she'll go crazy. But essentially,
how many men have touched her ass at corporate events
and so I think that's just another level of harassment
these women go through. And I think it goes back
to like in my opinion men need to change.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
What Page is seen up close in her own reporting
is how precarious the situation is today for pro cheerleaders.
Sharon told me she never actually thought the Cowboys would
get rid of their cheerleaders, but Page has seen teams
shut down their squads after cheerleaders came forward to complain
about being harassed and exploited. We'll hear her talk about
that more next week. But I had to wonder, is
(39:26):
the behavior of eighty thousand fans something a team can
realistically police. Is there a future where a stadium of
people can look up at those women on the video
board and appreciate their performance, because what they bring to
the game it's a lot more than shaking their pom poms.
Speaker 7 (39:42):
It's been ten years since I'd lasted a jump split,
and I still have to wake up in the middle
of the night and pop my head back into place
like it's an incredibly difficult thing that they're doing. And
these women wouldn't train their entire lives just to shake
their ass on the field. It's complicated choreography and complicated
dance training, and they are the best of the best.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
There's another important distinction here, Page told me she'd actually
never been to a Cowboys game. She's not a football fan.
She mostly knew the cheerleaders from the reality show, where
they were portrayed in one way, while a stadium of
sports fans might see them another way. It's confusing what
those cheerleaders mean and how they're seen. It really depends
(40:27):
on the context. Sharon actually quoted me in her Dallas
Morning News column We're friends, and she knew I'd grown
up loving the cheerleaders. I told her then that when
I was young and my dad would watch football, the
only place I'd see myself was in those beautiful girls
on the sideline. But I also told her we don't
need that place anymore. We have other places in sports.
(40:50):
And I'm not sure I believe that anymore, because while
it's true that women have made tremendous strides in sports,
it's also true that's not my passion. What I love
is watching women dance. I love their bodies, which are beautiful,
and I love their graceful, feminine energy on that field
where men smash into each other. And I'm not convinced
(41:12):
we have to lose that in order for other women
to rise in the games where they bring their own excellence.
But the politics of this are complicated. I think it's
hard to own your sexuality, as the saying goes, because
sexuality is something that is shared and who knows what
someone else will do with it. Women's bodies have tremendous power.
(41:35):
The sexuality they exude brings up questions I can't possibly
solve about how our culture sees women, how we value women,
what we want from women. And while sex can be
both easily commodified and painfully repressed, and the cheerleaders have
done plenty of both in their time, it's also a
life force that cannot be denied. And when I find
(41:58):
myself unable to take my eyes off those women as
they dance, that's what I see next week on the
final episode of America's Girls.
Speaker 5 (42:14):
Oh yeah, the reality show. I used to watch that
when I was stoned in college with my friend Susie
and I was scrolling through the channels one day. I
remember like, WHOA like seeing them, and I was like
taken back, like I've never seen on TV? What I do.
We thought we might be watching it like in a
sort of snarky we will laugh at these people a way,
And then we were like I would fucking die for
(42:35):
these women.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
I saw, I Saw, I Saw funny.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Thanks to Bill Zeebel for additional production on this episode.
Footage from the Cowboys Cheerleaders Swimsuit Calendar documentary. It's from
ESPN and How's Did the Inner Archive For a transcript
of this episode, visit Texasmonthly dot com slash America's Girls.
America's Girls is a Texas Monthly production. I'm your host,
(43:11):
writer and reporter Sarah Heflin. Executive producer is Megan Kriich,
Produced and edited by Patrick Michaels and edited by JK. Nichol,
Produced and engineered by Brian Stanffer, who also wrote the music.
Additional research and audio editing by podcast intern Harpercarlton. America's
Girls art is by Emily Kimbrow and Victoria Milner and
(43:33):
marketing by Tory mum Our theme song is Enough by
the bra Letts. If you like the show, please subscribe
and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and rate the
show there. See you next week.
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com