Texas’ obsession with tradition, especially around football, is the benign justification for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders continuing to shimmy and shake on the sidelines. But the calculation that sex still sells on the sidelines is why this spectacle endures.
While everything around them has evolved, the cheerleaders have never changed out of the skimpy halter tops, fringe vests and short shorts they put on in 1972.
Forty-seven years later, all they represent is the diminished role that women once played — both in sports and in society. They are a 20th century throwback dragged into a new era that doesn’t want or need them.
To this lifelong Cowboys fan, it feels the time has come to retire America’s Sweethearts — or at least put them in an entirely new uniform with a completely different routine.
Both of those options are as likely as Jerry Jones selling the team, so here’s middle ground: Stop using 2019 technology to jumbo-size the problem and change how the cheerleaders are portrayed on the stadium’s monster-size video screen.
As I watched several young men sitting in front of me photograph and compare those bigger-than-life images during a Cowboys preseason game, the revealing, sexed-up presentation made me queasy.
Local author Karen Blumenthal, a season ticket holder who has bled silver and blue since birth, is equally bothered by the cheerleader close-ups on Jerry’s “vidja board.”
Blumenthal and her husband jokingly call it “the breast board” — giant-sized women whose bodies are all but bursting out of their tight costumes — and the couple frequently takes note of men filming and photographing the most intimate shots.
Blumenthal’s breaking point came at last year’s nail-biter against the New Orleans Saints, when a man seated nearby repeatedly photographed individual cheerleaders’ body parts as they strutted their stuff on the big screen.
“He would whip his phone up and zero in on their crotches or breasts,” Blumenthal told me.
“By the second quarter, I am taking pictures of him taking pictures. By the fourth quarter, the young people behind me are yelling, ‘We need an intervention for this guy.’”
The bare-skin-obsessed fan wasn’t deterred, sharing his images with the men in his party and flipping repeatedly through the photos.
“This guy all but ruined one of the best games of the year for me,” Blumenthal said. “This is not a violation of any of the posted rules, but it made me really uncomfortable. In retrospect, it created a hostile environment for women and young people.”
Blumenthal reported this sorry behavior to the Cowboys and asked that they reconsider the images on the video screen. She also raised concerns about last year’s prerecorded opening to the cheerleaders’ performances, which she described as “a shot of the belt buckle — but it's really a crotch shot, showing a navel, shorts and two thighs.”
Cowboys employee Cory Miller, part of the video content team, responded that the organization shows the cheerleaders only in a positive and professional light. “Based on your comments, we will work even harder to ensure we are featuring only the best on our board this season,” he wrote.
Blumenthal, who once worked for The Dallas Morning News, didn't ask me to take her word for the in-stadium experience; she gave me her two tickets to the Aug. 29 preseason game to check it out for myself.
She wasn’t exaggerating. These grown women’s sidelines work in no way resembles that of college and high school cheerleaders — and certainly not those whose routines of daring and skill win national competitions.
The Cowboys cheerleaders’ moves that Thursday night were mostly pelvic thrusts, chest jiggles and bottoms up, long hair sweeping the ground. The projection of that eye candy onto the 60-yard-long video board magnified the feeling that the Cowboys are all but selling sex on the sidelines.
Yet fans seemed to pay little attention to the cheerleaders — except for the group of four young men in front of me.
I left the game wondering what value the organization believes the cheerleaders add. I question how many fans care about the cheerleaders — and whether those who do, care for the right reason.
Perhaps the cheerleaders contribute to the Jones family's bottom line in some other way — through merchandise sales, paid appearances or profits from the long-running CMT reality series Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.
I had hoped Cowboys executive vice president Charlotte Jones Anderson, who is also chief brand officer of the entire organization, would discuss these questions with me. But all I got was a four-paragraph written statement from cheerleaders director Kelli Finglass, who expressed pride in the women’s uniform “and the more than 700 women who have worn it since its inception in the days of Tex Schramm and Tom Landry.”
“We have women who have gone on to wonderfully significant lives as mothers and grandmothers, some of whom have also had successful careers in areas that range from show business, medicine, education, broadcasting and medical services,” Finglass wrote.
I’m not questioning the worth of the women who wear the cheerleader uniform. Of course, women should have pride in our choices and our bodies. The issue at hand involves how to balance that empowerment with systems that exploit women’s appearances for men’s pleasure.
One of the smartest people I know on this subject is Sarah Hepola, who, before she became a best-selling author, wrote the "Smart Blonde" column in D magazine that intelligently wrestled with how Dallas culture shaped her — and warped her.
Sarah was a young girl when her family moved to Dallas in 1978, a time Hepola now looks back on as “peak Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.” She told me, “they were, in some ways, the center of culture as I grew up.”
“As a little girl, I wanted to be an actress, a singer, a writer and a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader,” Hepola told me. “In that hybrid, you see what’s happening with my generation. We were told we can do anything, but we still witness a world where women are their most powerful when they are their most beautiful and most youthful.”
Hepola, the author of Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget and currently working on Unattached, a memoir about being single in her 40s, says she is neither "for or against" the cheerleaders.
“I love the look. It’s like watching an artist at work — a woman dancing with her hair,” Hepola said. “Parts of me will always be hopelessly tugged toward the cheerleaders. That stuff is programmed into me.”
But she also senses that the cheerleaders are outdated. “When I was young, and we’d watch the game, the only place I’d see myself was in those girls. We don’t need that place anymore. We have other places in sports.”
Iconic 1977 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders poster to hang in Smithsonian
Dallas debuted the iconic star-spangled cheerleaders the same year Title IX passed. At the very moment that legislation changed the landscape for women in athletics, their greatest visibility in sports was the pop culture sensation of bare midriffs, go-go boots and hot pants on Cowboys game day.
Today, women are part of team ownership, interviewing players on the sidelines or internationally famous in other sports. Girls in the football stands wear Dak Prescott and Jason Witten jerseys, not sparkly, fringed costumes.
Yet the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders remain part of a $5.5 billion football franchise’s brand — a problematic part of the brand in an industry that has made plenty of mistakes regarding the treatment of women.
A year ago, the Cowboys donated one of its iconic cheerleader uniforms to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Too bad they insist on keeping this relic on the sidelines in 2019.
