There are times when the Dog despairs that his fellow liberals will ever grow a sense of humor about some issues. It is this humorlessness that makes us easy targets for the witless Right, we are so serious, so earnest that we can not seem to let go a make a casual joke about an issue that we feel is really important. The Dog gets it, some issues are to serious, or to potentially damaging to allow them to used in humor or even treated lightly in discussion. However, that does not make the habit of treating these issues with more import than the average man any less open to ridicule.
Now that the Dog has set the premise, let’s get on to being humorless about an issue that was thrust into the Dog’s snout this weekend. The Dog works for a Heavy Equipment company here in Denver. The company has season tickets to in the Club Level for the Denver Broncos. These are what you might describe as Junior Master of the Universe level tickets. They are not quite the level of sky box seats, but you still go in your own entrance, there are four (yeah, four) checks of your tickets before you get to your seats, just make sure that none of the Hoi Paloi sneak in. During the regular season these tickets are used exclusively by the sales staff, but since no one cares about pre-season play, and the company has to buy them anyway they are given out to non-sales folks in a waste-not-want-not style of corporate perks.
So there we were, Mrs. Dog and I, and ten other staff folks who were lucky enough to be around when the tickets were handed out, sitting in a light rain, watching the Broncos beat up on the Dallas Cowboys. There was all the usual stuff at the game; a back up warning beep when the Cowboys got a penalty, the cheers of in-com-plete when a pass was missed and the Bronco’s cheerleaders, dancing in the rain in what could only be described as one third of enough clothes.
This is where things took a turn to the humorless side. As the clock was winding down on the first half, hundreds (literally, the Dog counted 310 before giving up) of little girls in Broncos orange and blue started to file in from the tunnels that the players use. The ages were between 6 and 14 according to their website but some were so little that they had one of those ropes with handles for them to hold on to, so they would not wonder off. They came out and did a half time routine with the adult cheerleaders. It was starting to make the Dogs "Liberal Sense" a little uncomfortable, then they got to the booty shaking part of the dance routine, and that when it the old LS flipped all the way to humorless.
Here’s the thing from the Dog’s point of view, and my fellow Kossacks can tell me if I have gone too far, but there is a big difference between the adults that are doing this and the little kids. For the young women on that actual squad, this is a choice. These are all very toned and athletic women, with lots of long shiny hair and some dance ability. They are on the far right of the bell curve when it comes to the consensus view of attractiveness and willingness to dance in front of 60 to 70 thousand people in skimpy clothing. While the Dog would like to think that they are all astrophysicists, philosophers, and union organizers in their other lives, it is a choice made in adulthood by adults. If they want to do this, no worries, adults get to make choices in our society and they made theirs.
It is when we get to the little kids that things get less fun and more worrisome. Lets start with the dance moves. The Dog is not a prude, but there is something more than a little creepy about 6 year olds doing butt popping dance moves. These are little girl that don’t have the first idea of what this kind of dancing is simulating, and it seems inappropriate to have them doing it. There will be plenty of time when they are teens and want to dance like that (which the Dog is perfectly fine with) but there is something to be said for having your whole childhood taken up with age appropriate dance. Childhood is way to short as it is, way accelerate it for these kids?
Then there is the thing that really bothers the Dog, for these girls an idea about the ideal look for a woman and success as a woman is being seared into their psyche. Here are these adult cheerleaders; getting massive amounts of approval from a crowd of 60, 000 and the kids are there on the field doing the same thing. Is there anyone out there that thinks this will not be a significant influence on how the women these girls will become view their bodies or their success as a person? The Dog does not see how it could be avoided. To make it worse some of these girls are not going to look like the adult cheerleaders when they finally reach womanhood. Now they are set up to view their bodies as a failure and that can lead to all kinds of behaviors that are bad and dangerous. Bulimia, Anorexia and other body image disorders seem a strong possibility for those girls.
Not to mention that the pursuit of this type of success tends to choke off other opportunities; after all, why study math when you’re going to be a Bronco’s Cheerleader? This is the kind of thinking that teens who don’t understand that life is really long and those kind of looks only last about 10% of it (at best) will not carry them all the way through.
Now, when the Dog mentioned this to some of other folks from work
they came back with the idea that no one was forcing these girls to do this, they want to do it or they would not be there. This is the kind of comment that can only come from someone that has never met a genuine Stage Mother. The Dog was an actor for the first part of his life, he has seen more than his share of kids dragooned into shows, so Mommy can live out her vicarious fantasy of being an actress. It is impossible to know the exact number of kids that are doing this to fulfill their Mom or Dads fantasy but the Dog is willing to bet cash money that in that 310 there were at least 20.
So, there it is Kossacks, something humorless for Monday morning. What do you think, is the Dog misplacing his concern? Given all the giant challenges that the criminal Bush administration has left us, should the Dog just let this go, even if it means that there will be damaged teens in the future?
The floor is yours.