PRAIRIE PARK, Kansas. When Edith-Marie Schlepper emerged from Theatre #12 at the Royal Multiplex Cinema here last week after watching the new Meryl Streep movie “Prom,” the smile that helped her become head cheerleader at the local public high school was nowhere to be seen. “I am just so sick of it!” she fumed to the two fellow cheerleaders who had accompanied her to the film. Sick of what, this reporter asked between bites of popcorn. “The idea that cheerleaders are cruel, condescending . . . it rhymes with ‘itches’ and it’s not ‘stitches,’” she replied, taking care to avoid profanity that could cause her to be grounded if her mother read this story and found out.
Meryl Streep in “Prom.”
That bubbling-over frustration is fueling a nation-wide movement that will take large-scale, tangible form next spring, when a “Cheerleaders March on Washington” will urge Congress to take action against anti-cheerleader prejudice. “It’s just not true that cheerleaders are mean,” says Tina Marie Oehrke, who is a junior member of the squad that cheers on the Ottumwa, Iowa Polecats. “If we weren’t nice we wouldn’t be cheerleaders–duh.”
“No beaver jokes, either!”
Cheerleaders stand atop the social hierarchy of American high schools, looking down on less-popular females figuratively, and sometimes literally. “Ordinary girls have no idea what goes into making a high-risk, human pyramid, which comes with the job of leading cheers,” says Dr. Beverly Wilmot, head of the Institute for Cheerleading Studies in Normal, Illinois. “A bee hive couldn’t survive without a queen, somebody’s got to be on top of the smoldering cauldron of adolescent hormones that is your average American high school.”
Cheerleading squads are coordinating a proposed legislative agenda to present to Congress that would include an exception to the First Amendment in order to ban anti-cheerleader movies, a sub-genre that had grown almost as large as romantic comedies, westerns and “swamp thing” movies. “We also should get first dibs on good parking spots at high schools so we can go off-campus at lunchtime,” says Judy Densmore, who cheers on the Hoxie, Arkansas, Fighting Stinkbugs. “I don’t know why some groaty shop teacher should have more rights than we do.”
Cheerleader slumber party scene from “The Legend of Boggy Creek.”
Legal scholars say the list of cheerleader demands faces constitutional problems, but are keeping an open mind while the girls refine arguments in support of their platform. “I’m skeptical of any proposal that would curtail the right of free speech under the First Amendment,” says Prof. Robert Sibler of the Roman Hruska School of Law in David City, Nebraska. “On the other hand, I find Beverly Rae Holcomb quite persuasive in her tank-top.”