Are men with pompoms awakened now? New Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders Spark Firetorm

When the Minnesota Vikings announced their Cheerleading team list earlier this month, they also triggered an internet storm.

“The next generation of joy has arrived,” wrote the team on Instagram on August 9, alongside a video that opened with a smiling Louie conn jumping in a backflip then dancing and shaking her pompoms alongside other dancers, including a bouncing shiek and enthusiastic.

The answer was immediate, some people on social networks leaving offensive remarks and threatening to stop supporting the team. Then, more public officials sounded, like the republican senator Tommy Tuberville, who accused the team of having pushed a “awakened” story, and the host of Fox News Will Cain, who declared that the problem was “of male cheerleaders being cheerleaders.”

A former Vikings player and the current conservative activist, Jack Brewer, told Fox News that he was “disgusted and embarrassed” to add male cheerleaders, adding: “No man never needs to have a cheerlead in hand”.

Finally, the Vikings themselves published a statement supporting Conn and Shiek, saying to TODAY.COM that around a third of NFL teams have male cheerlers this year, and that each member of the team has impressive dance experience and has followed a rigorous hearing process.

Conn and Shiek are not the first male male cheerlers of the NFL-which occurred in 2018 with the Rams of Los Angeles and New Orleans.

And if indignation is on men who dance alongside women, well, as long as there have been dance, there have been male dancers.

So why are people so excited about this particular type of dance, and why now?

“I think it comes back to people’s expectations as to what they think that the cheerleader should look like,” CBC News Tiffany Beverridge, president of the Canadian Pom-Pom Girl, told CBC.

“It seems that it is less than men on the field and more on the fact that they dance instead of simply raising or bases waterfalls. This really shows the prejudices that we still have around the genre and dance.”

Disturbing football culture

Football has a distinct role in American culture, where it is the spectator’s first sport. And the NFL tends to be historically gendered, with hard and grainy male players Ultra-feminine CHeeaders root the sidelines.

The “Taylor Swift Effect” on football notes, viewers and market sales has already angry many male fans for increased pop star during the matches. She was hooked at the Super Bowl this year and heckled online by US President Donald Trump.

And now, as some media underline, the male cheerleaders more disrupt this culture, while redefining what masculine – strong, graceful and joyful athletics can look like. Not only holding the base of a pyramid, but dancing before and in the center.

“When people think of NFL’s cheers, you think of great men throwing women in the air. More gymnastics and stunning,” Napoleon Jinnies Jinnies, who applauded the Los Angeles Rams in 2018 on Wednesday and made history by performing at Superbowl in 2019.

“I think that now that we are fully integrated, not as an accessory, making the same movements and the same movements as the female counterparts of the team, I don’t know, it’s just different for most people.”

Look | Enemies can seek elsewhere, says the male cheerleader:

The male cheerle

Napoleon Jinnies, one of the first NFL male cheerleaders, talks to CNN about his experience by applauding Rams from Rams and male cheerlers.

In the Canadian Football League, the cheerlers are not new, said Beveridge. Edmonton, for example, has men in the team for years, and others have followed since the step, she explained. Although they are mainly involved in the growth retardation, she added.

“Cheerleading is such a mixture of athletics and performance, and it is not something that should be defined by the genre,” said Beveridge.

“Having men on the dancing touch shows young boys and men that there is also a place in this world.”

‘Where I was supposed to be’

Conn and Shiek have also been announced as cheerlers in a political climate hostile to the diversity of sexes in athletics, while Trump promises to “keep men out of female sports” by prohibiting transgender athletes, and several British sports teams prohibiting transgender players following a British Supreme Court decision.

The indignation on Vikings cheerlers also concerns “attempts to control masculinity,” wrote the former NFL RK Russel player in The Guardian.

“This is the simple existence and visibility of men on the nfl joy teams who do not conform to the rigid and obsolete ideas of masculinity and so much sport, and football in particular, to defend,” he wrote on Tuesday.

But in the midst of negativity, a large part of the response was also positive, fans coming to support and applaud the cheerlers.

On the cheerlers of the Vikings of Minnesota, Instagram, for example, the commentators posted that the new team “embodies inclusion”, maintains “the rights of everyone on their dreams” and promised their love both to the cheerlers and the football team.

“Fan Seahawks, but here to support your joy team,” wrote a person on Instagram.

“New fan of the Vikings here,” added another.

In another Instagram publication apparently in response to an uproar, Conn and Shiek pose together in uniform alongside legend, “Wait … Did anyone say our name?”

Conn, for her part, also posted a photo of himself when she was a child, seated in the divisions with an arm in the air, with the legend: “I am where I was supposed to be.”

“I have never felt so loved,” he added.