Bring it on

My daughters are cheerleaders.

That is a sentence I never imagined uttering; indeed, it is a sentence that, from my high school years on, I have made a conscious commitment to avoid uttering. And yet, utter it now I must, and with some amount of pride. Actually, calling what Roo and Lumpy have been doing all summer for our local baseball team "cheerleading" pushes the term a lot further down the spectrum than ESPN programmers would have it. Once a game, they run on the field and do some lightly choreographed pom-pom shaking; twice a game they stand on dugouts and lead a couple of rudimentary crowdpleasers of the "You say fire/We say up" variety. No flips, no stunting, no pageant makeup: It's not the Dallas Cowboy Girls Meet Disney. But they do have pom-poms and cute uniforms, and they do know how to smile. 

None of this would matter, at least for this venue, except for the response some of our friends have had. Not one of outright hostility, but one bearing more curiosity than might be expected toward a summer activity for seven- and five-year-old girls. Some parents raise their girls to be Supreme Court justices, goes one joking line. Another comment we've heard more than once suggests that perhaps they should be playing soccer or softball instead, if they want to be active outside.

I am reminded of a great Art Spiegelman cartoon, "Nature vs. Nurture," in which daddy Art tries to convince daughter Nadia that playing with dolls merely reinforces societal gender constructs by introducing her to...a fire truck! Which daddy Art maniacally wheels around the carpet, doing siren sounds, vroom-vrooms, and braking noises. After Art's demonstration, Nadia takes "poor little truckie," covers it with a baby blanket, and gives it a bottle.

Yeah, I'm not really thrilled on an intellectual and political level that the girls like cheerleading -- I usually say that I hope it's a phase. And I do. But, you know, for them it's a good phase: They make friends, they get exercise, and they get to perform for an audience, which will stand them in good stead in other venues. Why this particular activity should be not be considered as significant as soccer and softball -- games based on male professional sports, Mia Hamm and Jennie Finch to the contrary -- seems to come down the fact that it's...for...girls. And that's the kind of thinking, I suspect, that Sonia Sotomayor's parents raised her to dispel, as much as they might have raised her to be on the Supreme Court. (And, btw, Roo and Lumpy tried soccer this summer as well: Not the kick in the grass the organizers promised.)

So, girls: You say fire, I say up!