Cheer Up, Ladies!
The anti-feminist dystopian dance of "America's Sweethearts" on Netflix
“A business is not a family, but siblings in stress, trauma bonded.”
-Adam Katz
“Workin' nine to five, what a way to make a livin'
Barely gettin' by, it's all takin' and no givin'
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it”
-Dolly Parton
What are the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders actually paid to do?
Before watching America’s Sweethearts: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, I assumed that they only danced on the sidelines for three hours at every home game. Watching this bizarre docuseries, I was awed and disturbed to learn that their duties extend far beyond dancing.
Their most visible dance obligation is a performance of “Thunderstruck” by ACDC at the start of each home game. This impressively choreographed sequence is undeniably powerful, athletic, and electric and was my favorite part of the series. It also takes up a few minutes in a seven-hour-long documentary.
While most sports documentaries highlight the athletic demands of elite performance in HD, this show taught me that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) do not exist to perform the dance routines, but rather a painfully, impossibly specific version of womanhood.
It’s true that at every home game, in front of 80,000 screaming fans, they must perform athletic dance numbers with high kicks and jump splits that make my hamstrings quiver in terror. However, the team’s coaches make it clear that perfectly executing the intense and exacting choreography isn’t enough. Under the harsh spotlight, they’re expected to deliver a serene display of heterosexual femininity that must deftly toe the line between alluring vixen and wholesome girl-next-door, a dance between Madonna and whore so carefully choreographed and dizzyingly precise it makes you nauseous.
The core tension of America’s Sweethearts is its struggle to humanize the participants in a fundamentally dehumanizing profession.
The project of femininity depicted here is hard to defend in 2024. No one tells Dak Prescott to smile while throwing passes, or asks CeeDee Lamb to look thinner when he catches them. We only demand these things from female athletes.
So, is the seven hours of content meant to revel in or deconstruct all this? Director Greg Whitely’s intent is unclear. This documentary lacks a clear focus or point of view.
As Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter puts it, Whitely “gets thoroughly and frustratingly caught up in the mythos surrounding its subjects,” resulting in a series that “felt more like a well-polished commercial than an eye-opening documentary.”
The flaw at the heart of this show is how its intent, execution, and your reaction to what you’re seeing diverge wildly. It’s clearly trying to be an enticing, humanizing deep dive into sports drama, like Whitely’s previous Netflix hits, Last Chance U and Cheer. Yet it lacks both the distance and clear point of view necessary to cover its subject in a consistent and objective way. For a moderately critical viewer, this quickly becomes damning evidence of an institution that delights in outdated gender roles and the exploitation of young women.
This is most evident in the making-the team-drama that constitutes the first two-thirds of the series.
Who gets cut and why makes all this painfully clear. One woman is cut for appearing to try too hard. Another is strung along till the end, only to be cut for being too short, as if this was information they didn’t have about her when she auditioned. Coaches often tell the women their dancing lacks energy and they need to fuel themselves better. However, the women make it clear that they feel pressured to be as skinny as possible to fit into the tiny shorts and look attractive on the Jumbotron. The faster they run, the faster the horizon of feminine perfection recedes.
As Caitlin Dickerson puts it in The Atlantic:
“The cheerleaders are expected to keep smiling as they’re given impossible standards to uphold. They’re told that their kicks aren’t high enough (which sometimes seemed to be a euphemism for the fact that Coach Finglass just didn’t like them), then that they look like they’re trying too hard and need to relax, then that they look like they have low energy, then that they need to eat more to fuel their bodies, then that they’re not skinny enough. More makeup. Too much makeup. Too blond. Not blond enough. The most scathing criticism must be met with a smile and a “Yes, ma’am.”
The way they’re cut is also undignified.
At least in Hard Knocks the coaches get right to the point and tell players they’re being let go. Here, they dilly dally with vague feedback about high kicks until the player begins to cry, then they pass tissues and insist there’s nothing the distraught woman could have done better. It combines the worst aspects of a humanizing and a blunt approach to firing someone. The botox’d crocodile tears of the two judges do little to soften the blow. The tearful aftermath of the cut scenes is so saturated in runny mascara that it looks like someone torpedoed a pleasure cruise at a bachelorette party. It’s more pitiful and frustrating to watch than entertaining or empathetic.
In the golden era of meticulously edited documentaries, it’s puzzling that this is the story Greg Whitely and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders chose to share. The result is unflattering to both parties, making Whitely appear overly sympathetic to the DCC and the Cowboys look exploitative and out-of-touch. Perhaps more troubling is this question: what does it say about us that we find the tenth most-streamed show on Netflix so problematic yet hard to stop watching?
Weatherman Ethan Bird once described the forecast in his area as “like those Dallas Cowboys, peaking in the 90s.”
For the non-football fans reading, Bird’s zinger is built on the plain reality that the Cowboys haven’t appeared in an NFC Championship game, much less won a Super Bowl, since 1995. Despite this lack of on-field success, “America’s team” has become the NFL’s richest. Since oil tycoon Jerry Jones bought the team in 1989, he’s turned it into the world’s most valuable sports franchise, valued at $9.2 billion.
So, how much are the cheerleaders of America’s wealthiest team’s paid? To spoil it, the show never discloses the number, so I did my own research. Overall, the DCC make about $10,000-$20,000 per year in a league where waterboys make over $50,000.
The most specifics we get from the show is when one cheerleader admits that they are paid the same as a substitute teacher or a Chick-fil-A worker. The real answer is what they show you instead of telling you: all of these women have full-time jobs. They do DCC as a weekend warrior hobby. After a full day of working in nursing, dentistry, or sales, they they brave Dallas traffic to commute to Frisco and dance until midnight, only to drive home, get a few hours of sleep and do it all again. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are paid a pittance for a part time job that demands more than a full-time commitment, and one that damages their bodies, body image, and sense of self.
To unwrap this steaming tamale of sexism, America’s Sweethearts turns to Charlotte Jones, nepo-baby of Jerry Jones, perhaps the NFL’s creepiest and worst owner, which is really saying something given the competition. Charlotte Jones, the chief brand officer of the Dallas Cowboys, had months to prepare a polished take on cheerleader pay, but instead fumbles the snap with a Trumpian non-answer. She says, “There’s a lot of cynicism around pay for NFL cheerleaders—as it should be,” and then rambles about how their cheerleaders don’t dance for money, they dance for the privilege to represent her father’s hallowed organization, which, mind you, has annual revenue of over $1 billion.
What do the Cowboys do with all this cash then? They recently spent $1.5 billion on The Star, their new state-of-the-art facility in Frisco, which has a practice field that seats 12,000 people. The fact that such a wealthy franchise won’t invest more in their cheer program tells you everything you need to know. All the Cowboys would have to do to look like saints in comparison to the rest of the league is pay their cheerleaders a living wage, but evidently, that is too much to ask.
The average NFL career is just three years long, hence the one of the leagues infamous nicknames: “not for long.” While the average salary in the NFL is just shy of $3 million, this figure is misleading, as star players’ astronomically high salaries skew the average. The median NFL salary is a better shorthand for pay and is about $800,000. If you make a roster in the NFL, you’ll earn at least $700,000 per year. While the average NFL career is three years, many players can and do play for much longer. Even as the Lombardi trophy continues to elude them, the actual Dallas Cowboys are still well compensated to destroy their bodies every Sunday.
The same can’t be said for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who shred their hips in jump splits and starve their bodies to fit into the signature shorts, only to be unceremoniously cast aside as soon as they crack physically or mentally. There’s an unspoken rule dictating that all DCC retire after five years. Even if they survive cuts or injuries, they are forced out after five years to make room for another people-pleasing 21-year-old whose lifelong dream is to uproot their life, relocate to Dallas, and dance for $10,000 a year. As if this process didn’t feel unfair enough, when they retire, they don’t get to keep their uniform, even though it has been custom-fitted to their svelte proportions. Being a DCC takes so much from these women yet in return it gives them only memories and the hopelessly fuzzy idea of “sisterhood.”
America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders reveals that the the only thing worse than the NFL’s exploitative, destructive, and dehumanizing treatment of the its players is how it treats the cheerleaders.
After being cut and sent back to New Jersey, Kelly, who had just dyed her hair at the judges insistence, says, “I’ll be exactly what they want me to be next year.”
Her comment made me realize that the best explanation of the draw of this show is how it depicts women stuck in a toxic relationship with a job that can’t and won’t love them back.
This may be effective, but it creates an odd viewing experience. While on any other show you’d root for your favorites to make it, here I felt upset when women were cut and simultaneously glad they dodged a bullet. I wasn’t happy for those who made the squad, but felt a peculiar pity, resigned to the fact that for a year they’d be stuck in an unfair pastime resembling a cult more than a dignified job.
To answer your final burning question, my favorite cheerleader was Kelcey, the veteran with a heart of gold, but my favorite storyline followed poor Victoria, the daughter of a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader from the 80s.
What’s Victoria’s secret?
Her time on DCC gave her an eating disorder and worsened her mental health.
The most joyful moment of the series for me was when Victoria tells the coaches she won’t be returning for her fifth year. This rare flicker of hope and female agency made me want to cheer for her and yell at the screen:
“Good for you, Victoria. Now run. Get out of Dallas while you still can.”