THE HEAD CHEERLEADER SLASH QUEEN BITCH OF SCHOOL
This exhaustingly crap old trope is so annoyingly stereotypical it honestly makes my teeth itch every time I see it – which means my teeth itch a lot, because of the following true formula:
1.) Most writers are nerds.
2.) Most nerds hated high school.
3.) Many nerds have not gotten over #2, and most writers-who-are-nerds definitely haven’t.
Thus, when creating an antagonist in a high school setting and feeling lazy, most writers end up channeling their own inner biases and taking it out on whoever they thought had it easier than them in high school, which is almost always the athletes and especially the cheerleaders. (The cheerleaders, far more often than not, come off worse than the athletes do. I leave it to the reader to chart the obvious gender politics inherent in this point.)
And if the cheerleaders in general get the shaft, well, the head cheerleader is especially singled out, like the queen bee of an evil hive. The head cheerleader, by definition in this writerly world, has to be the bitch of bitches, the alpha female, the leader of the vicious pack, et cetera ad infinitum. She’s almost always the worst, most hateful type-A-personality she-devil; almost always amoral, usually slutty (hellooooooo gender politics, again), and on top of that our stereotypical TV/movie head cheerleader, more often than not, is stupid. So not only is she evil and in a position of power, but the inference is that she only got there because she was lucky.
Let’s not kid ourselves: most head cheerleaders will be type-A personalities, that’s an entirely fair characterization. Why? Because cheerleading is difficult and demanding, with relatively little reward. (Yes, there are some full athletic college scholarships available for cheerleaders – but if a female athlete wants an athletic scholarship, statistically she’s better off pursuing swimming or track.) To excel at it requires a lot of determination and commitment, and to captain a team you have to be the sort of person who enjoys command and competition for its own sake.
But cheerleaders aren’t inherently evil. Most of the ones I’ve known in my time, both through my own schooling and through the schools of younger friends and family, were just competitive athletes, usually good students (because, well, they had to be to stay on the team, much less go to college), and perfectly friendly. Heck, outside of the football-crazy portions of southern America the cheerleaders aren’t even necessarily the top of the social pyramid – the “cool girls” subset can just as easily be totally unrelated to cheerleading.
The Head Cheerleader Bitch is a construct. It’s a sexist one to boot, usually existing to contrast feminine sin from womanly virtue: our Good Girl heroine isn’t ANYTHING like Tammy McSlutty who runs the cheerleaders. (This is so prevalent, in fact, that in Bring It On, where the heroine is a cheerleader, the writers felt it necessary to insert not only a head cheerleader who was duplicitious, slutty and kind of scanky, but two ambitious underling cheerleaders trying to backstab the virtuous Kirsten Dunst.)
It needs to be retired. Re-tired! Re-tired! R-E-T-I-R-E-D, that is what it means to me! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!
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I’m not sure that the majority of teenagers in high school are doing things for the scholarship potential. That’s an old-guy point of view idea. Tell me, has the ‘rock’ music gotten a bit loud lately? 😉
Of course, if it feeds the preconceived notion machine, it doesn’t matter much if it’s good, ‘coz it’ll sell, right?
There’s definite social capital involved as well, if I recall correctly.
Which is NOT to say that your point is wrong.
Well, I did notice that children today have pants that are far too large, but when I was in high school, university and whatever could prepare one for university were a large part of the thought process. Not the entirety, of course, but certainly a significant element.
And sure there’s social capital, but, as well put in Dazed and Confused, “all I’m saying is that we could probably get just as many chicks if we were in a band or something.” Which is to say, there are quite a few ways to generate social capital in the high school milieu, and it doesn’t explain or justify the frequent animosity towards cheerleaders in popular culture.
I would be nice to see a major show with a head cheerleader who “broke the mold” as it were. You’re right that the writers seem addicted to lazy shortcuts when it comes to creating conflict.
I always liked the fact that Cordelia Chase from Buffy started out as a bitch-queen-cheerleader, but evolved as a character & a person as the series went on.
There’s frequently a grain of truth in this sort of thing, though. Now, for some reason or other, no one really cared about cheerleading at my high school. But the dance team/poms was a bit more prominent, had the same type of uniform with the pleated skirt and the lollies, and they did have a few stuck-up/bitchy types. At least one who thought that she could “make my day,” so to speak, just by saying hi to me.
And I say this even though one of my two best female friends in high school was ON the dance team. They weren’t huge horrible people like in movies, but my high school was nowhere near as cliquey as I’ve heard most people describe theirs.
Our high school wasn’t bad about that. The football team got a little special treatment from administration, but most of the atheletes and cheerleaders were also in band. Our band was huge and consisted of nerds and geeks right alongside the cool crowd. Everyone from all walks of high school life. Sure, the cheerleaders had their share of bitches, but so did the rest of us. So yeah, I’ve never understood that stereotype myself, but you see it everywhere. Not just movies, but any time there’s a TV show that takes place in high school, the head of the cheerleading squad will be one of the main antagonists. It’s boring, in addition to all your points.
Well, if it was a preponderance of anti-cheerleader propaganda, I’d see your point, but it’s not JUST cheerleaders is it? ANY clique well known for messing with geeks is pretty targeted.
At least that’s how I see it. I am also willing to bet that your high school experience is PROBABLY not very indicative of the high school experience of your average cheerleader. Although I am completely willing to be wrong on this, just in case you post a picture of yourself in a cheerleader outfit. I am RIGHT OUT of eye bleach. 🙂
I went to a combination vo-tech/gifted school/performing arts school, so no one really got special treatment, which was nice.
Although as a nerd I was still taken aback when I learned that my girlfriend was cheerleader, prom queen, and runner up for Miss Nevada 2003. I mean, what the hell?
It would be nice to see a TV show or movie about high school that did not have some “let me instruct you on the various stereotypical cliques in the lunch room” within the first 30 minutes. In my high school, people did generally hang out with others of similar interest, but this kind of weird ass ultra-strict caste system has existed nowhere I’ve personally laid my eyes on. I think it’s like the storytelling cliché version of “famous for being famous”: this trope gets perpetuated because it always has been.
Our high school never had any cheerleaders that were abundantly evil.. or attractive, for that matter.
Oh, I don’t know. I think Shiv from Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., who started out as Courtney Whitmore’s school rival and then made the lateral move to super-villain, was pretty entertaining.
But then again, a good use of a cliche doesn’t stop it from being a cliche in the first place.
I have no experience with cheerleaders personally, as the phenomenon has only gradually been showing up in Norway for the last few years, but with all the shows and movies and comics etc. that we get from the US, I’ve noticed what you just observed. (Yikes, what a sentence.)
Anyway, the only nice cheerleader I can think of off the top of my head is Kim Possible, and even in her show there was one bitchy cheerleader (Bonnie). Still, I remember an episode where the two of them were competing for the head cheerleader position, and Kim conceded the position to Bonnie because she’d actually been working her butt off for it. (Of course, once Bonnie realised she’d have to continue doing that much hard work, she gave it up.)
I am very recently out of an American high school, and yes, exactly. People clustered, sure, but there was hardly any inter-clique warfare- the cheerleaders had important cheerleadery things to do, the nerds had video games to play, we left each other alone.
Actually, the only cheerleader I ever knowingly interacted with- she sat by me in Spanish- I kind of liked. She wore foundation like Spackle, but she was so *enthusiastic*- I couldn’t hate her, it would have been like kicking a puppy.
And for that matter, what is *with* the idea that the cheerleaders are supposed to be the ultra-hot ones? All our cheerleaders, dance-team members, cheer girls or whatever the various teams were called, they were tiny and skinny and, as often goes along with skinny, flat-chested. It’s the body type you’re going to *get* in a gymnastic sport, and it’s not precisely the fashionable ideal.
Yeah, we didn’t have any cheerleaders in my high school, and I was shocked, Shocked I tell you when I got to college and not only were the cheerleaders not a bunch of models, they also just considered cheerleading a competative and super hard sport. Have you seen the kinds of jumps and flips and tosses they do? That is redonkulous.
Also, someone mentioned the count off of the high school cliques in the first thirty minutes of a movie and I just wanted to give a shout out to “Mean Girls,” and their inclusion of the nerdy Asians and the hot Asians.