Hepola: Sydney Sweeney, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and the politics of women's bodies

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Covering the world-famous cheerleaders taught me how long and viciously we've been arguing about the sexualization (or liberation?) of the female form.

The internet exploded this week, and few could be happier than American Eagle, a fusty clothing brand whose denim had historically had all the sexiness of, well, denim. But these jeans contained the va-va-voom figure of Sydney Sweeney, a 27-year-old actress in the Hollywood hourglass form.

"My jeans are blue," the blond Sweeney told the camera in an ad that quickly went supernova. It was a pun on genes, but it struck several commenters as something more sinister.

Progressives cried eugenics. Conservatives cried hypersexualization, though so did the left. In a country where few could agree, a surprising number of people agreed on this: Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad was very bad.

"Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad is being slammed as 'Nazi propaganda' by crazed woke mob," read a New York Post headline, though the mob in question turned out to be a handful of TikTok users. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro mocked the left's over-the-top criticism, but he added his own, calling the ad a "piece of very soft-core pornography."

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In a busy news week, Sydney Sweeney dominated.

"Are there other examples in history of a woman's body becoming a political lightning rod like this?" asked journalist Benjamin Ryan on Twitter/X. Comments mentioned Marlene Dietrich and Brooke Shields, though I added that last one, and it's not even the best example I can cite.

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There's another example, a culture-war battle over women's bodies that's been raging more than half a century, and one I know very well. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

The lightning rod of women's bodies

My 2021 Texas Monthly podcast on the DCC, as they're known, tracked how critics of the cheerleaders moved from the religious right to the cultural left. The Christian traditionalists of the '70s and '80s saw them as fallen women; the progressive bloggers of the 21st century saw them as tools of the patriarchy. Controversy has been buzzing around the DCC for 50-plus years, and those gorgeous women just keep smiling and high-kicking and shaking their pompoms.

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The deeper truth is that women's bodies have always been a political lightning rod. Burqa, bikinis, corsets, miniskirts. The evolution of female apparel is a flip book of women's rising place in society: from the status of property, largely valued for an ability to have children, to the corner offices of CEOs in pantsuits and sensible flats, or tight wrap dresses and stilettos, a choose-your-own adventure that prompts thorny commentary from many angles.

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One reason I loved covering the cheerleaders' rich history is that their saga is the tip of a sociocultural upheaval we are still living inside and therefore cannot fully understand. Through their story, we see the long and winding path of Western girlhood itself, one of the reasons my podcast was called America's Girls.

'Sexist or Just Sparkling?'

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders as we know them debuted in 1972, a year of American fracture. Title IX opened the door to women's athletics, but Deep Throat opened the door to porno chic. Feminism got pulled in opposite directions: toward less skin, and more.

The seven cheerleaders who took the field in blue halter tops and white booty shorts launched a contagion of imitators across professional sports -- the sidelines of the NFL (and later, basketball, hockey, etc.) traded cutesy young things in pleated skirts and cable-knit sweaters for sirens with bare midriffs, plunging necklines, slinky sarongs.

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The DCC became sex-positive pioneers in the process, not to mention the first pinups of modern sports, as Joe Nick Patoski has written. Their 1977 poster sold more than a million copies, prompting a New York Times headline that year to ask, "Sexist or Just Sparkling?"

Selling sex isn't new. I'm gonna assume the concubines of previous eras had marketing tricks, too, but the sexual revolution of the '70s sure did loosen the lid on how sex was sold. Suddenly, it was everywhere: magazine covers, movie marquees, the evening news. On Monday Night Football, NFL cameras drifted from the field over to the pretty cheerleaders, a gimmick pioneered by sports producer Andy Sidaris, an SMU grad, who nicknamed those cutaways "honey shots."

Such white-hot attention made the cheerleaders very famous, and controversial. In 1977, Alicia Landry, wife of Cowboys' coach Tom, and Anne Murchison, wife of Cowboys' owner Clint, joined forces to put a stop to this madness. (Some versions only attribute this to Alicia, though Anne was likely in on it, too.) "Modesty shields" were added to the revealing uniforms, a strip of fabric that fastened across the cleavage.

The crowd booed. They were gone by halftime.

Advertisement'Debbie Does Dallas'

This genie could not be coaxed back in the bottle, which became obvious in 1978 when New York City's Pussycat Cinema premiered a dirty movie called Debbie Does Dallas. The early ad campaign swore the actress who played the beautiful blond protagonist and went by the nom de porn Bambi Woods was a former DCC. She was not, but she had the goods, by which I mean one of those iconic uniforms.

The Cowboys sued, an ordeal covered in the 2018 documentary Daughters of the Sexual Revolution, and the Cowboys won. But did they? Because thanks to copious publicity, Debbie Does Dallas became one of the most famous -- and watched? -- dirty movies of all time.

Also in 1978, Playboy got in on this, with an "NFL bares all" issue. This hot-seller caused such a ruckus that several cheerleaders who posed in the photo spread were fired, and the San Diego Chargettes were disbanded entirely.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders didn't participate in the Playboy peek-a-boo. They were good girls! But a group of former DCC, calling themselves the Texas Cowgirls, did. They were bad girls! Well, they were the girls who didn't say no when Playboy called, opening their halters while wearing uniforms that were close replicas of those blue halter tops and white booty shorts. A bit too close, it would seem. Second verse, same as the first: The Cowboys sued and won.

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By the '80s, protests were coming from feminists. Before a DCC appearance at Fresno State University, a female professor garnered 100 signatures of protest. "We believe this is demeaning to women and a counterproductive use of university resources," read the letter.

"You can't please everybody," then-director Suzanne Mitchell told Dallas Morning News writer David Casstevens, who covered this in a column before the event took place. "Obviously they are not abreast of all the facts," Mitchell quipped, proving that in addition to being tough as nails (ask the cheerleaders), she was sharp as a tack.

Mitchell pushed back against accusations of sexism by positioning the cheerleaders as patriotic. They went on USO tours by then, singing "God Bless the USA" to troops overseas, and Mitchell liked to say that putting on the DCC uniform was as sacred as wearing the American flag. Presumably with less material.

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By the time Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989, sex was not so shocking. The once-taboo sight of a woman baring lots of skin had been absorbed by the bloodstream of American pop culture. The DCC had to push for results. The shorts got shorter, the tops got tighter and the boobs? Well, I bet you can guess what they did.

You'd be hard-pressed to find activist groups complaining about the DCC around the turn of the century, in part because American culture had so many other lightning rods: Britney Spears in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, Christina Aguilera writhing in a mud pit, the "Thong Song."

By comparison, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were practically demure, though those beautiful young women rolled on sandy beaches in bikinis for their annual calendar, a new revenue stream, with making-of DVDs for those at-home DIY types curious, I suppose, to find out how a swimsuit calendar gets made.

Advertisement'A Ponzi scheme in hot pants'

But the flesh parade of the aughts crash-landed into the social media activism of the 2010s, and the DCC -- along with professional cheerleading writ large -- found themselves in the crosshairs again.

"NFL Cheerleading Is A Scam," read a 2014 headline in Deadspin, which called the enterprise "a Ponzi scheme in hot pants."

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"So, Uh, Why Does the NFL Have Cheerleaders Again?" asked a 2018 story in The Ringer, written by Claire McNear, who enumerated the many messy lawsuits making their way across the NFL. Fair pay, body shaming, allegations of abuse.

These naysayers weren't good Christian wives, scurrying to cover up the girls' assets, and they weren't academics penning a letter of protest over what women should be. These were cool young internet scribes, clacking away in the sweatshop-adjacent blogosphere unleashed by the era of Gawker and Huffington Post. Feminism was cool again, and in the head-scramble of the #MeToo era, when "sex work was work" but dressing for the male gaze made you a patsy of the patriarchy, the DCC took a real status hit.

In the years leading up to my 2021 podcast, NFL cheerleaders disbanded, adopted modest uniforms, added men for acrobatic routines and, in the case of the Carolina Panthers, the NFL's first trans cheerleader.

The DCC stuck with tradition: same uniform, same 36 gorgeous and gifted dancers doing the jump splits to "Thunderstruck." Ain't broke? Don't fix it.

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I do not envy Charlotte Jones, president of the cheerleaders, and Kelli Finglass, the squad's current director, trying to thread the needle of these cultural pivots. Being sexy was their brand, but being sexy was verboten, though common. And kinda fun? The DCC began as a way to entertain male viewers (football's primary audience), but one of the many twists of this saga is how they became beloved by little girls.

I was one of them. Seeing those pretty princesses in the corner of my father's football games through the '80s gave me something to watch, something to aspire to, even if I also planned to be a writer-director-actress in the Spike Lee mold (one out of three isn't bad).

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Women love watching other women. That was one of the revelations of America's Sweethearts, the Netflix docu-drama that turned the cheerleaders into global "It Girls" after its debut last year. (Editor's note: I'm interviewed in the first season and was a story consultant.)

Surely dudes watched America's Sweethearts, but they weren't the ones in my social media feed talking about it. The dancing! The frothy interpersonal drama! The dangers of dieting, the low cheerleader pay (resolved by the show's second season), the dilemma between flaunting the body and keeping that body on lockdown. Empowerment or degradation? Feminism or fool's gold?

I could have told you America's Sweethearts would become huge, because even if the cheerleaders fell out of favor for a while, their style of performed female perfectionism never did. It's rampant on Instagram and TikTok. The cheerleaders are a very Texan mix of piety and pout, praise Jesus and erotic provocation. If this sounds confusing, it is -- but it's also very American. We are puritans; we are consumerists. We are smart modern rationalists; we are helpless visual creatures.

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But let's get back to Sydney Sweeney, the culture-war poster girl of the moment.

Poor Gen Z, so innocent

"Newsflash: Women like boobs too and appreciate them in ways we grok in our skin," wrote journalist Nancy Rommelmann on Twitter/X after the Sweeney dust-up.

Nancy is a friend, and my partner-in-crime on a weekly Substack podcast, so consider me biased. But Nancy's point is too often lost in the headline-grabbing hubbub of Nazi vs. tart, left vs. right, men vs. women. "We are also hardwired to assess other women's bodies," she continued, and by "we" she meant the XX portion of the species. "It's part of survival."

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Nancy was riffing on a headline in The Wall Street Journal, "American Eagle's Male-Geared Sydney Sweeney Ads Have Gen Z Women Scratching Their Heads."

I wonder if Gen Z knows Brooke Shields was 15 when she told the camera, "Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." (I wonder if Gen Z even knows the name "Brooke Shields.") I wonder if Gen Z remembers the orgy of double entendre that was the 2005 Carl's Jr. ad starring Paris Hilton, where the hotel heiress turned reality TV star soaped down a luxury vehicle in a black one-piece whose neckline plunges so deep it's like two strips of duct tape.

But surely Gen Z women know women's bodies are a battleground. School dress codes, women's restrooms and locker rooms, the controversy changes keys, yet the rancor stays heated. What is progress, and what is regress? What is power versus power's abuse? Exploitation to one party can look like liberation to another.

The selling of sex is both a staple of pop culture and a trend that must readjust with the times. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been phenomenal at doing this over the past half-century, and companies that hope to survive these herky-jerky times will probably do the same.

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One reason the American Eagle ads may have taken a younger generation by surprise is that the provocation was a change in tack for the company. According to that Wall Street Journal story, the brand was celebrated for inclusive advertising and sizing, but then it reported a loss of $85 million.

Bold moves were needed, and what's astonishing about this recent pop-culture controversy -- Sydney Sweeney, a professionally beautiful woman with a classically voluptuous figure -- is how rare some people think it is when it's so common as to be basically retro. (To be fair, the "Nazi propaganda" angle is new.)

If history teaches us anything, it's that a young woman willing to walk the high wire of sex-as-power will be rewarded -- also judged, scorned, admired, ogled, imitated. It's as old-fashioned as apple pie, though perhaps I should say, an American eagle.

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