Penn and Teller's
Bullshit! has started its eighth season, and while I'll probably continue to watch it as long as it's on, I have to think it might have overstayed its welcome a bit. The first episode of this season was about cheerleading, and how dangerous it is. Their complaint seemed to be that cheerleading isn't regulated enough because it isn't considered a sport. I'm not entirely sure how these two things are related. Cheerleading ISN'T a sport, and I'm not saying that as a value judgment (it's not like I LIKE sports, at least as a general rule), but as a simple matter of classification. There's some gray area in what is and isn't a sport, but I think it's usually a matter of one player or team trying to achieve a specific goal before their opponents can. Cheerleading, on the other hand, is about putting on a good performance. Sure, it's a performance that requires athletic prowess and can be done competitively. As
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bethje pointed out, however, you could say the same thing about ballet, and is anyone lobbying to have that considered a sport?
The other point they made was that one particular company, Varsity, basically monopolizes everything to do with cheerleading, and they wouldn't be able to have that kind of stranglehold if it were classified as a school sport. I'm no fan of monopolies, but doesn't at least part of the blame lie on the schools that buy into this company, and the parents who let their kids get involved in an activity they know to be expensive? The episode didn't even address this issues, instead choosing to show us families with members who had been injured through cheerleading. The conclusion I would draw from this is that cheerleading is a dangerous activity in which parents should avoid letting their children participate, but the show refused to go against the activity in general. Why? Well, according to one guy they interviewed, apparently just because a lot of people enjoy it, which isn't really much of an argument. Whatever happened to this show making its points with actual FACTS? Even in the early days, they had some episodes that were mostly just about promoting a controversial opinion, but it seems like the weight had shifted so that these are now the vast majority. When they have episodes exposing pseudoscience in the more recent seasons, it's a refreshing change of pace.
Mind you, while cheerleading isn't a sport, I kind of lump those two things together, thanks to high school. I didn't attend any sporting events, so my only exposure to either one was at those god-awful mandatory pep rallies. As if high school students didn't have enough pain what with all those hormones and the teachers all scheduling tests for the same day, we also had to undergo noise torture every once in a while. Some of my classmates loved it, though. There's no accounting for tastes, but they really shouldn't force the tastes of some onto everyone. Anyway, the cheerleaders would do some acrobatics to really crappy (and, of course, really loud) music, and yell some blather so inane that it made me think church wasn't so bad. So yeah, I'm kind of biased here, but there were other episodes of the show where I went in with a prior opinion and at least reconsidered my position afterward. Not so for this one. Parents, if your daughters want to participate in an activity that involves teasing boys by performing athletic feats in skimpy outfits, tell them to wait a few years and become strippers. It's less patronizing, and you get tips.
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