Good news for fans of dystopian fiction: season two of the Handmaid’s Tale will premiere next week. I’ve got some even better news, though! You don’t actually have to wait that long in order to immerse yourself in an archaic society where every tiny aspect of a woman’s existence is controlled by men. You can just read about the NFL’s latest cheerleader controversy instead.
It starts with a woman called Bailey Davis. In January, Davis was fired from the Saintsations, the all-female cheerleader squad for the New Orleans Saints, for failing to comply with NFL rules and regulations. She was accused of doing two absolutely dreadful things. Her first crime was posting a photo of herself wearing a lacy one-piece bodysuit on her private Instagram account. This violated the NFL’s rules about lingerie photography, which is strictly forbidden. Oh, unless you’re a male player, of course, in which case you can post as many photos of yourself in your underpants as you want.
Davis’s second crime was that she was believed to have been hanging around with a member of the football team. This is strictly prohibited by the team’s anti-fraternization rules. Saintsations must ensure they keep contact with the football players to a minimum. They must block them on social media, for example, and avoid them in real life. If a cheerleader is at a bar or restaurant and a football player walks in then the woman has to leave immediately, or risk lose her job. Men, meanwhile, are subject to no such rules.
This makes sense, of course. Can you imagine if a cheerleader and a football player were in a restaurant at the same time? Clearly the man wouldn’t be able to help himself from making lusty advances on the woman. We all know that men are basically incapable of controlling their behaviour, poor things. As the Saintsations’s coach, Ashley Deaton, told the cheerleaders, all these rules were simply “an effort to protect you from player advances and activity”. Davis, however, doesn’t quite seem to understand that these archaic and one-sided rules were simply meant to protect her; she has filed a civil rights complaint.
It’s not clear how many cheerleader squads are subject to similar rules, but it appears to be a widespread issue. According to the New York Times, which reviewed a number of cheerleader handbooks this month, anachronistic rules are rife. There are restrictions governing everything from how the cheerleaders conduct themselves in their private lives to, apparently, “the proper use of tampons”. Sadly, no more detail was provided on this particular rule; one can only speculate as to what the improper use of a tampon may be.
Davis is also far from the first cheerleader to have had to resort to the law because of demeaning work conditions. In 2014, five Buffalo Bills cheerleaders filed a lawsuit complaining about dehumanizing regulations, including a weekly “jiggle test”. This consisted of doing jumping jacks in front of their coach to see which parts of their bodies jiggled. If too many parts of your body wobbled then you were benched for the next game and presumably told to starve yourself.
The current Sainsations controversy is about more than cheerleaders; it is yet another reminder that the NFL is an archaic institution that doesn’t care about women. In recent years it has drafted a number of players who have been accused of sexual assault and domestic violence, for example. But, hey, who cares if football players rape women or knock them unconscious; as long as they can throw a ball and don’t kneel during the national anthem that’s all that matters!
It’s not just women, either. The NFL’s reactions to the kneeling protests and the treatment of Colin Kaepernick demonstrate that the NFL doesn’t much care about black people being killed because of racist policing. Nor, as the Washington Redskins have made clear, does it much care about the feelings of Native Americans.
The NFL also doesn’t seem to have worried itself very much about the fact that its players are suffering devastating concussions; it wasn’t until 2016 that the league finally acknowledged a link between football and the degenerative brain disease CTE. Nor is it clear that the NFL is making meaningful attempts to prevent concussions; in 2017 NFL concussions rose 16%.
Football is very much a symbol of America. But what kind of America is the NFL representing? As the recent news around Bailey Davis has made quite clear, the NFL is very much stuck in the past. For football to remain a proud part of American culture, the NFL desperately needs to move into the 21st century.
