The first ever cheerleader — according to USA Cheer, the governing body of American sport cheering — was a man from Minnesota. The sport was born in 1898, when a male student at the University of Minnesota spontaneously got up and led the crowd in a cheer for the football team. Men have always been a part of cheerleading; multiple US presidents, including Ronald Reagan, were cheerleaders in college, and male cheerleaders have been a part of the NFL sidelines for decades.
So how is it that Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn, the two male cheerleaders added to the Minnesota Vikings’ squad last May, have received such widespread backlash? After a recent social media promo, the range of people who spoke out against the Vikings for adding the duo to their squad included a former Viking, a senator, and plenty of Fox News commentators. Suddenly, the Vikings were being blamed for helping perpetuate, as one Instagram commenter put it, “the sissification of America.”
The team has also received plenty of support from Vikings fans and other members of the public, as well as other men on NFL cheer squads. Some NFL teams have seized the moment to brag about their own mixed-gender dance squads. The backlash seems to be coming from a minority here, and isn’t likely to change the NFL’s embrace of all-gender sidelines. But what’s interesting here is the timing. Men have been on NFL cheerleading teams for years. Why is this sudden groundswell of anger happening now?
Alongside the Vikings backlash, social media users have also been touting viral clips of sorority rush dances, claiming them as “wins” for conservative America and traditional values. How is it, exactly, that choreographed, celebratory group dance has become a front line, so to speak, of the culture wars around gender and sexuality?
This movement to impose rigid gender standards and assumptions on groups of people who shake might be ahistorical, but it exemplifies the shifting boundaries of the culture wars. Conservative commentators have been in conflict with the NFL — which the Heritage Foundation declared “woke” last year — and the universities that house these sororities. Now, they’re looking to reclaim the sidelines — and the line dancers.
Men have already been cheerleading in the NFL for decades
The Vikings inadvertently kickstarted the brouhaha on August 9 by posting a lively clip of their new dance squad on Instagram. The video featured Conn front and center, smiling and doing a backflip before joining the rest of the squad in their routine. Both men are dedicated dancers. Shiek has been dancing for a decade and was part of his college dance squad at North Dakota State University. Conn just led his Iowa State team to win the National Cheer and Dance Championship.
Cheerleading has always been associated with football, but its origins as a masculine hobby are often overlooked. Not only was the sport historically male-inclusive, but for decades after it began, it was exclusively a male hobby. It wasn’t until World War II, when women stepped into roles previously designated for men, that all-women cheerleading teams became the norm.
“Cheerleading was the epitome of masculinity,” Natalie Adams, a rare cheerleading expert and author of the forthcoming book Cheer Matters: Gender, Race, Sex and Belonging in an American Institution, told me. “As late as 1939 at the college level, there was this premier cheerleading league that was… all male.”
The early 20th-century association of cheerleading with collegiate Americana, patriotism, and athleticism has never really faded, and men have remained a part of the sport. The Baltimore Ravens have had an entire multi-gender stunt team, dedicated to tumbling, lifts, and acrobatics, on the sidelines since the late ’90s. For a while, so did the Indianapolis Colts. The Dallas Cowboys have long touted having the NFL’s only multi-gender dance and drum line, the Rhythm & Blue Dancers.
In 2018, two NFL teams, the Rams and the Saints, quietly added men to their dance-focused cheerleading squads. The Rams took their new male dancers to the Super Bowl in 2019. Since then, 11 other teams around the NFL — including the Vikings, which have had men on their squads before — have joined in adding male dancers to their sidelines. In 2022, the Carolina Panthers welcomed the NFL’s first trans cheerleader, Justine Lindsay. (She’s leaving to focus on pageantry work.) The Ravens currently brag about having 19 men on their still-fire stunt squad.
At the time these changes happened, they ruffled few cultural feathers. Arguably the primary reasons for that were the widespread cultural resurgence for gender equality sparked by Me Too and the loosening of gender norms that came with a greater societal embrace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, both of which meant a few teams adding men to dance teams wasn’t a cause for concern. There were other factors, as well. Netflix’s 2020 documentary series Cheer sparked a wave of cultural respect for cheerleading as a sport (though competitive cheer and pro-football cheer tend to be very different). The NFL, meanwhile, faced battles of a different sort: The cultural right spent those years fixating on Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter protests in the sport.
And so, cultural outrage lay dormant until the Minnesota Vikings announced its new fall cheerleading lineup in 2025.
The Vikings backlash draws lines between male and female athletes
The substance of the backlash around Sheik and Conn has been focused on their masculinity, with statements and online comments that are both homophobic, and — despite the fact that both dancers are cis men — transphobic.
“I don’t have anything against male cheerleaders … There have been male cheerleaders around a long time,” Fox pundit Will Cain said in a segment on the backlash. “[But] if we’re really being honest, we’re talking about male cheerleaders being female cheerleaders.”
While the exact meaning of Cain’s comment is unclear — again, neither male cheerleader identifies as trans or nonbinary — he seems to be referring to Conn and Sheik’s style of dance, which matches their female counterparts’. If the concern is about supposed femininity, exactly how closely should the squad’s coach police their athletes for signs of gender fluidity? Yet again, the red-blooded Dallas Cowboys have had men bumping and grinding alongside women on their dance team for well over a decade, and few people seem to be questioning their masculinity.
The Vikings cheer squad seem to have picked up on the transphobic subtext of the arguments against them. One squad member, Brianna Putney, has since posted a viral TikTok video showing Conn and Shiek dancing alongside their squadmates in a women’s bathroom. These arguments also seem to coincide with an underlying substrain of misogyny — the idea that “real men” belong on the field while women need to remain on the sidelines. As Putney’s video suggests, it’s the blurring of those gender roles that’s the real offense.
To understand how this works in a sport that was once exclusively male, we have to understand that, historically, once the makeup of cheerleading changed from male-only to women-only, cheerleading itself became associated with normative ideal femininity. “Desirable characteristics for a cheerleader were things like charm, popularity, attractiveness,” Adams said, “all feminized traits … nothing about athleticism.”
Where previously, male cheerleaders were seen as campus leaders who were capable of crowd control, by 1955, the role had changed. Women were seen as being incapable of leading the crowd the way men could; their presence was increasingly about being eye candy. This change solidified in 1972, when the Dallas Cowboys, which had previously had an unofficial co-ed squad of high school cheerleaders, swapped them out for a line of choreographed dancers — a move that ushered in the modern iteration of pro NFL cheerleading, catering to an audience that was assumed to be straight male by default.
Cheryl Cooky, professor of American Studies at Purdue, notes that this move coincided with the shift in thinking about football itself as not just sport, but entertainment, alongside the emergence of broadcast sports. As football became a form of cultural power during the Cold War, alongside social trends like the Kennedy fitness test, the sport highlighted “fears around the virility of American men, and how we would compete with [world powers],” Cooky said.
That militarism, still on display in football today, gets coded as masculine and conservative, while cheerleading gets coded as its feminine opposite — a stigma that arguably leads to women on professional cheerleading squads being minimized, disrespected, and underpaid. That’s finally changing, but those changes also threaten to destabilize the binary gender presentation that football players and cheerleaders conveniently represents. Thus, male cheerleaders who perform choreography alongside women on the squad are doing even more to disrupt the gender order in a moment where politicization of gender is extreme.
If the NFL is becoming destabilized and “woke,” then where else can we look for a reinforcement of that gender binary? Conservatives seem to have latched onto college sororities as an alternative — specifically, the sorority rush dance.
This year, multiple rush videos have gone viral in right-leaning social media corners, with posters on Twitter and other platforms claiming both the videos and the women in them for right-wing culture and framing them as “wins” in the culture war against liberalism. There’s no solid evidence these women are politically conservative themselves (women who attend college have consistently leaned liberal since the 1980s), but the wave of enthusiasm for these young, attractive women seems directly tied to the anxiety around gender in cheerleading.
“What conjures in my mind is preppy white kids going to football games, being involved in Greek life…quintessential ‘All-American,’ ‘big man on campus’ [tropes],” said Cooky. She argues that the trend has ties to the tradwife movement, the “old money” trend, and other recent conservative aesthetic trends. If women on the NFL sidelines are demanding more equality and better pay while they perform dances for a broader audience, these sorority rush videos allow conservative men to resume the fantasy of an elegant, hot woman dancing just for them.
Who gets to dance? And why?
Underlying these two trends is the basic question: Who gets to dance, and why? The idea seems to be that white, young, beautiful, conservative-coded women are allowed to perform for a presumed straight cisgender male audience, but only in formation and only on the sidelines. It’s also worth pointing out that when talented groups of Black women dancers go viral, they often face backlash for performing the same dance styles that many conservatives seem to now be applauding.
Cooky also argues that the larger conversation is equally about masculinity and what kind of man gets to benefit from male privilege. “It’s not just that [men are] dancing, it’s where they’re dancing,” she said. “It’s that they’re dancing within the space of football.”
She points out that nobody’s upset that there are male ballet dancers. That’s because “NFL football has this cultural dominance and visibility and capital in ways that other spaces [don’t].” Meanwhile, while other aspects of higher education are under fire, Greek life and the college football milieu arguably still represent a version of Americana to conservatives that the NFL has been steadily moving away from, which is why it’s so important to conservatives to claim them as their spaces. “These are the anchors of universities for a reason,” Cooky said.
It makes sense, then, that conservatives have a vested interest in dictating who gets to dance on the football sidelines and on college campuses. Historically, after all, dance has long been used to challenge societal structures, from dances on protest lines to Hairspray’s interracial sock hops.
Yet the act of movement, of claiming bodily autonomy, of expressing joy through motion — these are all things that are extremely difficult to wrangle or restrict. Inevitably, drawing lines around who can and can’t dance only incites more of us to cut footloose.
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