Male Cheerleaders Won't Bud Light the NFL
America's most reasonable football fan weighs in
There’s another controversy where it’s unclear if it’s only an Internet controversy. I can’t wait to discuss with Nancy Rommelmann live on Random Offense at 4 pm ET today, and to debate in the BCC chat.
The Minnesota Vikings announced their cheerleading team this week and apparently there’s a man on the squad named Blaize. Actually there are two men, but Blaize, who looks a bit like a young Kato Kaelin for those old enough to remember, appeared in more viral social media posts. He’s telegenic and likes to mug for the camera. Blaize doesn’t come off like a disheveled, disordered Libs of TikTok villain. He just seems, and I say it descriptively rather than pejoratively…gay?
I’ve seen it asserted that conservatives are angry about this happening, and while I can grok that a lot of the story is driven by faceless engagement-bait accounts, some non bots got invested. Conservative radio host Jesse Kelly tweeted out a video of the male cheerleaders, saying:
Don’t think for a second the enemy is defeated. We have finally begun to fight back. We are finally engaged. Smile about that. But we have much, much work to do.
It would be easy to dismiss grown men worrying about NFL cheerleaders, but some of our most inane controversies can end up mattering. When the conservative boycott of Bud Light started in response to the company’s Dylan Mulvaney campaign, nobody high status took it seriously. Right wingers had been relegated to the cultural fringes, with even downscale corporations mirroring the preferences of college educated progressives. This was beer. This was stupid. A little self contained tantrum thrown by a group whose job was to be the Washington Generals against Team Right Side of History.
And then the boycott worked, brutalizing Bud’s sales. Then another boycott over Pride Month displays shook up Target. All of a sudden, the stupid beer boycott was impacting the outward cultural production at major companies, informing which ads and what messages get transmitted to millions. Bud Light cried “uncle” by hiring red-friendly Shane Gillis to be their leading endorser. The beer company aggressively rebranded, slapping their logos all over the podcasts of Trump-supporting hosts.
Word was out. If you had a significant base of conservative customers, you had to be wary of offending their tastes. That concern used to just flow in one direction. The Bud Light boycott was a battle over very little, but it influenced a whole lot. Beyond that, it presaged a resurgent conservatism, if not the Trump victory that happened the following year.
Will this be another Bud Light situation? I don’t think so. The very reason it’s happening is likely less due to a top-down ideological agenda and more that cheer teams have a diminished role in American sports.
A funny aspect of this controversy is that there were already a bunch of male NFL cheerleaders, on 11 teams at this counting. The Vikings have broken no barrier. The Carolina Panthers even have a trans cheerleader. So, this has been happening for awhile, absent many people caring. While social media makes every situation feel quite new and present, HoS friend Sarah Hepola, who’s reported extensively on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, sent over a note about the why and how of all these men in NFL cheer: