OK, on my way to work I just saw something disturbing. A group of very young women in bikinis stood alongside the highway waving at cars. Not since I left Ukraine have I witnessed a scene like that.
And then I noticed they were holding promotional signs for the new car wash that opened nearby.
I’m old, so my first thought was, “I hope they are using a lot of sunscreen.”
My second thought was, “The poor kids are breathing in exhaust fumes all day long.”
My third thought was, “I can’t believe there are people who want to recreate the idiotic car wash commercials that feature half-naked women in real life.”
My fourth thought was that I needed to blog about it so I did.
Clarissa's Blog 
I would guess it’s a fundraiser for something. It’s a sad and fairly typical way for groups to raise quick money. Even worse, sometimes high school cheerleaders do it to raise money for the high school football team.
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I always wanted to support all of my child’s choices but I knew there would be one choice I’d find enormously hard to support: cheerleading. So in that sense, it’s good this will be a boy.
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Some high schools and many colleges have male cheerleaders.
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Male cheerleaders are never made to look and act pathetically. Female ones , however, make me cringe in vicarious shame.
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Cheerleading must have changed from when I was in high school (and neanderthals were a going concern).
In my high school cheerleaders…. led cheers (and did a lot of shaking pom poms and jumping in the air out of “school spirit”) The idea was/is kind of silly but the cheerleaders themselves seemed…. wholesome. They didn’t do the dangerous acrobatic stuff or skanky ho-dancing that seem to define the term now. My last year of high school was the first year for male cheerleaders (only for football iirc) but they were also doing basic cheer stuff maybe doing extremely simple lifts and certainly not throwing the girls around like juggling items.
And yeah they did car washes too but in t-shirts and shorts and not bikinis.
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But cheersluters are populaRRRRR!
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“Male cheerleaders are never made to look and act pathetically.”
But they may look and act pathetically of their own accord, like our favourite famous former cheerleader, George W. Bush. 🙂
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Such a phenomenon would not materialize if there was not a demand for it.
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There may even be as yet untapped demands to see them perform pornographic moves. Anything could be demanded…at any time.
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According to http://bikinicarwashorlando.com/:
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Be sure to read the book, also.
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I think today’s huge tendency towards ‘raunchy’ images of females, of any age, is one of the most harmful things to the identity of men and women today, dramatically affecting their view of their own selves, each other and social relationships of all kinds, general speaking. The girls ‘going wild’ these days are presented as being far more savvy, liberated and empowered than their oppressed ‘sisters’ of the Sixties, or the submissive Bunny Girls, or the sickly-sweet Stepford Wives of the Seventies, and yet they’ve unwittingly ensnared themselves in a sexy system that will crush everything out of them, on every possible level. I don’t even know if you could call this ‘sexist’ in the sense that it’s no longer the bad boys of a macho society encouraging or enforcing this trend – the girls are ready to go for it themselves.The Sixties did at least give rise to access to the Pill for millions of women so that they could initially ‘plan’ their families,and later manage their conception rates, but where exactly has that got us girls today? The alarming rate of unwanted pregnancies in the UK (the highest in Europe) does tend to refute that idea of physical liberation and that of an intelligent control of conception. Far worse is the mental attitude all this seems to have spawned, fuelled on by internet porn fodder.
Parading around in a bikini or whatever other raunchy attire that is at hand today really isn’t that much of a deal, but it IS when it’s presented as empowering to women, especially when it’s the girls themselves trying to sell this idea! Who is kidding who? Yep, it must be physically liberating to be able to wear what you like (how did women cope with laced corsets?), but raunch doesn’t necessarily liberate the mind, or necessarily force mentalities and mindsets to evolve. The Slut Walking demonstrations showed that women can and should have the right to dress sluttily if they so wish, without being branded an active, actual slut. You can look boys, but don’t touch or judge. But what are the basic motivations to wanting to dress like a slut? Apart from an initial thrill to shock and the liberation to wear what you want, where does this take the girls? Freedom isn’t always liberating or feminist.
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It may be helpful to look at it with a very cynical eye. “Savvy, liberated and sexy” are just the attributes target audience of a marketing campaign of for goods X and services Y may have or may believe it has, or wishes it had. When selling goods Z and services W one has to appeal to audience having, or believing itself to have, some other attributes, for example “conservative”, or “moral”…
Double points for selling the same goods to two or more different audiences with two or more incompatible advertising campaigns. Quadruple points for selling goods and services to all audiences with one and the same advertisement campaign, which is both feeding on and reinforcing internal contradictions in individual minds.
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“It may be helpful to look at it with a very cynical eye. “Savvy, liberated and sexy” are just the attributes target audience of a marketing campaign of for goods X and services Y may have or may believe it has, or wishes it had.”
– Exactly. This is about promoting the new car wash and nothing else. And my concern is that very young people who are probably my students are working in unsafe conditions.
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