Since leaving Dallas in my early 20s, I’ve found solace roughly 1,500 miles east of my hometown, in New York. But the wiser part of me has always sensed that eventually, a stroke of fate would lead me to reembrace my roots. I just never expected that event to arrive in the form of 36 star-spangled, spray-tanned women sashaying and high-kicking across my television screen.
The first time I started Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts, the Emmy-nominated docuseries about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, I had to turn it off. The hair was too sprayed, curls too done, makeup too baked, and lashes too thick. The focus on appearances felt antiquated. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade trying to unlearn the beauty expectations and the body dysmorphia that run rampant in the South. I’ve questioned patriarchal narratives and challenged my encoded impulse to bend for the male gaze. I’ve darkened my Dallas blonde, denied the call to conform, and rejected the idea that a woman’s worth can be defined by how well she wears her gender role. But curiosity led me to try watching the show again. The cast’s Texas accents drew me in. This is what raised you, girl. Like it or not. By season two, I was hooked.
In the show’s first episode, AC/DC’s siren-like, barbaric yells boom through the football stadium as the cheerleaders stride toward the 50-yard line, throwing their poms in the air, whipping their hair, and beaming the entire way. “Thunderstruck” is the team’s famous pregame performance, but for the dancers and their fans, it’s the main event. “Our job is to make it look easy,” says Kelcey Wetterberg, a fifth-year veteran, in the first episode of season one. “You need to look like a supermodel but perform like an athlete,” another team member echoes. “You may have a bad day but, [clap, clap] dry those tears, girl. You’re at practice now.”
I know these women. I mean, I don’t know them, but I know them. I grew up with a similar understanding of how to be. Physical perfection, playing the part, and making it look easy were core tenets of being a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother—or, in this case, worth a spot on the team. Although I’ve disavowed most of this belief system, the show’s sweethearts reflected the Texas traits that are still alive and well in my blood, my being, my nature.
When girls get cut from the team, they ask for feedback and say “Yes, ma’am.” Often, they come back and make the team the following year. Their commitment to finding meaning in every outcome was familiar. I rooted for them. I became invested in the rookie candidates and could guess which ones Kelli Finglass, the team’s director of over 35 years and a DCC veteran, would deem a “Thunderstruck girl.” Finglass, the squad’s matriarch and an arbiter of Texas taste, was looking for perseverance and positivity as well as prettiness and technique. She reminds me of the women I was once so eager to please.
“I don’t go to the grocery store without my makeup on or without my hair done,” says Judy Trammel, the team’s lead choreographer of several decades, in the show’s first episode ahead of audition day. “My mom always looked at me and said, ‘Put your lipstick on.’” Trammel is also a vet and an archetypal Dallas woman. (Her Reddit fans agree, commenting “Totally Hair Barbie” and “hair is probably insured for ten thousand dollars” on 1980s portraits of her in the team’s uniform.) Her rulebook reminds me of the time I briefly stopped wearing mascara during my junior year of high school. A boy in the grade below me said I was “ugly without make-up on,” so I started wearing mascara again. I didn’t yet know to question my internalized misogyny. In Dallas, I understood subconsciously that my worth was tied to my desirability, my sweetness, my becomingness. And if I was considered smart, well, that was just a plus.
