>> Cheerleading, by nature, is a form of propaganda—I can say this, I think, having cheered in Texas for six years. But the North Korean cheerleading squad, which will perform at the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, this Friday, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, occupies its own stratosphere of weaponized comeliness and discipline. The squad, which has been dubbed, in South Korea, the “army of beauties,” presents a doll-house version of military service: girls in their late teens and early twenties are plucked from the country’s most prestigious universities and charged with making North Korea look good. The cheerleaders are chosen on the basis of
appearance and ideology—they undergo
background checks, to insure that there are no defectors or enemy sympathizers in their families, and they must be pretty (and at least five feet three). At this year’s Olympics, two hundred and thirty cheerleaders from North Korea will be in attendance. The country is sending about two dozen athletes.
The cheerleaders haven’t been seen outside North Korea for some time. A sparse collection of aughts-era photos and video shows them in
unnerving numbers,
as uniform and multitudinous as bees on a hive. They’re often dressed like
golf caddies, in
baseball hats and crisp polo shirts in bright red and white.
Past cheer captains have inspired dedicated
online fan clubs in South Korea, where the cheerleaders have been accumulating devotees since 2002. That year, two hundred and eighty-eight of them arrived in Busan, for the Asian Games—the largest group of North Koreans to arrive in South Korea
since the Korean War. In 2003, three hundred cheerleaders, clothed in attire that the Washington
Post described as “
part Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, part Red Army,” travelled to the Universiade Games, in Daegu. “What do we want?” they shouted at the South Korean crowd. “Unification!” the crowd shouted back. They raised North Korean flags and chanted, “
Skill! Technique! Focus!”
On the same trip, the cheerleaders caused a scene when they spotted, mid-transit, a welcome poster featuring Kim Jong Il that was getting rained on. Six buses stopped on the side of the road. Thirty or so sobbing girls ran back to retrieve the poster. A South Korean police officer told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper that the cheerleaders were “wailing loudly as they got on the bus, like women who had just lost their husbands. People who were at the scene were saying that it was beyond their comprehension, and some even said it gave them the chills.” <<
>> ..... It’s always funny to recall that cheerleading actually originated, in the late nineteenth century,
with men. In 1911,
The Nation wrote that being a cheerleader was “one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college . . .
it ranks hardly second to that of having been a quarter-back.” Eisenhower and F.D.R. were cheerleaders. Women weren’t even allowed to cheer until 1923. After that, the pastime changed. Cheerleaders began to seem decorative and submissive: the idea being that if women were cheerleaders, then cheerleaders must be there to look pretty, and to do what they’re told. By the twenty-first century, the idea of a powerful man being a cheerleader was
something of a punch line. <<