She founded a popular ad agency that dreams up marketing plans for some of the biggest sports teams in the country.
Lightning coach throws in the towel
Given her early days as a professional cheerleader, you'd think she'd proudly point to those years as the base for her high-powered career. But Monique Fikar doesn't really want to talk about her time in the early 1990s as an Edmonton Eskimo cheerleader.
Examining the evolution of the modern cheerleader.
"You don't have to put any of this in there," said the Vancouver-based managing director of Red the Agency, a firm that represents clients such as the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers.
"I don't think it's a bad thing... I don't want to detract from what I do professionally now."
So, why is she coy about her time on the sideline with pompoms?
Maybe it's the unusual role that cheerleaders are asked to cultivate by the sports teams that profit from them: Neither virgin nor vamp, but a little of both. It's a role that many were questioning this week after breast-baring and bottom-flashing photos of current and former members of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Blue Lightning cheerleading squad surfaced on the Internet -- and became a news story far and wide.
So what is it about trashy photos of cheerleaders that garnered more than 270,000 hits on the blog that launched them?
And why do cheerleaders hold such a lewd toehold in pop culture while the teams they dance for insist their cheerleaders are, in fact, talented athletes and wholesome role models? According to the blogger who posted the photos of the cheerleaders romping, for sports marketers, the equation for success is simple.
"Sports + sexy women = male readers," said Don Chavez, the assumed name of the blogger who explained his website in e-mail correspondence with the Free Press.
Chavez's blog attracts thousands of readers daily -- generally men aged 21 to 34 -- intent on checking out stuff on sports, modern culture and the occasional explicit shots of cheerleaders from across North America, even though these women haven't authorized the website to post their pictures. Blue Lightning team members, who are volunteers, say the photos of them were stolen from one of their computers.
After launching a blog in 2006 devoted to horse racing, Chavez stumbled onto a better way of getting attention -- posting photos of Sacramento Kings cheerleaders with their skirts hiked above their waists.
Soon, Fox News was calling, and Chavez had a hit.
"I have no problem whatsoever posting photos like these. The reason being that I often find these photos after they have been sitting elsewhere on the Internet for months or maybe even years," Chavez said. "Although I love writing and talking about sports, I've found that my readers are more interested in the racier side."
That interest is reflected in the nature of the photos submitted to Chavez's blog. Left in the dust are those glamour shots of cheerleaders holding their pompoms to their chests in magazines such as Playboy at a time long before the Internet. The pics on Chavez's site look more like seedy shots taken by amateur porn aficionados, la Girls Gone Wild.
Voyeurs checking out the pictures may charge that these local cheerleaders have been willingly sexualized even before they posed undressed, by wearing cleavage-baring uniforms on the field and starring in pin-up shots on the team's website -- shots that were promptly removed after the illicit photos surfaced.
However, one media expert said it still doesn't explain our culture's wider push for women to objectify themselves sexually for attention -- and how cheerleaders are used to capitalize on that attention from their fans.
Male athletes aren't subjected to the same scrutiny, said Shari Graydon, a Toronto-based media literacy expert and author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You, a book that encourages consumers to look at how physical attractiveness is defined.
"Regardless of what athleticism (cheerleaders) actually have, the public's perception is that cheerleaders are hired, in part, for their ability to conform to a pretty narrow ideal of what attractive women are supposed to look like," Graydon said.
The shots of the Bomber cheerleaders just affirm old stereotypes, she said, and worship of cheerleading is part of a "broader cultural context" in which women are rewarded for capitalizing on their looks and sexuality.
Posing for raunchy photos has become an acceptable way for women to seek attention -- and there's lots of eager demand for the product, she said.
"As a society, we look at women's sexuality as a commodity in a way that we don't yet look at men's sexuality."
"We live in a culture almost where that guarantees you your 15 minutes of fame. If you're looking to stand out and get attention and you're female, you can almost guarantee you'll get attention if you hike up your shirt... and flash your tits."
And what about the brand these cheerleaders are calling attention to?
The pictures surfaced at a time when the CFL Bombers -- which made it to the Grey Cup last year, but lost to the Saskatchewan Roughriders -- was winless after three games and is mired in a public debate over whether tax dollars should go to a new stadium.
And, unlike the Dallas Cowboys and its famous cheerleaders, which are a private enterprise, the Bombers are a community-owned team -- and that invites public scrutiny. Indeed, the football club stresses its connection to the community. Part of the requirements of being a member of the Blue Lightning squad is to volunteer for at least five events in the community. On average, the Blue Lightning squad volunteers a total of 2,000 hours a year, working with youngsters at cheer camps, leading group exercises at charity functions and acting as hostesses at various formal functions. They also are not paid for the 12.5 to 16.5 hours they put in weekly at games and practices.
The photos could damage the Blue Bombers' desire to market the team as family-friendly entertainment, not to mention the community's perception of the women themselves. But apart from a single media statement when the photos surfaced, there has only been silence from the Winnipeg Football Club on the role of its cheerleaders.
Ditto for the Canadian Football League, where a spokesman said all employees, including cheerleaders, must sign a code of conduct. However, the league declined to provide a copy of the code or answer questions about the marketing or operations for cheerleading squads.
Fikar said in her experience at the Eskimos, athleticism of the cheerleaders was stressed -- part of an overall experience designed to make sports fans happy.
"There's a sensuality about (cheerleaders)... but first and foremost, was the athleticism of cheerleaders, followed by, 'And we look good,'" Fikar said.
Cheerleaders who entertain fans can be what she terms an "auxiliary element" or "sensuality element" that boosts the fans' experience, even if the outcome of the actual sports game is beyond the marketer's control.
"If your only goal is to put attractive women in small outfits on a field and stand there and not have talent, I don't know that that really brings value to more than a very small percentage of the male population," she said.
"There are a lot of different elements to providing the fan with a positive game experience... you can't always control what the product on the field is, but elements such as cheerleading, mascots, sponsor contests, all those things form an opinion about the game."
It's also why University of Alabama cheerleading expert Natalie Guice Adams says professional cheerleading is perceived by critics as a tired holdover for young women who are willingly exploiting themselves for minor celebrity and little, if any, financial gain. It also betrays hypocrisy in popular culture about expectations of women, she said, and the companies that use them.
"It's a mixture of the virgin and the vamp, the good girl and the bad girl," she said. "Posing with a provocative pose on (the Bombers) website with a bare midriff still falls within the acceptable. It's seen as sexy, but they haven't crossed over to being nude; that's then seen as being trashy.
"It's all about marketing a particular image of womanhood, to somehow combine a wholesome good girl with a provocative girl you dream about having sex with. That's what professional cheerleading has (always) been about."
gabrielle.giroday@freepress.mb.ca
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