Lady Cheerleaders' Lovers

World has been bruited about in certain feminist circles that Radcliffe women should be permitted to "cheer," as they put it, for the Harvard football team. These creeping mergerists of mergering creeps, call them what will you, claim that that the sight of scantily clad young women leaping into the air, legs well apart waving sticks with colored paper on their ends would have a beneficent effect on the team's performance. We view this position with more than a jot of disdain and more than a title of alarm.

Those schools known as the Ivy League have long held the gridiron to be a masculine domain. Stout-hearted lads with long horns and strong drink can and have provided all the cheer the serious university needs. There is certainly no total exclusion of women. They are permitted to sit in the stands. But if they are allowed to gambol on the field of play who is to stop them from participating in the very contests themselves? Are we to countenance the sight of the finest products of our young ladies' seminaries, helmeted, and padded, raging at each other like aroused bulls? No, we are not to countenance that sight.

Finally we must consider the welfare of the team. Men will be men. The well-turned thigh and ample chest of a young women cannot leave them unaffected. The defense will no longer regard the opponents. As if on one head, their twenty-two eyes will veer toward the sidelines, towards the jumping girls thereon. In general, the proximity of muscular Harvard men and Radcliffe women will lead to what it has always led; shoddy passes.