I never had any cheerleaders when I was in school. Back then, I wasn’t the super-cool blogger that I am now.
A few years ago, I had a girlfriend who could do cheerleading chants and dance moves. It was really cool and was one of the reasons I kept her around for longer than a year. That and she could play chess.
Little did I know that what I thought was innocent fun on my part was really a symptom of sex addiction.
For the many men who ogle girls in pep-star squad garb, it’s all about the idea of the beautiful girl they will likely never meet.
But for men who fixate on the image of cheerleaders, it’s more about obsessing about the past, said Timothy Lee, a sex-addiction therapist and founder of New York Pathways.
Some men fixate on the idealized vision of that girl next door, long after they’ve moved away from home.
“It’s an image of something you can never have — and most likely never had, even when you were in high school,” said Lee.
Despite the pompoms and the peppy chants, the cheerleader is actually a complex symbol. She’s both young and innocent yet unaware of her sensuality. Or is she?
“There’s a bit of the Madonna and whore complex,” said Lee. “Men want her because she’s pure but then they want to have sex with her.”
Men who can only be aroused by young-looking women are often harkening back to past experience — or trauma.
“Say a man loses his virginity at a young age — say, 13 — to an older, attractive girl, say a 17-year-old baby-sitter,” said Rob Weiss – a certified social worker and the founding director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles.
“That could be a defining moment for him, one that he will constantly be measuring all of his sexual experiences up against.”
