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The Coastal Carolina Cheerleader Scandal Raises Big Questions

By Charlotte Allen

I’m riveted by the case of the Coastal Carolina cheerleaders.

Coastal Carolina University is a 10,000-student public liberal-arts college in Conway, South Carolina, not far from Myrtle Beach. A few weeks ago the college suspended its entire cheerleading squad pending a “criminal investigation” after a person describing himself or herself as a “concerned parent” sent an anonymous March 7 letter to Coastal Carolina president David A. DeCenzo describing activities that the writer clearly found hair-raising:

There is a rampant use of alcohol, drugs, binge drinking, using fake ID’s, being busted by cops at parties for underage drinking, stripping at the male strip clubs, prostitution, the girls that are stripping try recruit new girls when they join the cheerleading team to strip at the strip club, veterans of the team provide alcohol to underage teammates, bullying is done by veterans of the team. There are quite a few cheerleader’s paying other students to do their schoolwork. … The CCU Cheerleaders should be representing your University in a positive way they should be setting an example for the other students. They should feel honored to be representing your university. Instead they are posting half naked, drunk, with alcohol in hand, pictures, videos of themselves drunk, etc, on social media.

Of course everyone was immediately dying to know how many of the 26 members of the cheer team—which remains suspended from competition—had allegedly engaged in these salacious activities, although no names have been released by either the college or the press.

Then, on April 6, the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which had filed a Freedom of Information request for the results of Coastal Carolina investigation, which is still ongoing, reported that the college believed at least some of the allegations in the anonymous letter were true:

[S]ome members of the CCU cheer team worked as strippers and escorts.… [C]heerleaders involved in the escort services were paid between $100 and $1,500 per date. Cheerleaders also would receive goods such as Michael Kors purses, as well as shoes and clothes, according to the investigation. One cheerleader was offered $800 to escort a male to New York Prime, according to the report. The cheerleaders would not engage in sexual favors, the report stated, but the investigation found “evidence of an escort service.” … Text messages between cheerleaders advised team members working at the strip clubs, including Thee DollHouse, to quit their jobs until after a national cheerleading competition taking place in Dayton Beach, Fla., according to the report.

According to the report, the “escort service” in question turned out to be the website SeekingArrangement, which bills itself as promising to link beautiful but impecunious young women with “sugar daddies” who can take care of their “unpaid bills” and treat them to “shopping sprees, expensive dinners, and exotic travels.” What the quid is supposed to be for this quo SeekingArrangement never makes clear—that’s presumably up to the parties in question. The Coastal Carolina report said there was no evidence that any of the cheerleaders had traded sex for money. The site encourages female college students to avoid crippling debt by becoming “sugar babies,” and according to a spate of recent news stories, many a co-ed has gone that route.

The New York Post had a good time with the report. “Turns out these cheerleaders were ‘sugar babies, not prostitutes,” blared the headline of an April 7 story accompanied by a stock photo of shapely cheerleader torsos and pom-poms.

Coastal Carolina still isn’t commenting on its ongoing investigation. But plenty of other people are—because the incident raises fascinating philosophical issues such as: What exactly is prostitution? And: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

For example, SeekingArrangement, which has offered to foot any legal bills the suspended cheerleaders might incur, insists that it’s not an escort service and that it “specifically prohibits” any kind of pay-per-meet relationships. And according to a local TV station, SeekingArrangement CEO Brandon Wade issued a statement accusing anyone who thinks that accepting a little cash or a Michael Kors purse from the rich gent you’re being nice to amounts to hooking is engaging in “slut shaming”:

To portray these women as “prostitutes” just because you do not understand or agree with their dating choice is bullying. We will not stand for slut shaming, and find it wildly inappropriate for a public university to comment and pass judgment on the dating habits of their students. Sugar Babies are not escorts they are ambitious, goal oriented individuals who is looking for a specific kind of relationship.

Amy Lawrence, a lawyer representing some of the suspended cheerleaders, issued her own statement casting her clients as victims of double-standard misogyny:

Would this ever happen to a Male Sports Team? We have all read about male athletes at Coastal Carolina being accused of drugs, domestic violence and rape. Yet, most of those men are still playing the sport and not one team was suspended in retribution for the actual crimes of their teammates.

But even if the cheerleaders actually were prostitutes, isn’t the correct response for feminists supposed to be that it’s unfair to stigmatize commercial sex, period? Isn’t being a prostitute actually a good thing if you’re a true progressive? No less an authority than Everyday Feminism says this:

[T]hose who voluntarily engage in the sex trade generally prefer the term sex work and often identify as sex workers. This term was coined by sex workers as a way to rename and define the concept for themselves—as a form of labor and economic exchange.

It’s this jumble of earnest but hilariously conflicting self-righteous rhetoric surrounding the case of the Coastal Carolina Cheerleaders that makes it so much fun to follow.

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