Imagine an army of angry cheerleaders, ablaze with rage, shaking their pompoms furiously in your face.

Sexy, isn’t it?

NOT REALLY. Nothing sexy about cheerleaders. Get your mind out of the gutter and focus on their serious, determined athleticism. I once made the mistake of objectifying cheerleaders, and that is precisely what inflamed their wrath.

It was back in 2010; I had voiced an opinion somewhere about the news that 40 per cent of British schools were offering cheerleading as a sport. I don’t know if they still do. I don’t know if they did then! It was just the sort of thing that newspapers like to report, however exaggerated or genuine, because everyone enjoys thinking about cheerleaders. And it’s the sort of thing that I like giving an opinion about (if required to pontificate somewhere), because it isn’t at all important. It’s ripe for debate but inconsequential and ultimately funny, like the horsemeat scandal of 2013 or the planning disaster of the Millennium Dome. As opposed to, you know, Ukraine, the Middle East and climate change. There’s no joy in giving your opinions there. You won’t say anything funny, you’ll be cancelled if you try, nobody who disagrees will change their mind and everyone who agrees will think you said it wrong. I’m with Henry Higgins: stick to the weather and everybody’s health.

So, I voiced the instinctive opinion that schoolgirls should do “proper sport”, rather than just dancing near the proper-sport-doing boys. I expressed squeamishness about the skimpy costumes and the supporting role. I had just seen the recently released film Made in Dagenham, about those heroic women who walked out of the Ford plant in 1968 to fight for equal pay, and was coming over all second-wave feminist. I said that our schoolgirls should put their trousers back on and try to score a goal.

My word, the rage that ensued! There was a storm of seething cheerleading fans (cheerleaders’ cheerleaders, you might say) who were incensed by the notion that theirs was a supporting role, or a predominantly aesthetic one, or anything other than an independent, standalone, muscular and serious expression of athletic achievement. Their fury came in the form of an organised and extremely vocal collective. Which I suppose was only to be expected.

I was a bit baffled. I grew up on American teen literature and romcoms in which the cheerleading squad was always the preserve of the in-crowd, the pretty girls who dated footballers. Were they not supposed to look sexy? Was the point of it not to support a sports team? This went against everything US culture had ever taught.

But I am nothing if not open-minded; I resolved from that moment on to think of, and certainly speak of, cheerleading as a worthwhile and independent sport.

I was thinking about this while watching America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, the second series of which recently dropped on Netflix. There is a whole genre, now, in cheerleading documentaries: there is Cheer about the Navarro College Bulldogs cheerleading team from Texas; Cheer Squad, about the Great Whites Canadian cheerleading team; Cheerleader Nation about high school cheerleaders in Kentucky and its follow-up Cheerleader Generation; there’s also Cheer: Full Out and Cheerleader U which are two different shows about two different groups of cheerleaders who are also from Kentucky; American Cheerleader about the National High School Cheerleading Championship; Cheerleaders about the California All Stars, and that is just scratching the surface of the “docuseries” and not even starting on the cheerleading dramas.

Both Cheer and America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were created, produced and directed by a man called Greg Whiteley, and – at the risk of making my old assumption again – he certainly does seem interested in cheerleaders. Nothing wrong with that! They are interesting! But if I were his wife, I reckon I’d be saying: “Why don’t you make one that isn’t about cheerleaders now?”

The episode I watched (series one, episode one) baffled me all over again, as it appeared fully to vindicate what I used to think 15 years ago, before my education at the hands of the internet. The cheerleaders are all female, in skimpy clothes and make-up, describe their activity as “dancing” and do it on the sidelines of football matches. They dream of performing at the Super Bowl, which will happen if the boys make it to the Super Bowl. But, in episode one, the boys get knocked out. So the girls are knocked out with them. Their fate is entirely dependent on the sportsmen’s success.

Not only that, but this is the American South: when one cheerleader states her intention to perform again next year, the coach asks, “And does your fiancé support that?”

However, the main difference for me personally between 2025 and 2010 is that I have daughters now. Looking back at my vicious attempts at wit, 15 years ago, at the expense of girls who saw themselves as serious sportspeople, I’m quite shocked; I don’t recognise myself. If some of them just wanted to dance and look pretty… so what!? They’re all wonderful! I don’t know if it’s age, motherhood or the creep of the Trigger Age but I would never say any of it today.

In fact, I was moved to tears by the hopes and dreams of the girls in this show, and by the gallantry and sweetness of their world, and by their ill treatment at the hands of some bad men.

Weirdly, though, I was simultaneously bored. So bored.

How many cheerleading series are there again? I won’t even bother watching episode two of this one!