"OUR STANDARDS ARE SO HIGH, THEY ARE NEARLY UNATTAINABLE..."

Anybody care to take a guess where I heard that quote?

Anybody?

Could it be the Secret Service?

CIA?

Harvard Medical School?

Yale Law School?

Army? Navy? Air Force? Marines?

That would be No. No. No. No. No no no no.

I heard this highly thought provoking statement on "The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders."

Now, I realize to make a point about this I have to make another confession about watching trashy television. So here it is. One day after exhausting myself ignoring the laundry and pretending the bathrooms were clean enough, I sat and flipped channels for a couple of minutes. And lo and behold, on CMT, was this show about becoming a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader. And, like most trashy television, it mesmerized me and I couldn't stop watching these poor young girls who have made it their life goals to become a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader. I wanted to grab my daughter and sit her down beside me and say "This is what you SHOULD NOT aspire to be. This is what a shallow and superficial life looks like."

I do realize that some of these young women are "working" at this job while they go to school. And I realize that these young women do some worthy work. They visit our troops. They perform for charity. I realize all of that and I commend them for it.

But aren't there other ways to do worthy work without squeezing your pom pons into a micro-uniform and dancing on a football field to basically sell sex?

If these girls want to dance, could they not attend a performing arts school and aspire to become a dance teacher, and perform in community theaters?

Here's what got me. One of the directors/choreographers, while talking about one girl said "Boy, she's big isn't she? She has a stomach on her." OK. The poor girl about whom they were talking was probably 5' 8" and weighed 135 pounds. She had a gorgeous figure. If somebody said that about me, and I looked that good, she'd be picking my rings out of her teeth.

And these are WOMEN BEING THIS HARD ON OTHER YOUNG WOMEN. I just wanted to scream through the television screen to these young women and tell them "Go home! Put on some clothes and go to school. You're beautiful the way you are."

And then, as the directors were making another very difficult decision about which of these girls to cut, one of them said "The thing is, our standards are so high, they are nearly unattainable."

NNNYYYAAAAGGGGGH!!!

Are you kidding me? Uh, ladies? You're not training them for NASA, or medical school. You're not training them to protect our president. You're not training them to teach our children one day.

You're training them to smile big and kick big. And by the time they're 27 years old, they'll be considered washed up and they'll all hate themselves because they've spent the previous few years being told to lose five pounds and flatten their stomachs when they already look great and are in better shape than most people. Oh, and they won't remember what a brownie tastes like. And then they'll raise their daughters to be the same way, and we will have a whole new generation of girls with their very special definition of "high standards."

I think I will stick with instilling mediocre standards in my daughter - like four years of college and a job that requires her to be fully clothed.