 Okay night 40 here. Sex scandal and sisterhood. 50 years of the Dallas Cowboys from Texas monthly. And on the sidelines of Fresno State, those two forces were about to collide. The drumbeat of protest had been building all week. A professor in the physical education department named Rita Flake started a petition, swiftly. Right, once she become popular, once she become subject to adoration, there's always going to be some sort of backlash. All right, you build something, someone's going to want to tear it down. We picked up by the news media calling the cheerleaders demeaning to women because their primary function was to provide sexually suggestive entertainment for male sports fans. Sex objects, that was the slur that followed the squad. Even if the cheerleaders and many fans saw themselves as more role models, goodwill ambassadors, role models. That's hilarious, role models. People tend to have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. USO tours to visit soldiers in Korea and elsewhere overseas. So when director Suzanne Mitchell heard about Flake's comment, she shot back in the press. The first thing I'd like to ask her is, what has she ever done for her country? We helicopter into the DMZ. Things got ugly at the performance later that day when protesters gathered outside the stadium. Dana Presley Kilmer, who joined the squad in 1981, remembers the ominous vibe. It was so nasty that the faculty of the university had to form a human fence on either side of us so we could get out of the bus and get onto the field without protesters throwing rocks. The confusing part for the cheerleaders was that the appearance was a charity event to raise money for the college's athletics department. But in the heated battle of the sexes, the cheerleaders were now deemed to be on the wrong side. The cheerleaders may have been thought of as eye candy for men, but they had become a lightning rod for many women and still are to this day. Yeah, women like men don't like competition. They don't like invidious comparisons. They don't like being seen negatively compared to others. People are lazy and selfish and self-centered and they don't like to be shown up. Maybe you have other contributions aside from just those qualities. All right, like the charity work that the cheerleaders did. That's good for a dinkum pro-social behavior. That often gets thrown around by critics of the cheerleaders. But who decides that these women are being exploited if they say they're not? Right, exploitation is purely subjective. There's no objective meaning to the word exploitation. Oh, Jesus. By the end of the decade, the cheerleaders' tightly calibrated mixture of sweetness and licentiousness was about to face an entirely different challenge. Oh, Jesus, there are more of them. That's the Australian water dragon. Arrived at the office to discover all sorts of unfamiliar men wandering the halls, shuffling through papers. There were all these suits remembered, Hanson. She called Mitchell, who was at home. What was happening? The evening news would tell them soon enough. An Arkansas oil man named Jerry Jones had bought the Dallas Cowboys. A new sheriff was in town. Hanson had been with the cheerleaders since 1979. Through much of the following decade, she'd proven a trusty second lieutenant to Mitchell. Once, after hearing a rumor that one hopeful was moonlighting as a stripper, Mitchell dispatched her to visit every strip club in Dallas. I had never been to a strip club, okay? Said Hanson. I was hiding in the corner because I didn't want anybody to recognize me. She slunk around in oversized sunglasses and fur coat. Since her last name at the time was Bond, this detective work earned her the nickname 007. Mitchell and Hanson had steered the cheerleaders out of the scandalous late 70s and the feminist pushback of the early 80s. Yeah, they steered, but must need the cooperation of society. You get that in part by doing all these good deeds, these charity functions, these visits to troops and DMZs, right? You want to get society on your side. You want to get the community on your side. And everything goes much easier. I were used to keep things steady and predictable, but they also offered instruction in a certain kind of Southern womanhood. A lot of people don't know this. We were a grooming school too, Hanson told me. The matter of when to wear heels and what fork to use with the salad might seem like trivial concerns, but those questions could be overwhelming to small town women hoping to be something more. The ultimate goal of each cheerleader was made clear in Mitchell's photocopied handouts, which were given to rookies. A girl becomes a lady. Jerry Jones didn't seem to be a fan of rules, not bears anyway. He fired coach Landry. He shunted tech-shram to the side till the legendary manager walked off the field he built and the