 May 40 here. I'm at Manley looking out on the Sydney Harbour looking across to Watson's Bay there and thinking about the power of the primal, right, the primal passions. One of the things that I loved about converting to Judaism, getting to know Jews, is how blunt they are, how honest, forthright they are. I guess many non-Jews would consider that, consider this bluntness crude offensive, unenlightened, not touched by the dove or the spirit, but I like it. So I'm listening to an article from Texas Monthly on 50 years of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Announcing that the Dallas Cowboys were looking for a new kind of cheerleader. Dancers, that was the idea. More than a hundred showed up for tryouts. Only seven made the cut. Right, so if you're a sex and love addict or a porn addict, I know Twitter may be a dangerous place to go. Like I was looking at a thread on Twitter or a hashtag on Twitter Los Angeles. As I do say, it's like all this hardcore pornography scrolls across my screen, so one has to know one's bottom line is what is bad for one. So going to a football game with cheerleaders may be incredibly triggering for some people. Actually ain't did, but an aspiring model dropped out before the season began. They would become known as the original seven. Baker, Anna Carpenter, Rosemary Hall, Dolores Makeda, Kerry O'Brien, Denivoy Nichols, and Dixie Smith. Each of them stood in that tunnel staring at the artificial turf and the stands of a new football stadium named for the state whose glory it hoped to capture. The Dallas Cowboys had had cheerleaders before, including a group of high schoolers and Bobby. So right-wing commitments tend to be concentric, right? They tend to start with the family, go to your relations, your friends, people on your block, your community, your church, your synagogue, and then extend to your city, to your state, to your nation. The left tends to have leapfrogging loyalties. I think this is an analysis from Steve Saylor. So maybe loyalty yourself, to your spouse, and then to hungry transsexuals in Kenya, and then leapfrog to oppressed strippers in Florida, then leapfrog to, I don't know, starving wiggers in China. So football, team sports, tend to be highly heterosexual. And they tend to appeal to people with right-wing concentric loyalties. Socks, pleaded skirts who yelled charge. They didn't dance, and they didn't wear that. It's tough to remember in our skin saturated age, but cleavage and bare mid-drifts weren't just unusual back then. They were scandalous. This moment in 1972 marked the debut of a bold experiment, a very Texas hybrid of pageant beauty, good girl etiquette, and cum hither slink. So I remember the first time I went to Akosha Iterie, the Persian woman behind the counter. You know, I found out that my friend Michael and I were both single, and she said, I want to see your tax returns. Like before she'd set us up, she wanted to see our tax returns, right? That's how blunt and bottom line oriented she was. Now, most Jews went to see tax returns. I don't think anyone else, any other Jews ever done that. But it does echo a Jewish frankness about money, sex, power, and these primal passions. Baker looked up at the sky whenever she got anxious, and she could see the sunlight fading and the stadium lights blazing from where she stood in the mouth of the tunnel. Right, so there's certain kinds of sex appeal that are considered kosher by societies. You can be an actress, you know, it does nude simulated sex scenes, but you're an actress as opposed to a porn star who's just a glorified hooker. Texas Stadium had a hole in the roof. A design quirk. Plans for a retractable roof were squelched because the price tag spun into an asset. So God could watch his favorite team. One player famously put it, as the drums of the live band started to pound, the seven cheerleaders burst from that tunnel. And all of a sudden we heard noise from the fans, and we were going like, what's going on? Baker told me and her honey twang. Texas Stadium erupted in a joyful noise she can still hear 50 years later. And they're pointing at us. We didn't know that we had introduced something new to football. What they introduced was sex and glamour into the gladiator arena of modern sports. And this is being copied now by teams all around the world, even in India, even in Australia. It's a winning formula. They launched a wave of imitations across the NFL, creating a blueprint for beauty that's practically branded on the cultural imagination. It was a watershed year for women, a time when the forces of freedom were starting to be unleashed, but also clash. Roe v. Wade was making it. Wow, who would have thought that extending freedom might result in clashes of freedom? Of course it's going to. You can never extend freedom with one group without taking it away from other groups.