Who cheers the cheerleaders?

I watched a bit of "Cheerleader Nation", and I'm intrigued that I've found a sport that's even more complicated with conflicting meanings than figure-skating.

Not only is cheerleading mixed up in the controversies of "Sport vs non-sport", "male vs female sport", and experience of what it means to be an athlete a sport whose very definition and scale of success relates to internal and external stereotypes of the looks and behavior of its participants, but you have the added twist that cheerleading is a sport that derives from the antithesis of sport: staying on the sideline and rooting for the jocks.

Before learning about figure-skating, I would have been quick to say that Cheerleading didn't need to be a sport: there was already gymnastics (the sport) and dance (the artform). I think I've gained an apreciation for the value of mixed-up complicated activities that fall in the intesections of otherwise rigid categories.

I wonder why asthetically influenced sports like gymnastics and skating don't have cheerleaders. Is it because the stereotypical meanings would cross into muddy metaphor: the pretty girls on the sideline are gracefully rooting for the girls on the ice to be pretty and gracefull? Would the more high-energy choreography of cheerleading conflict with the more balletic choreography of skating? Would fans who value the athleticism and grace of skating be annoyed when athleticism and grace are seemingly trivialized by an activity that relegates them to the sideline? Or is it just something about the venue: AFAIK swimmers, not even their indisputably "big burly men" (tm) get cheered. Wrestlers don't. Only prestige sports like Football and Basketball do.

Any ideas? I went to a high-school without cheerleading, so I don't know much about it.

Personally, if I had a child who wanted to cheer I'd look at them funny and list all the other activities available. I'd let them do it if they really wanted though. Just like football or basketball, it's as much about social prestige as it is about competition. And to say "any activities that requires pom-poms isn't a sport" is just as ignorant as to say "any activity that requires a judge or a costume can't be a sport" and I sooo tired of hearing that said about skating.

Then again, if I had a child who wanted to cheer, that would presuppose having a child in the first place, a condition that would make me look at myself funny and say "what in the world were you thinking?"!