its so hard to be in fellowship with other women, as a great thinker once said, because "some of you bitches are really dumb".
i followed a news article link from the tumblr #adult ballet tag yesterday to the Toronto ballet academy accepting a 45 year old applicant and i was like hey thats great good for her joining ballet late and getting any good at it is notoriously impossible, like all the other sports that require you to be bonsai kittened into an extra-human shape. anyway im looking at her instagram (it is immediately apparent that the Toronto ballet academy needed a diversity enrollee, which is fine, but no she is not seriously competitive for any actual ballet jobs besides teaching, which again is fine!! not every ballet job or ballet artform is about lifelong diehard eating disorder bootcamp funnel into a ballet company. it is actually a much larger field than the Black Swan shit) and she has a big angry post about retouching in a ballet dancewear catalog. im in favor of this, i complain about this stuff often. hell yeah. go off etc. so i click the post and yes she is correct about the image being retouched, however it is not like, absurdly retouched, it's just sort of normal levels of "the photographer will do this unless you specifically tell them not to/many apps will also do it by default" stuff that has given us all brain worms. i think it should be illegal personally. but it's not like the stuff ive seen coming out of korean tiktok recently. ie, the model in the photo could conceivably be shaped that way, we can just tell she isnt because they didnt keep the retouching consistent between front and back views. so the woman posting says this:
1) Every body is different, and any company can choose what kind of body type they use to display their collections. . 2) Her waist (not mine), IF it is real, and IF it is not compressed into shape, is very RARE. And quite unfunctional: The torso shape makes breathing very inefficient.
loud tire screeching sfx etc ?????????????? is this woman aware of what normal professional ballerinas look like. i mean the really insanely successful ones
sylvie guillem?? the ballet dancer so good, and so famous, a lot of non dancers know who she is? does she look like she has a normal waistline to you lol
ok well here is a photo of her as a teenager, showing her concave, flared ribcage (pectus excavatum), which is an actual breathing disability. and it looks like consistent exercise inflated her concavity over time, because i dont see this deformity in her ribs anymore as an adult
again, arguably the most well known ballet dancer in the world between idk, 1980 and 2003. asserting that of all things, the field of BALLET requires a thick waist in order to "make breathing efficient". i promise you that Pina Bausch's waist measurement is below 25", its fine. she soldiered on somehow
so all this is not to defend retouching, which is correct to call out. nor is it in defense of shockingly skinny and basically always eating-disordered presentations of bodies in the field of ballet, retouched or candid. it is an ONGOING issue in the field. it kills people, mostly women. anyway the issue is the immediate leap to fuckin, body phrenology just to make some old bitch feel better about her unretouched waist being "superior for ballet" i guess
