Body-shaming isn’t limited to the world of ballet
The woman in the video is in her 30s, articulate, thoughtful, and close to tears. She’s talking about body-shaming — admitting that it’s happened to her; admitting that it is embarrassing both to experience and to talk about; and deeply troubled that it still goes on. She’s one of the world’s leading ballerinas: Ashley Bouder, who for 18 years has been a principal dancer with New York City Ballet.
Last year she was scheduled to dance in a gala performance of “Symphony in C,” one of choreographer George Balanchine’s most famous ballets, but said that just before the performance she was “strongly encouraged to not perform because of my appearance.” The explanation given publicly was that she was injured — but that wasn’t true, she said in the video. During the pandemic, and a subsequent serious injury that had taken a year to recover from, Bouder had gained 10 pounds.
Bouder has always been a deft, electrifying, witty dancer. Onstage she projects strength and confidence; there’s a joyous directness in her dancing. It’s disconcerting at first to see her, in her Instagram video, looking and sounding so vulnerable. But as the 20-minute video goes along it becomes apparent that this vulnerability is in itself an expression of strength and courage. It takes guts to say, “There’s something wrong with this picture” when you’ve been told that you’re the one that’s wrong. Bouder is not some disgruntled wannabe; she’s a seasoned top-tier professional pointing out something deeply unhealthy within her profession.
Suzanne Gordon’s 1983 book “Off Balance,” an examination of the harsh culture of ballet, vividly documented the body-shaming and disordered eating that begin with children in ballet school and continue throughout a dancer’s career. “Women who fail to conform to this ideal [of extreme thinness] are penalized,” Gordon wrote. A “too fat” penalized dancer she cited was 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 105 pounds.
Forty years later, not much has changed. Bouder uses the word “pervasive” to describe ballet’s culture of body-shaming. And she frames it as a mental health issue. She links her own recent body-shaming incident to something that happened during the first week of her professional career when, at the age of 16, she was told that she could get leading roles, but only if she lost five to 10 pounds. Now she has a young daughter who is studying ballet and who loves to dance. “But how do I let my daughter walk into this dance world?” Bouder asks.
Ballet is a profession that demands extreme physical strength and precision. And a ballerina must be light enough that a partner can lift her. But the world of ballet has superimposed upon this a preference for visual, aesthetic uniformity, for superskinny bodies. Audiences and critics, to some degree, are complicit. A few years ago The New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay was criticized for writing about a dancer’s weight. Instead of apologizing, he doubled down. Ballet fan-blogs are full of hateful assessments of how “fat” various dancers appear. In a world that is newly attentive to the value of inclusion, it doesn’t seem amiss to be questioning whether ballet could adjust the narrowly uniform aesthetic of acceptable women’s body types and still maintain its high technical standards.
Body-shaming is not limited to the world of ballet. It happens mostly (though not exclusively) to women, in professions where athletic performance is central and also in jobs and social situations where it isn’t. Every woman I know has a story. Usually more than one story. We don’t necessarily talk about this, even to each other, because these incidents make us feel humiliated.
Bouder is careful and judicious in her video monologue. Her attitude is not selfrighteous or finger-pointing. She’s not saying, burn it all down. She’s saying she loves ballet but that this aspect of it is damaging people. She’s saying that to speak openly about the damaging impact of body-shaming is the first step toward stopping it. She is looking for a healthier balance for future generations of dancers — and, I can’t help thinking, for girls and women in general.