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Dancing season is rapidly coming to close. Not a moment too soon, I must heartily add, as I will miss nothing about the hot chaotic mess that is hosting a Dance Festival. Children running, crying, scurrying about, being chased by frazzled Moms – all to the backdrop of shitty canned music and the omnipresent sickly smell of too much hairspray. One can feel the anxiety in the air as troops of children are herded about for their stiltedly choreographed time on stage. So many shades of awesome; but not the reason for this post today. Today we look at the larger issue of the replication of the patriarchal beauty standard via the innocuous vehicle known as the teen Dance Festival.
Daughter Crying while being attended to by Mom.
I see this happening multiple times during the festivals I work. A distraught daughter being made up by her Mom in preparation for some sort of dance routine that will be judged and graded during said competition. Young girls being preened and made up to look like something they are not. Not all, as in the above picture, are really that into the entire process. Yet, the show and the make-up must go on. They are groomed into dancer approved appearances like this:
Step 1
Or this:
Step 2
The question I have is this – how important a quality is ‘sexy’ for female dancers? The pictures provided certainly seem to prioritize a certain look: Lithe, heavily made up, and much skin showing. Does this standard apply to all dance? Of course not, but in dance festival land as I’ve seen, step 2 could be considered the norm.
Against the backdrop of our societies standards, “step 2” can send a ruinous message to girls/women about how they should look to be successful in their personal pursuits and society in general.
How did dancing get to be like this? We need only to look at the standards set by society in general for women.
Errr…yah.
The cultural transmission of these toxic norms is carried across generations – the norms ingrained on the mother are inscribed onto the daughter as she grows up and looks to her mother to help cope with being female in our society. So, the in the dance festivals I observe, I can see this transmission of patriarchal norms in action. Small children are plucked and primped, made to wear revealing clothing and generally forced to embody what is considered to be ‘sexy’ as per the male-gaze. This process is only made possible with the cooperation and willingness of older women to groom their children into what has been deemed as an acceptable female pursuit by society. It is a vicious cycle that needs to be examine more and unpacked to find ways in which dancing can be made less of a grooming tool of the patriarchy and more of an actively fun pursuit for children who want to express themselves in a venerated art-form.
Let it be said that I am not against the art of dancing, but rather, the poisonous patriarchal outer shell, that has encased much of the art-form within its clutches.
Well we can’t be posting sunshine everyday here at DWR. A small reminder of what the people of our nations are up against. From the essay titled Revolution and American Empire by Rob Urie.
“Liberal economists have ‘fought the good fight’ for nominally populist economic programs for the last decade with little but growing frustration to show for it. In sequence, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enacted economic policies— deregulation of banks, tax cuts for the very wealthy, the largest bank bailouts in human history and ‘trade’ deals that formalize corporate control over civil governance. There exist economic theories to support each and every one of these policies. Many prominent economists base which economic policies they support or oppose on which political Party is in office at the time they are proposed. The policies enacted are retroactively deemed ‘politically feasible’ in tacit admission that economic outcomes are politically determined. ‘Markets’ are used to explain these outcomes with the politics removed.
From the time of the American Revolution to today, with a brief compromise between 1948 and about 1973, the U.S. has been run by and for a self-serving plutocracy. Slavery and genocide weren’t ‘accidents’ nor were they the product of primitive thinking. U.S. wars in Central America, Southeast Asia and Iraq were / are as primitive, in the sense of being for-profit and brutal, as any in human history. And it is hardly an accident that elite impunity and immunity from prosecution for crimes, including War Crimes, is matched by brutal repression of the economic underclasses. Banks and corporations are the social forms of economic imperialism, necessary to the imperial project that places the rest of us as imperial subjects. Back to the start: the American Revolution was fought for the freedom to repress while the revolutions of liberation it has opposed were / are by-and-large fought against it.
The obligatory liberal chides against Russian and Cuban totalitarianism, in their contemporary incarnations against ‘strongman’ Vladimir Putin and the aging Fidel Castro, never admit to two centuries of American crimes or to never ending U.S. attempts to undermine democratic revolutions around the globe. This isn’t to gloss over crimes— the U.S. is the only nation in history to drop atom bombs on largely civilian populations, U.S. General Curtis LeMay joked that had the U.S. lost WWII he would have hung for the bombing of Tokyo, three million killed in the Korean War, three million killed in Vietnam, one million killed in Iraq and substantial portions of Central America turned into right-wing gangster states. Cuba is poor today because the U.S. has enforced an economic blockade of it for half a century. And the only guarantee from ‘liberalized’ relations between the U.S. and Cuba is that Cuba will get the worst of it.”
[Source:Counterpunch]
The front flowerbed at Arb’s and my place is starting to take off – perennials that I’ve planted over the couple years we’ve owned the house, are established enough now, that they can dedicate some energy to blooming! Of course, weather that’s good for flowers is also good for weeds, and our weed crop is plentiful, so I was out pulling weeds yesterday evening.
Working in the front yard is not a peaceful and relaxing experience for me. I feel self-conscious about bending over with my back to the street and my butt in the air and often get into weird positions trying to avoid it. I’m on edge and there’s a constant stream of snarky comebacks and verbal self-defense going on in my head, along with self-pep-talks about how this is my yard and I have the right to be in it and what I look like while doing yardwork is nobody’s business.
Why?
In a word: men.
Like last night when a carload of young men appeared seemingly out of nowhere, yelled something about my fat ass, and peeled out with a screech of tires and raucous laughter.
This shit doesn’t happen super-often – not every time I’m out in the front yard, for example. But it’s often enough that anticipating it and steeling myself against it, takes a non-negligible portion of my mental CPU cycles. It doesn’t matter that not every man who passes by harasses me, and that in general not all men harass women. Enough men harass women often enough, that being on guard against it is an almost-constant thing you do, if you’re a woman.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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