As I wander through the news of the day I sometimes have a take, the sort of one-liner or thought I would once have shared on Twitter, but I don’t do that anymore, and that just doesn’t seem to work the same way on BlueSky, or Substack Notes, or that maybe deserves a little more articulation. You should write about that, I say to myself, and then I file it away in the endlessly scrolling to-do list of my brain, never to be mentioned to myself again except with chagrin, the moment passed. I console myself for missing yet one more opportunity to stake my claim in the discourse by reminding myself that absolutely no one is waiting for me to do that, and they probably wouldn’t notice anyway if I did. But the other day I set a personal challenge – just do it! – and my writing group is sticking me to it, so, herewith, a take or two, lukewarm and probably past their expiration dates.
I read this New York Times investigation into the sexual exploitation of girls on Instagram with a surging mix of horror, nausea, and fury. You probably did too – because it’s horrifying, nauseating, and infuriating. A trip through the comments section, or the conversation around it online, will reveal a full gallery of villains: predatory pedophiles, opportunistic moms, exploitative photographers, absent dads, heartless tech. I can’t even do it all justice, but I wanted to home in on one aspect of the story, namely that the digital universe of sexualized images of young girls (and more) is a slippery slope direct outcome of the girls’ participation in dance and gymnastics.
I’ve been thinking (and writing) so much about dance and circus* as avenues of empowerment, and I wholeheartedly believe in their potential to positively affect the self-esteem and creative development of young artists, not to mention their physical health. But in my own explorations the obvious and well-established downsides have remained sidelined, I guess I take them so much for granted as to not be worth notice. So, let’s go there – specifically into the elision of dance and sex.
Women and girls who dance have always been sexualized beings, both venerated and exploited. Devadashis, India’s temple dancers, dedicated their lives to sacred dance – a classical art form in which the dancer’s body is the vehicle for communion with the gods. They were also sex workers, taken as lovers and/or trafficked by the elite men of the day.
Nineteenth-century ballerinas of the Paris Opera were made sexually available to wealthy patrons. Look at a Degas painting; behind the tulle and the beauty of the dancers’ bodies, dark-suited figures always loom in the wings, watching and waiting. **
Contemporary exotic dancers put a nakedly capitalist stamp on the elision, making a living at the intersection of expressive movement and sex.
But the promise of twentieth-century modern dance was to divorce dance from sex, and from the conventions of gender. Isadora Duncan, the reportedly bisexual mother of modern dance, despised marriage and ballet in equal measure, and was a passionate champion of women’s liberation from both oppressive structures. Duncan flung away corsets and bras. Her barefoot dancers wore long white shifts, miming the imagery of Greek statuary to express emotion stripped of narrative. While her unfettered performances often caused a scandal, they don’t seem to have been sexual in nature. Rather, she delighted in the “holy innocence” of the human body.***
Martha Graham, hot on her heels, crafted a rigorous, utterly modern movement language based on muscular contraction and release – the rhythms of labor and delivery – that tied fierce and sweeping choreography to classical female archetypes (Clytemnestra, Medea), Americana, Emily Dickinson, and antifascist politics. Graham, like Duncan, performed on the popular stage – in the Greenwich Village Follies – as a very young dancer and, like Duncan, HATED IT. I’m about halfway through Deborah Jowitt’s new biography of Graham, Errand Into the Maze, and I’m just blown away by both how radical her work was at the time, and also how wild it is that at midcentury an avant-garde dance artist could become a cultural celebrity on the level of Graham, something that seems unimaginable now.
(I mean, here’s a thought experiment: Picture in your mind a Picasso – perhaps it’s Guernica, perhaps it’s some Cubist naked ladies, but whatever it is, probably not too hard. Now, try to hum to yourself a phrase of twentieth-century music: Satie, Copland, or Gershwin if you’re feeling poppy. Harder perhaps, but generally accessible? Now, visualize a Martha Graham dance.)
In the 60s and 70s, postmodern dancers like Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, Tricia Brown, and Meredith Monk exploded the distinction between “dance” and everyday movement, and upended normative expectations of beauty, technique, and body type. They worked with untrained dancers, or older dancers, or differently abled dancers; their work was often as much performance art or physical theater as pure dance as classically understood. Dancers walked, talked, fell to the floor and climbed the walls. The aesthetics and politics of postmodern dance continue to ripple through the art form today.
Or to quote from a NYT piece from 2019:
“Postmodern dance developed alongside both artistic and social upheavals, particularly second-wave feminism and, though it was not often expressly political about things other than aesthetics — “there wasn’t a specific agenda,” says Childs — the style’s early champions, many of whom were women, were seeking alternative ways of moving through space and, by extension, life. Their work is a reminder, as we live through our own reckoning surrounding the control and mistreatment of women’s bodies, of the ongoing validity of that search.”
You may be right now remarking that I’ve wandered far from the starting point, the reckless abuse of little girls on Instagram. But this is my point. There’s a rich vein of dance history actively working against the commodification and fetishization of female bodies, but – like so much else – it is squished to the margins by a popular understanding of dance that even when technically remarkable celebrates the be-spangled limber young body doing a needle split with a lacquered smile.
When I talk to nondancers about how much returning to dance has meant to me; how key it has been to my own process of both healing from cancer and healing from unresolved sexual trauma (yeah, more on that someday) I sometimes get blank if sympathetic looks. I have to think this is why. That dance, by definition embodied, is at some level hardwired as sexualized, even among the otherwise culturally enlightened. I think it may be my life mission now to disabuse the world of this notion?
* Gymnastics with more sequins, basically.
**Speaking of Degas, I loved this video from the Met on restoring the tutu on The Little Dancer.
*** Per Joan Acocella in this excellent review of Duncan’s autobiography, My Life.
That was a really long take. Here’s a shorter one, on another matter of popular interest:
I was single through my 30s, when all my friends were getting married. I was accidentally pregnant and miscarrying when they were raising small children, and I fell in love during the pandemic when married people nationwide were realizing they hated each other. I didn’t meet my husband until I was 52, and he was 59, and he didn’t move into my rented second-floor walkup until a few months after the wedding. All of which is to say that I find the ongoing wave of divorce memoirs a cultural curiosity. They don’t exactly speak to me but I’ve actually read a lot of them, not in search of solidarity but to glean some insight into marriage and I’ve learned maybe two things. One: many, many, many more women – artsy women! – than I ever expected bought into the promise of the middle-class American marriage, with a high-earning partner, a mortgage, kids, and all the unequal distribution of labor and power that entails. I realize that the subset of married-and-divorced women writing memoirs is not representative of the culture at large, but I find the normative “we” at work in these books frankly infuriating. Like, I’m sorry if you were raised to believe having a husband who made a lot of money was the answer and you’re suddenly realizing it’s not, and hats off to you for surviving, but … a lot of us never thought that in the first place.
Related: all these stories seem as much about parenting, or co-parenting, as they are about marriage, and it is the grind of parenting under the burden of the aforementioned unequal division of labor that shatters the marital bond. The existence of children in these dynamics is a given, the reason for the marriage in the first place, but this fact seems elided in much of the writing. For this reason I really appreciated Elizabeth Crane’s 2023 memoir, This Story Will Change, for its refreshing focus on a child-free couple and the collapse of their romantic and domestic bond. I also did really love Kelly McMasters’s divorce memoir, The Leaving Season, which was just gloriously written, so sharp and smart, and did succeed in giving me insight into her marriage and divorce (with children) while not making any blanket assumptions about shared common ground with the reader.
Anyway. I’m working on my own memoir project, about – among much else – finding love and getting married late in the game. Maybe by the time I finish the damn thing the cultural pendulum will have swung back around to me, but given my track record I doubt it.
Last: I’ve been so busy lately. My day job has been challenging and really engaging, and I’m glad of that. Plus some other stuff is afoot that I can’t talk about yet. And, also, we’re in the thick of soup season! I’m planning to write a bit more soon about the origins and higher purpose of my Soup & Bread community meal project (15 years and running!) but in the meantime, the folks here at Chicago Public Radio dropped this wonderful podcast episode the other day, after coming out for a visit to our February event. I was really happy that they got a lot of different voices in the mix, rather than just listening to me ramble on. Give a listen!
This is so good! Yes to the marriage take! Learned so much history in the dance take! Who needs twitter, let's make belated but thoughtful newsletter takes the new tweet!
Well if this is your “cold take,” I don’t know man, I want them every week!!