Mirror Mirror…

       

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? In a ballet class, mirrors are a useful tool to show or fix how your technique looks. It is also a weapon for ballerinas to pick apart their bodies, their weight, and their beauty daily. The standards within the ballet culture are detrimental to young girls and women’s self-confidence, eating patterns, and body image.

               Imagine this: you are twelve years old and are so excited to take your first ballet class, you get your pretty pink tights and a skin-tight black leotard. You walk into ballet class with a room full of mirrors, your reflection staring back at you for 90 minutes. Your ballet teacher repeatedly tells you to “Suck in your lunch,” week after week in class. So eventually, you just stop eating your lunch. Not eating lunch turns into barely eating at all, because the smaller I look the better I will perform. Right? The standard ballet body is thin, thinner than what is healthy, with little to no curves, and an extremely flat front side. A standard that shuns so many bodies that aren’t deemed “worthy” of success or recognition, and tells women that they must remain small to succeed.

               To succeed in ballet is to conform to the body type of a ballerina, no matter how talented a dancer is. Eating disorders are ten times more common in ballet dancers than in the rest of the general society. This all starts with the mirror, with the drill sergeant in your brain telling yourself you will never be enough and you need to lose weight. When you start eating less and losing weight, the drill sergeant only gets louder. After one mistake it says, “What is wrong with you?”, “Her body is so much better than yours”, and “You will never be enough.” Having no control over your mind makes it easier to have control over your food. Only eating or not eating the foods that you know will make you look “perfect” in the mirror to succeed.

               This constant pressure to be “perfect” eats at one’s body image. How one view themselves and their bodies in the mirror is called body image. Society already tells women that they need to fix themselves and their appearance. Women are already told that they should be thin and the pressures women to uphold the general standard of beauty. The ballet world upholds these values that were based on the white-European view of how women’s bodies should appear. Creating an extra emphasis on policing how one’s body looks in the mirror, in comparison to peers, and to the public. It feels like a trap, no matter how little you eat you never feel small enough to fit the “perfect” ballet model. The drill sergeant starts to follow you outside of the ballet classroom and now every time you see a mirror you start to police your body’s appearance.

               The toxic cycle of striving for perfection is all-consuming and allows the culture of ballet to shape how young girls and women define their relationship with food and their body image. The mirror is the source, a dancer’s best friend and worst enemy. The source of a girl’s confidence comes from how she looks in the mirror. The mirror is a trap, that only leads to destruction within a dancer’s mind and continues the cycle of chasing perfection.