She required that all of us get her approval before we could spend one moment on practice. And I was safe mimicking that style in school because our teacher set healthy restrictions around costumes, music, and choreography. The contemporary style, furthermore, was always intriguing and wholesome. However, most children in dance, especially young girls, are dealing with this in their most developmental periods, which puts them at a greater risk than myself.Īs a young girl, I was inspired by “So You Think You Can Dance,” a competition show I watched religiously as a teen. Those things I had been exposed to became my identity, and I still, to this day, am trying to separate myself from them. I entered into commercial sex work and considered letting it define my future.
I completely missed how abnormal and exploitive our culture and hypersexualized dance genuinely are. At that time, dancing on boxes in a club for tips (go-go dancing) was where I felt the most seen and affirmed. My experience in dance was safe and healthy until a dance educator introduced something in the studio that I was only used to seeing out in culture. While I grew up with a wide range of influences, nothing gave me so much permission to see myself as a sexual object as hypersexualized dance in my early 20s. I started dancing my heart out in the studio, but I ended up coddling the fancies of a stranger bent on using me as an object. “My job required one thing of me, to be an object for arousal and consumption.
This article is dedicated to the girls who haven’t had a chance to know better.
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