duktic flicka wrote:

" I'm trying not to give away my identity here, but I'm American. " ....

Ok, this is good news .... I was feeling too depressed about your english, too fluent for any foreigner

Hmmm ... but in this case you learned ballet in USA .... not in Soviet Union, and this contraddicts mythicat who stated:

"But in America, we do it to ourselves. If I'd had a teacher who was abusive I could easily have found another. Whereas in a lot of the rest of the world, the choices are fewer...."

Excellence can be achieved only thru hard work and sufference, not only in ballet, but true passion drives you ahead (the love for ballet in your caes, for horseback riding in my case ... it's slowly killing me ) ... so I cannot really accept your fresco of ballet schools as "lagers" and theatres of phisical and psycological abuse on children and young people.


I have met many girls who frequented ballet schools. Most just as a hobby...
(One of them has been my girlfriend when we were in our twenties and revealed herself as a passionate slave). Another went over to a professional academy (Ia Ruskaya in Rome) and became a professional dancer and earns good money now, even if she never became a top dancer. I know with certainty that she had strong submissive tendencies, already before starting her ballet studies, as she confessed them to my sister.

My sister herself started ballet (in very early age) at the ballet school of the Vienna Opera House ... she enjoyed it a lot and small girls like her (she started at 4-5 years of age) were treated in a lovely way.... Though, my sister and me used to play master and slave when we were children and carried our plays up to when we became teenagers..... she was very submissive and masochistic, but was never mistreated, neither in the family, nor at the ballet school.

Some year ago I met a swiss submissive woman ... she was very submissive and strongly exhibitionistic .... can you guess? she was also a dancer (even if not as first profession) ... she told me about her excitement one time that she set up a modern ballet where she danced in her nude .... (a serious modern ballet, not some lap dance ... )

Perhaps there is indeed a relation between submissive tendencies and ballet, but, in my experience, the submissive inclination was always pre-exsisting and I never found records of abuses.

I also met a male who had been a professional dancer .... he was straight, rather dominant .... he started dancing casually, went on because he loved it and also, so he confessed, because there was plenty of females and scarse competition in dating them (many male dancers were not really masculine).

So ... possibly girls with submissive tendencies are very attracted by ballet (and by strong discipline)... perhaps it satisfies both their masochistic and their exhibitionistic dreams.... Perhaps for the same reasons you can find a certain percentage of neurotic women (and anoressic girls) in this milieu .....

But, if this is true ( my statistics base on a much too little population), then, dear Flicka, you could feel resured .....

Go ahead and enjoy the pleasures of BDSM without any anguish or anxiety .... with the right partner, of course.


Post Scriptum:
If you ever plan to visit Florence or Pisa ....