When future humans look back at the era of gender normative child-rearing, when parents watched their girls stumble around a dance studio and watched their boys try to decapitate a tee-ball stand, they’ll probably draw misguided conclusions, conclusions distorted by a preponderance of archived Dance Moms clips. “Wow, this Abby Lee Miller must have been president of the world. How else can one account for the Dance Moms’ utter deference to her?” If you think of history, especially ancient history, as merely the study of records that weren’t smashed or eaten by shortsighted people of the past, then Thucydides was basically just a reality-show cameraman and Alcibiades a mercurial dance instructor.
Greta Gerwig’s mom, as it turns out, was way ahead of the history’s final judgment on the charismatic power dance teachers have over their female students. Gerwig, the living, breathing indie-movie Aimless Young Woman archetype, told the Guardian during a recent interview that her mom wouldn’t let her do ballet nearly as much as she wanted, fearing that ballet class was far too “cultish.’