Dance critic Alastair Macaulay made a comment that Ringer, 37, looked like “she’d eaten one sugar plum too many”.
“It made me feel bad, it was embarrassing,” Ringer said was her immediate reaction to the comment.
Today’s society puts enough pressure on women to be thin, especially ballerinas. Is this a message we want our daughters to see?
Ringer, who was criticized for her weight, recalls her own struggles with an eating disorder and says the beauty of her troupe is the variety of body types it features, saying “that’s what should be celebrated.”
Macaulay responded to the uproar with yet another articles in the NY Times defending his decision to comment on the dancer’s body under the justification that if you’d rather not be critiqued on your body, don’t enter the world of dance.
He wrote: ” This has caused a certain brouhaha online, and a minor deluge of reader e-mails, in many cases obscene and abusive. The general feeling was that my characterizations went beyond the pale of civilized discourse. One reader wrote that the review was ‘appalling’, ‘heartbreaking’, ‘childish’, ‘hurtful’ and ‘incompetent’.”
The media uproar about his criticism come from the fact that Jenifer Ringer had previously been very open about her eating disorders in the past, having admitted to overeating and anorexia. Watch the video.
