Product Review

In the midst of the Cincinnati Ballet’s celebration of the year of the woman, the Ballet’s head, Victoria Morgan, now known as the Ballerina Boss, had set off a stampede of ballerinas toward the exits. The women had found their voice, but they weren’t saying what the Ballerina Boss wanted to hear. The ballerinas had grown tired of doing yet another sex robot dance. A full-fledged anti-feminist rebellion was under way: all told four ballerinas were either pregnant or had already given birth. The Ballerina Boss’s promotion of feminism had created an epidemic of pregnancies. And two of the ballerinas were leaving the Ballet. They had done the thing only a woman can do: they gave birth. They had borne children, and it set them free. And the ballerinas were also talking about God. It was what Hegel would have called “der List der Vernunft” (the cunning of reason) or what Sigmund Freud would have called “the return of the repressed.”