Politics & Power Quote by Camille Paglia

A whole culture’s insecurity is packed into that faux-prayer: “Heaven help.” Paglia isn’t blessing the ballet boy; she’s diagnosing the social penalties awaiting him. The line works because it’s both melodramatic and clinical. It borrows the language of moral rescue to describe something that should be morally neutral: an American kid’s artistic aptitude. That mismatch is the point.

Paglia’s target is less ballet than the American performance of masculinity, especially the way it polices the male body. Ballet demands discipline, pain tolerance, athleticism, and public grace. Yet in the American imagination, it’s coded as “feminine,” then weaponized as an insinuation about sexuality. The “American-born” qualifier matters: she’s implying that other cultural contexts (think Russia, France, or even certain urban enclaves) can treat ballet as prestige, while the US, with its jock-centric rites and puritan hangovers, turns the same talent into a liability. The boy isn’t endangered by pirouettes; he’s endangered by other people’s panic.

There’s also an old Paglia move here: her willingness to defend high art through provocation. She frames the dancer as a social martyr because martyrdom is a language Americans understand. Subtextually, she’s indicting a country that claims to celebrate individuality while enforcing conformity at the exact moment a young person’s identity is forming. The tragedy is not that ballet is hard. It’s that America can make it harder by making it suspect.