Has anyone watched the Starz series Flesh & Bone? It’s set in the world of the New York ballet. I watched a few episodes over the weekend and it’s okay. I feel like the show has growing pains – they don’t know if they want it to be a suspenseful drama/thriller or something a little bit lighter about the internal workings of the ballet world. The series stars ballerina/actress Sarah Hay, and Hay gave a lengthy interview to the NY Post to promote the show – you can read the full piece here. Much of the piece is devoted to trying to explain the strangeness of the ballet world to outsiders, which I found interesting. But I was fascinated by Hay’s story about being told that she couldn’t be a ballerina with DD-cup breasts.

‘Flesh & Bone’ shows the realities of the ballet world: “Everything goes in and out of style. [Ballet] is sort of a dying art form. There’s so much weirdness about it people don’t really understand. I’d say 100 percent of [the show] is real. It’s just that it’s a drama, so it’s portrayed more intensely, but I’ve seen things happen that you wouldn’t believe. People get so hung up in their egos . . . and they take it out on people.”

Ballet makes people weird: “Eight hours in front of a mirror all day can make you either crazy or crazy… If you don’t have a personal life, that obsession is real.”

She’s considered “fat” because of DD-cup breasts: “I had a lot of controversy about my figure,” says Hay, who is a size 0 on bottom and a DD on top, making for a figure so curvy, it doesn’t fit the typical mold for a dancer. One teacher even pulled her offstage during a production, handed her a sports bra and said, “Your breasts are distracting me.” Hay was crushed. Some suggested she get a breast reduction but Hay says, “I like my body. I don’t want to have to change it for anything — even if that means I have to take a step down as a dancer. I don’t think I’m ever going to sacrifice my figure for anyone else to accept me… I was always ‘the fat girl’ or ‘the heavy girl.’”

Her style: “I like vintage clothes, a lot of ’80s band shirts. I wear a lot of my boyfriend’s clothes too… I prefer to be covered. I don’t wear a lot of low-cut things. I’d rather keep the attention to my brain, my face.”

[From The NY Post]

The last time we really discussed how larger breasts affect how a woman is perceived, it was when Ariel Winter announced that she had gotten a breast reduction at the tender age of 17. I think it is a matter of perception, and it’s also about how comfortable you feel with your body. While I’m big-busted and sometimes they’re a pain in the ass (or a pain in my back, more often than not), I do think that being big-busted is part of what defines me and how I define myself. It’s difficult to even imagine having a job/career where your body’s supposed imperfections were being put under that kind of microscope, to be told, flat-out, that she should get a breast reduction because they’re “distracting”? Douchebag. Now, all that being said… I watched some episodes and she really is a top-heavy ballerina. I wouldn’t say it’s “distracting” or that she should get them reduced, but I did notice and I was even more impressed that she looked so graceful while being so top-heavy.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Getty.