I saw a statistic floating around somewhere once that said 100% of dancers have been assaulted at work before. I don't know who came up with that number but in my experience, I believe it to be true. I feel like the assault number is closer to at least once per day. If you fought every customer that tried to violate you or ignored your boundaries you'd barely have a customer.
Instead, dancers use their emotional intelligence to calmly redirect customers who aren't behaving correctly. And sadly, female customers can sometimes be the worst. They imagine an extra level of comfort with you that isn't actually there. It's okay, she shrieked at me as I turned around in response to someone grabbing my ass aggressively, I'm a girl! I wouldn't consider a forty-something woman to be "a girl", but I told her to keep her hands off.
As dancers, we usually come from childhoods of assault so I feel like we have a deeper level of understanding. There are tiers of assault, some violent, and others a lower boundary violation. An entitlement to our bodies. That sums up the stress of being a dancer. Yes, we do sometimes face violent assaults at work. A hand around the throat. Ripping our underwear off. Being hit, and worse. But most often we face the daily, chronic intrusion from people who believe they deserve more from us than we want to give.
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