T H E_.H O T_.S P O T Erotic wasteland By Susie Bright With bad sex at home and pseudosex on TV, America is one frustrated nation (03/05/99)     R E C E N T L Y Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson By Gentry Lane Why is it taboo for women to date younger men? (03/25/99) Will the real Jeff Stryker please rise? By Jeff Stryker Jeff Stryker on Jeff Stryker: My doppelganger is a sex god (03/18/99) Enchanted forest By Reed Hearne A man takes us behind the tropical bushes into the land of gay cruising, where two worlds coexist without ever touching (03/11/99) Rub me tender By Jon Bowen A reformed frotteurist explores the roots of his long-lost fetish (03/04/99) Doctor's orders By Janelle Brown In the wake of a new Alabama law declaring vibrators illegal, a provocative new book, "The Technology of Orgasm," sheds light on the perversely puritanical evolution of the feminine joystick (02/25/99) - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Urge archives - - - - - - - - - -		..From ballet to B&D and S/M? _____________________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -     COLLUSION: MEMOIR OF A YOUNG GIRL AND HER BALLET MASTER BY EVAN ZIMROTH HARPERCOLLINS, 229 PAGES Evan Zimroth's elegiac memoir raises disturbing questions about girlhood femininity and brutal domination. BY TARA ZAHRA She is expecting to be struck, knowing that she deserves it and will allow it. Her body is rigid, not with fear but with premonition and a kind of longing for whatever will happen to her. Instead of rising to punish her, however, he tells her to take off her practice clothes. If you had to make a guess as to the origins of this little vignette, several Web sites protected by Adult Check and charging subscription fees might come to mind. But the "she" in this story is a 13-year-old girl, and her "practice clothes" are not a cheerleading outfit or any other staple of erotica, but a black leotard and pink tights. The tale is drawn from "Collusion," Evan Zimroth's unsettling memoir about her childhood relationship with her domineering ballet master. Pointe shoes and tutus have a special place among our icons of femininity. Even my otherwise feminist female friends who scorned fashion magazines, nail polish and "Melrose Place" would become gooey with excitement when I brought mine out of retirement in college. Everyone wanted a turn to try them on, and rise in awkward agony onto the tips of their toes, for just a moment to enact their childhood fantasies. But rarely did such fantasies include domination by a Svengali-type teacher with a Russian accent and a cane. Ballet is inextricably bound up with fantasies of eternal girlhood. Dreams of being a dew-drop fairy remain firmly planted in childhood, along with selling Thin Mints and wearing green polyester. Yet aside from a few lessons in a local Dolly Dinkle studio, and a few performances in our parents' living rooms, few of us actually enter ballet's cloistered world of pristine glamour, grace and femininity. The "adult" ballerinas we see onstage do little to dispel this connection between ballet and girlhood. Flat-chested, skinny enough to make Ally McBeal seem pudgy and always adorned with long hair, slicked into a bun and often topped with a tiara, many adult ballerinas look like the 10-year-olds we were when we gave the fantasy up. Ballet, of course, can be sexy: What is a pas de deux other than an extended metaphor for sex? But the sex depicted by ballet often more closely resembles pedophilia than mature sexuality. The ideal women, after all, are forever children. But what happens when ballerina fantasies are not confined to girlhood, but usher a girl into adolescence? Zimroth's "Collusion" offers one answer. This isn't simply another attempt to shatter our cotton-candy illusions about the dance world (that's been done before). Nor is it your typical coming-of-age memoir of tortured adolescence. (Though there is plenty of torture.) Rather, she describes how the deep convergence of scripted, exaggerated femininity with underlying pain that we see performed onstage (the smiling, fluttering fairy whose feet are actually bleeding) infiltrated the offstage psyche of at least one young girl: When F first so unexpectedly hit me, he taught me more than to pay attention to the small things, like battement tendu. He also showed me beyond words what it felt like to be a woman with a woman's submission and a woman's power over a man. I see now that I did not in any ordinary sense "grow up." I was a child, and then one stunning moment later I was a woman. I moved beyond childhood in the instant of discovering something I could not have possibly known before -- that I could submit to the violence of love, recognize it as love, and be complicit in it. N E X T+P A G E | Trained to just say yes to rape