Ballet Cosplay & Horizontal Academics

Old Freed Classics used for Cosplay

Ballet training for UNLV Cosplay women: There is a cosplay (costume play) club associated with a popular sorority at UNLV that is using a set of period (1950s) story lines that involve ballet for role playing. The idea is that the costumes and equipment for and the interpretation of the individual roles have to be as nearly as perfectly period as possible and errors in costuming or performance are brutally criticized and the girl making the errors is humiliated in front of other club members as a form of sorority hazing.

A friend of Taryn’s, who graduated from St Lucy’s at the same time as Taryn, is now an Advanced Placement second year student at UNLV asked for my help in getting herself and two of her sorority sisters up to speed in pointe work and contraception (which are the two aspects where they feel their experiences and training are the weakest) to avoid being humiliated by the stream of invectives directed at new club members who make costume and performance errors.

For pointe shoes we are using old Freed Classics which use traditional materials and manufacturing techniques and are the closest to the pointes used in the fifties. We get them from the discarded shoes from several of my company dancers and pad-up so the shoes don’t hurt that much. When the girls get good at it I will reduce their padding and refit them with shoes that are a better fit. And we replaced some of the ribbons that had elastic in them to lessen the chances of tendonitis because elastic wasn’t used in the ribbons in the fifties.

One of the girls balked at the time I insisted they take for training, but after one of her friends was so humiliated during a critique of her Cosplay performance she resigned from the sorority she changed her mind and is now 100% committed to learning as much from me as she can. It would have been a hopeless task to train them except for the fact that all three had taken pointe several years ago and so they were rusty, but with proper training and dedication were back up to passable amateur speed in a few weeks.

The contraception problem limits the girls to condoms and diaphragms since the ballet roles are set in the 1950s and the women are not supposed to use hormonal contraceptives or IUDs which weren’t invented or in use in the U.S then and that freaked them out. As far as cervical barriers are concerned the FemCap wasn’t available then nor was Oves or the Prentif cervical cap so the only method of contraception that the woman herself could use was the diaphragm which became available in the 1930s. The girls were very concerned about using only diaphragms for protection, but I assured them that a properly fitted and correctly used diaphragm is 96% effective and that when used simultaneously with a male condom the combined effeteness is above 99%, just as effective as the pill or an IUD. I would like to have fit the three of them with All-Flex silicone diaphragms since it is rugged and the easiest style to insert correctly. However, they needed latex because diaphragms were made of latex in the 1950s. So I fit them with Reflexions flat spring diaphragms the only latex devices still made by a major manufacturer. A flat spring diaphragm is a bit harder to insert correctly. Fortunately their fingers are long enough that they can feel their cervixes, so I taught them how to check with their fingers that the stretchy rubber dome is covering the cervix. And a gas Guard inserted protects a girl from her partner blowing air up her vagina while giving her oral, something fifties women using diaphragms were automatically protected against.

Dive-sex wasn’t a part of normal sexual activity in the fifties so with wanting to be as true to the period as possible during a cosplay sexual encounter they shouldn’t be having dive-sex. However, a benefit of a flat spring diaphragm is that it can be use at any depth for dive-sex so if somehow they find themselves in that situation they are still safe. Of course there is nothing to prevent the girls using their flat spring diaphragms for dive-sex with a favorite partner outside the Cosplay setting. Diving deeper than 30 feet seems very unlikely since the only dive facilities deeper than 30 feet in the area are my pit and Adolph’s well and neither of us is allowing UNLV students in our training facilities.

The girls use our in-house experimental silicone base intimate lube and spermicide Semécide from Labia Labs professional line of contraceptive products. The spermicide made with dive-gel and Octoxynol-9 (O9) and is far less irritating and just as effective as spermicides using Nonoxynol 9 (N9) and can be used with both silicone and latex barriers.

They have been able to avoid any of the ballet scenarios during Cosplay so far, but their training has reached the point that they don’t wobble en pointe and their poses, développés, bourrées and jumps are quite good for amateurs so I think they should be ready to compete in that category in the next few days.

Horizontal Academics: Karen Owens PowerPoint presentation during her senior year at Duke University is old news by now. However, the same thing is going on at UNLV with, hopefully, a bit more discretion. With today’s sexually liberated women keeping a tally and rating a girl’s sexual conquests is common, especially among sorority sisters who share the information while mentoring younger women. Horizontal Academics is not a for-credit course, but it certainly is a valuable part of a young woman’s education. I’m working with Student Health to provide dive-sex training for the few sorority women who want to score in non traditional public locations and counseling them about being careful what information they post about themselves and others on social networking sites.

That’s because many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook have been transmitting identifying information -- in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names -- to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. For more about that read the eighth installment in The Wall Street Journal's "What They Know" Click here