Badass Ballerinas Beat Down A Sexist Football Fan On Social Media


Ballet dancers are some tough-ass ladies and dudes– have you seen a photo of those ballerinas’ feet, all gnarly and beat up? In order for a person to get feet like that, they have to have a wicked-high pain tolerance and ability to abuse yourself for years. These are not folks that you wanna mess with.

Image by Steven Depolo, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Sharealike license.
Image by Steven Depolo, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Sharealike license.

This was a lesson that a sexist football fan had to learn the hard way. A Philadelphia Eagles fan, disappointed at their recent loss, complained that they “played like they were wearing tutus.”

This is obviously an insult akin to “you throw like a girl:” the ballet reference is really a smokescreen to say the players are playing like girls. It’s a jerky thing to say, for sure.

The Pennsylvania Ballet didn’t take it laying down, and responded in badass form:

“With all due respect to the Eagles, let’s take a minute to look at what our tutu wearing women have done this month:

“By tomorrow afternoon, the ballerinas that wear tutus at Pennsylvania Ballet will have performed The Nutcracker 27 times in 21 days. Some of those women have performed…without an understudy or second cast. No ‘second string’ to come in and spell them when they needed a break. When they have been sick they have come to the theater, put on make up and costume, smiled and performed.

“[T]here have been no injury timeouts. They have kept smiling, finished their job, bowed, left the stage, and then dealt with what hurts. Some of these tutu wearers have been tossed into a new position with only a moments notice. That’s like a [quarterback] being told at halftime that they’re going to play wide receiver for the second half, but they need to make sure that no one can tell they’ve never played wide receiver before.”

Just in case you thought tutu-wearing ballerinas are less athletic and tough than football players.

The ballerinas concluded:

“So no, the Eagles have not played like they were wearing tutus. If they had, Chip Kelly would still be a head coach and we’d all be looking forward to the playoffs.”