This week's big story centered, surprisingly, not around Hollywood movie stars but on another entertainment art form: ballet. Italian ballerina Mariafrancesca Garritano was fired from the famed La Scala ballet company this past weekend, and many are blaming the controversial topics brought up in her recent book: The Truth Please, About Ballet.

In the text, and again in a December interview with The Observer (a British newspaper), Garritano reported the harsh treatment she received from her ballet instructors (they teased her with names like "Chinese dumpling" and "Mozzarella") and how she stopped getting her period for a year between the ages of 16 and 17 because she had dropped to a sickly 95 pounds due to the extreme pressure. She estimated that seven in 10 dancers at the La Scala Academy in Milan have lost their menstrual cycles, one in five have anorexia and that many of her colleagues are now physically unable to have children due to the strain of constant weight fluctuations on their hormones and reproductive systems.

Criticism of the ballet world is nothing new. Last year's film Black Swan raised serious questions about the physical and psychological pressure to conform to a certain body type after the already-slim Natalie Portman lost 20 pounds for her role as a prima ballerina. In 2010, New York Times critic Alastair MacAulay came under fire for calling ballerina Jenifer Ringer, who is not even slightly overweight, "the Sugar Plum Fairy [who] looked as if she'd eaten one sugar plum too many," prompting questions over the policing of body types of ballerinas who are considered by many to be athletes. When it surfaced that Ringer had suffered from anorexia in the past, MacAulay's article received even more harsh criticism, with many bloggers accusing him of perpetuating the culture of unhealthy ballerinas.

The policing of female athletes' bodies is nothing new. There's even a medical diagnosis for the women who are pushed too far. Female Athlete Triad refers to a combination of three conditions: disordered eating; amenorrhea, loss of menstrual period; and osteoporosis, weakening of the bones.

It's been proven over and over again that weak, too-thin bodies don't perform as well as bodies that are well-fed and strong. So why does the ballet industry—and other athletic and aesthetic industries where women are put on display—insist on pressuring these women into eating disorders that can have serious effects on their physical, psychological and reproductive health just to perpetuate the image of the tiny, delicate dancer? And more importantly, why do we continue to let it happen?