Dancing: Sex Standing Up

At that golden age when puberty is embedding its oily claws into our blossoming youth, the beast we call “dancing” begins to transform from an innocent preschool circle-dancing kitten into a sexual bump-and-grinding bloodthirsty lion. When it seemed like just yesterday that boys weaved through playground equipment to escape man-hungry little girls who threatened them with kisses and infectious strains of cootie-itis, adolescent men were suddenly faced with the pressures of talking to girls, asking girls to dances, and even worse, dancing with them. Then came high school, where it became the man’s task to buy corsages, dinner, limos, tickets, hotel rooms and stereotypically he had either to get laid on his prom night or be forever looked upon by his peers as a failure (forever in this context meaning the month of waiting for your buddy who deflowered the prom queen to forget about the whole thing and stop harassing you).

Now, it’s our college years, and dancing is so oversexed. By that I mean that what gets classified as “sex” or “dancing” really depends on whether or not there is penetration.

We go to dance clubs lit like bedrooms where women make it their purpose to look as jaw-droppingly sexy as possible. Lift the boobs, show the butt. People ought to start up naked dance clubs. Then, they actually could go that extra distance and penetrate on the dance floor. However, the likely conflict among women due to duplicate fashion statements stands in the way of this development. “What a bitch, she’s wearing the same vagina I am! Let’s nail fight, you slutty bitch!”

Dance music is hilariously explicit. Good beats, catchy rhythms, but personally I am tired of song choruses that revolve around metaphoric and literal descriptions of cunnilingus, fellatio, body parts, and intercourse. OK, I did like that song four years ago “Too Close” about having a boner on the dance floor because it had a decent pun ” “you’re making it hard for me.” But now our lyricists have all caught the “sex sells” syndrome, using lyrics that on the edge of what is and is not acceptable as attention-getters. And in the club context, they’re popular picks for DJ’s. They soak dancers’ subconsciouses with sex, and when sex is on the brain, it’s likely to end up on the To Do list too. It’s like when you’re in the movie theatres and the animated popcorn man dances across the screen so you realize you want to buy popcorn. Like that except you go home and bone all night instead of eating popcorn. At the current rate of song de-evolution, soon popular songs could easily be “Ejaculattack” by Big Johnson, or “Stick your Rod in my Boat and go fishing for Orgasms” by Boobzilla.

The moves. We’re not talking The Charleston or The Swim here, we’re talking rubbing, riding, groping, grinding, so sexy it hurts, put your booty into it, FREAK-dancing. Enough said. Everyone has seen that one girl making an O-face and rubbing her butt all over the hard-on Lucky Larry has tucked into his pant leg at some point in their dancing careers.

The final tie between dancing and sex is the well-known idea that women correlate a man’s dancing abilities to his talents in bed and the size of his penis. (Fine, just kidding about the penis). This belief has stifled my love life on several occasions, because apparently finding an unsuspecting woman, dropping to the floor, and grasping my ankles to give her the old fashioned back-it-up does not create for me the sex dynamo image.

Fortunately, more respectable dances still exist in our society. Swing, Hoedown, Salsa, Waltz, Interpretive Dance, the Conga, and numerous others, salvation for those who want dancing to be more than sex standing up.

For questions, comments, or to hear about the time a Salsa Dance instructor’s 50-year-old wife kissed me on the lips, write to dgingras@calpoly.edu.