Interesting. I get to the same conclusion (boys weren't encouraged to develop dance skills) but by a different explanation.
Huck Kennedy wrote: > > Now let's get to the truth of the matter--any > advantage women have in dancing comes from their being > shunted off to dance class at an early age, while the > boys were playing sports and/or running around in the > woods with toy guns pretending to be on army patrol. > The idea that women somehow "have more of an inherent > musicality in their bodies" than men is patent nonsense. > > Huck > _______________________________________________ Most girls in my neighborhood were shunted off to gymnastics, tennis camp, piano lessons and karate self-defense classes. Some got dance training but maybe they didn't stay with it because a ballet instructor swatted their legs with a wooden blackboard pointer to the point of making welts, like mine did. (And I still dance.) Some went on for lots of ballet, jazz, tap, etc. but not many. I come from a US middle-class suburban background; other social strata would be different, my uncle made everyone on the farm learn square dancing and two-step. I don't think dance lessons have anything to do with the fact that, if you go to a random WASP wedding** or other event with a dance floor and a band, you will see almost every woman not in a wheelchair out on the dance floor at some point, but only a minority of the men. (**This observation doesn't apply to the many ethnic and cultural groups in the US which have continuously valued dancing and partner dancing, including African American culture.) I would say the difference in US male/female dance skill is more attributable to changes in pop culture. In the 60's everyone started hopping around to the Beatles and Motown rather than partner dancing. Parents didn't bother to teach the kids because the kids were not interested in anything that wasn't a complete break from tradition. The mid 70's brought in this era of machismo where it was all of a sudden extremely unmasculine for the boys to hop around. Also, along with the machismo was this hyperreal seriousness invested in one's coolness and badness, at every waking moment. Guys would not admit that they liked to dance, that was an invitation to be ridiculed and humiliated. Plus if they looked a little goofy trying do something, it was the end of the universe. I realize that men are always under pressure to perform well and this creates great anxiety about dancing and leading, but I am talking about a cultural phenomenon far more extreme. Boys were only allowed to express themselves to music in that era in limited ways. If they liked music they would invariably buy an electric guitar and form a rock band with their buddies. Hence the universal adoration of rock stars and the popularity of Guitar Hero I, II and III. My school dances were filled with power rock, boys huddled on one side of the room showing each other their killer air guitar performances to Stairway to Heaven and Smoke On the Water, and girls hopping around in groups to some of the power rock and then going off to the bathroom or out to smoke during the extended guitar solos. Disco came in, had a brief heyday and made it OK for men to dance and then was satirized and rejected overwhelmingly by macho WASP culture (a wooden cache of disco records was exploded in Chicago by radio jock Steve Dahl at a baseball game, turning the crowd into a mob burning records and smashing disco mirror balls in the stands, in the rock concert equivalent of a soccer riot. People came from all over the country to attend this). Largely for the above reasons, I think, a large age group of men spanning many eras, just aren't comfortable with dancing. And they cringe when they see the guys on 'Dancing With The Stars' wearing spandex and gliding around...no matter how masterful and powerful the dancing might be. Everyone my dad's age dances. Nobody my brother's age dances. The men I know between 25 and 55 who dance are a distinct minority. At least two thirds of the men I know in this age group who dance were not born here. And then came that Gap commercial with some manly aerial throwing around of girls to manly jump blues music. Some US kids decided partner dancing was interesting. I know dozens of men under 25 who think it's cool to dance even if they don't. At some point many of them go out and learn basic swing and salsa so they can dance a little bit. And there's Dance Dance Revolution: one of my middle-aged friends recently said that he was very happy that the arcade game made it "okay" for his son to learn to enjoy dancing. Men from other cultures seem to be much more comfortable with themselves in relation to dancing. And back to Huck's point, a lot of schools in other countries *do* require learning partner dancing at some point. CS I think the body slamming in punk music and grunge rock made dancing acceptably masculine again in the US. The knife fighting and foot swipes cited in the endless debates about some of the elements of tango seem to me to be an interesting parallel to the violence in punk. (I'm not saying the aesthetic is at all similar or appealing, I'm not saying knife fighting is the same as slam dancing, I'm not saying punk music is as worthy as tango music, and I am not inviting this to become Yet Another 'origins of tango' thread or an 'expressions of outrage against any comparison between punk and tango' thread.) -- Carol Ruth Shepherd Arborlaw PLC Ann Arbor MI USA 734 668 4646 v 734 786 1241 f http://arborlaw.com copyrights • contracts • collections • corporations _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
