I was going to say … Dancing is popular among gay men. And at gay square dancing events, something like 80% of the gay attendees are male. It’s less popular with lesbians. A gay friend said to me, “people who like men like to dance”.
I suspect something to do with gender roles.
Not if none of them do.
– I suspect that at least a lot of this is cultural.
Dancing is generally unscripted/creative. It is therefore a more vulnerable position to put yourself in. People may be judge-y about your ability. Men are socialized to avoid vulnerability of any kind.
IME men are far more likely to hit the floor for a line dance. They may even get into their element and add little flourishes, kicks and spins, if they know the dance well. But let the line dancing stop and they scurry back to their tables, ignoring their date’s tapping feet. 
And it does not matter if people actually are judgey; the paranoia that that are looking and judging is often enough.
FWIW in my marriage I am the one wanting to get up and dance and my wife the one saying no most of the time. But I long ago recognized I didn’t matter enough to any strangers for them to spend energy judging me, and so what if I look like a dork? Well that ma tv exp k sin my wife saying no, she doesn’t want to judged for dancing with the dork!
You could at least refrain from dancing while typing.
wow.
Yeah meta. It explains my wife not wanting to dance: embarrassed by me.
I thought I could do a passable job of dancing. I knew I wasn’t good at it but I enjoyed moving to a beat and had a lot of fun with it. Then I saw a video of me dancing at a wedding. I looked like I was having a convulsion that accidentally happened to be in time with the music. Think of Elaine’s dance “moves” on Seinfeld. I’m surprised nobody called an ambulance to drag me to ER to see if I was ok.
After that embarrassment I rarely dance in public. I might be persuaded by my wife to do “hang on and sway” thing with her if a slow song comes up, but that’s it. My wife isn’t much of a dancer either. She spends more time on my feet than I do. We were meant for each other.
None of the subcultures I associate with have this apparent disparity. Male goths dance. Male punks dance - or mosh - more than females. Male b-boys used to outnumber b-girls quite a bit. Rave culture didn’t have a shortage of males off their tits on E shaking it. Burner culture likewise. Gay culture was already mentioned.
Is the OP specifically asking about a specific kind of dancing, like Disco or ballroom?
I have no idea about this discussion overall.
But as a matter of principal, basing one’s view of what most people do on observation of certain subcultures is highly dubious. They aren’t called subcultures for no reason.
To be a good dancer, you need an elegant streamlined body, and women have that by default, while men have to really work hard to achieve that, so I think dancing comes a bit more naturally to the willowy and slender, rather than the stocky and top-heavy.
Basing it one one subculture would be. Basing it on a range of subcultures, covering large swathes of people, is a lot less so.
All culture is made of nothing but subcultures. Some just anoint themselves as “mainstream”. This doesn’t mean the others are some weird disparate group - I mean, you’re talking all of hip-hop, electronic dance enthusiasts and male homosexuals, there, in just three of the subcultures I mentioned.
That is not actually the natural order of things. If anything, women naturally tend to be fatter than men.
Yes - I think you could only think that women like to dance more than men if you were severely limited in your cultural experience. Straight white men love to dance as much as anybody else. Have you ever been to a ska gig? The “Disco sucks” thing is much more limited to north America than people on the SDMB realise - in Britain, continental Europe, the rest of the world, I’m pretty sure disco classics are as likely to get men on the dance floor as women.
I think the OP’s premise is about men in western society who don’t like dancing is itself about a pretty specific subculture, even if it doesn’t have a name.
Well, from the other thread I cited in my OP, these folks agree:
I Googled “do women like to dance more than men”. Google came back with this AI overview:
Based on social perception and studies, it appears that women generally tend to enjoy dancing more than men, with statistics showing a higher participation rate in dance activities among females; however, this is not a universal truth and individual preferences vary greatly between genders.
Among the results, there was this actual published study:
The prevalence of dance was much higher in girls (34.8%) than boys (8.4%). Girls had a greater contribution of dance to total MVPA (39.3%) than boys (23.0%). Dance is a prevalent form of physical activity among girls, and it accounts for a substantial fraction of their total MVPA.
There are also plenty of other folks who share my perception that women like to dance more than men:
http://www.ballroomjoe.com/articles/whywomenlovetodance.htm
So then I turned it around and asked Google “do men like to dance more than women”. Google came back with this AI Overview:
No, generally speaking, women are considered to be more likely to enjoy dancing than men, with many studies and observations showing that men are often more hesitant to hit the dance floor compared to women; this can be attributed to cultural factors that sometimes perceive dancing as more feminine.
And the results of that search were almost entirely about women liking dancing more than men and being better at it.
As the google results would reflect the majority culture in the US, we would expect that.
You you suggesting that this is universal to all cultures?
There’s also a confusion here - do more American women than men dance? Sure, the numbers bear that up.
Do more women like to do it than men? I’m not convinced.
I’m especially not convinced by studies looking at schoolkids, where way more girls than boys are enrolled in dance classes by their moms whether they like it or not. Dance moms and the dance school industry are real phenomena which are going to skew that kind of study quite a bit.
If it’ll help advance the discussion, we can narrow my question:
Within the majority culture in the US, why do more women like dancing than men?
This would suggest there is a portion of women who are dancing involuntarily which strikes me as odd.
This is going to get me in trouble, somehow.
Yeah, I went to dancing school as a young prepubescent. It was a thing, and yadda yadda.
It’s really difficult or improbable to generalize.
I suspect it comes down to how many women are musicians, and how many men are musicians.
Pretty sure there’s an imbalance. No, that doesn’t work. Cancel that. Obviously, some of the most accomplished musicians in any genre happen to be women.
I can dance, both ballroom (begrudgingly, but passably), and just cut a rug, I guess.
The problem for me is that, as a semi-professional musician for forty years, is I can’t stand the fucking music. Certainly not anything made in the past fifty years as dance music.
I can’t tell you how many hundreds of dollars I’ve spent in the past months at a local dive bar to get the juke box to stop playing dance music in the middle of the afternoon.
It’s just a matter of taste. Or maybe I can hold my liquor better than most and don’t get carried away.
It’s a conundrum, but not an insoluble one.
Matter of taste and discretion.
Large swathes of people? Ravers, b-boys, punks, burners? All subcultures into dancing?
Not even close to representative. Of society or dancing. If they comprised more than 5% of Western society I’d be surprised.
Guy here. I’m coordinated with myself, and I’m coordinated with the music. I’m less coordinated with other people, so line dancing doesn’t do it for me personally. And I don’t really have a desire to learn a line dance well enough to perform the moves. There’s also an element of “you can’t tell me what to do!” All but the last element also goes for any couples dancing in which you might touch the other person.
So that leaves dancing with myself, but I only like to dance to less than 1/10 of the songs that others would consider danceable. More like 1% I’d say. But if there’s a very danceable song that comes on and people don’t expect me to perform it in a certain way, I’d rather be on the dance floor than just listening to it in my seat.