I can dance. I don’t find it very hard, you just do it. But I don’t find it very much fun. You get all sweaty. If it’s crowded it’s hard not to bump into people. It’s hard to talk to your date. I much rather sit in some dark cool corner with a drink in my hand and someone to talk to.
You know, dancing is just like sex without the sex. Plus all the people around.
I’m with you on both counts. A typical exchange (at a party or wedding, for example, where people are dancing) might go like this:
Person X: Come on. let’s dance. Whooooooo!
Me: Um, no thanks.
X: Come on, you can do it! Whooooooo!
Me: I know I can do it; I just don’t want to.
X: Don’t be embarrassed. Whooooo!
Me: Really, I just don’t enjoy it.
X: Sure you will. It’s fun! Whooooooo!
Then the person grabs you forcibly, making you dance against your wishes, or even pulling you into the dreaded conga line. This makes it even less enjoyable, because now you’re bored ** and ** resentful.
another straight white male here who loves to dance!
a good night out isn’t complete without a couple of hours ‘booty shaking’ i believe you americans like to call it.
and here’s some bad news…
after leaving a party last week, my two female friends were discussing a hot looking guy they saw.
they then described how he got up to dance and had NO rhythm and that was it, no longer attractive!
so get practising, get yourself a jackson 5 greatest hit and you won’t be able to sit still!
shamon! hee hee! m***** f******!
proper bo!
I’m a straight white male, and i love dancing. Mind you, i go to house/trance clubs (you Merkins might call them raves) where pretty much the whole focus to the night is dancing to music rather than trying to pull or drinking etc. I love just reacting to the music, almost trying to be the music.
I don’t really get the whole feeling self conscious thing. I don’t spend my time watching how other people dance in a club and mentally scoring them out of 10, and i doubt anyone else does. Most people look slightly silly while dancing if you rate them purely aesthetically. If they’re having a good time though they look good.
I guess if you did go to clubs where everyone is watching everyone else then i can see how that might make you self conscious.
I’ve noticed on this thread that it seems to be mainly British men who enjoy dancing and mainly Americans that don’t. Is this a cultural divide, or just a small sample group?
I just don’t like it. I will dance with someone if asked, figuring that if someone took the trouble to swallow their pride, or lost a bet, I’ll oblige, but I won’t go dance of my own accord. I’d rather talk to someone or just watch everyone else. I see no point in dancing. At least, on the floor. I am the MacDaddy of chair dancing. I can cut a rug as long as my butt is attached to a barstool. I just don’t see the point in wasting energy on a dance floor.
I’m straight, white, male, American.
Will tango for food. 
I like dancing – ballroom, swing, and Latin. It’s a wonderful social outlet. Plus we can actually talk over the music.
(To quote one lady I met at a dance last year, “Dancing is a socially acceptable opportunity for a man to push a lady around.”)
Seriously, I’m a musician, and when I play music onstage, I dance around a bit. I’m not shy about dancing and while I’m not too jiggy, I do marginally better than most white guys. I totally agree that most men’s interest in dancing is purely for the purposes of getting sex. So ladies, when that guy asks you to dance, know that he’s imagining doing you nine ways to Sunday. Hey, you think that’s why girls dance with girls or gay guys so much?:dubious:
Dance? Yes, I like to dance. I even studied a few forms. However, I don’t like to randomly twitch to bad thumpa-thumpa-whumpa-thumpa-thumpa crap that the ignorant like to foist off as “dance music”. Likewise, I’m no fan of any sort of random twitching to rhythm. That’s fine for my four-year-old, but calling it “dance” is like calling a random collection of tones produced by a number generator “music”.
As a straight white woman who loves to dance, but used to be extremely self-conscious about dancing in public (maybe I just don’t drink enough!), may I suggest another hypothesis? Maybe those of you who don’t like to dance, or think you have no rhythm, just haven’t experimented enough to find the right kind of music.
In high school and college, I never used to understand how people could go to clubs, or concerts, or dances, and flail around on the dance floor. Dancing with predetermined movements, like folk dancing? No problem. Dancing in the livingroom with my mom leading (jitterbug, for the most part – Mom is a fabulous dancer and used to go regularly to dance on American Bandstand when she was growing up in south NJ) – sure, but only if she or my grandfather was leading. Dancing around the house to old musicals with my sister and our friends, like West Side Story or Fiddler on the Roof? Sure, it was tons of fun, and a great way for us to get goofy and creative. I took lots of dance classes as a kid, and I was pretty damn good, if I may say so.
But freestyle dancing to the rock/pop of the time (1980s), in public, with strangers watching? No way in hell. My poor HS boyfriend used to drag me to dances, and I would stand by the wall feeling like an idiot because I was too self-conscious, and send him off to dance with other girls. (Poor guy; he was a sweetheart, and he could never enjoy himself knowing that I was standing there by myself.)
Then I left for college, and discovered there was other music in the world besides classic rock (which I love, but which is terrible for dancing – ever been to a Grateful Dead show? I rest my case) and awful cheesy pop ballads. Now that I was old enough to go to clubs (in NY at the time it was generally 18 to enter, 21 to drink), I discovered blues, house and other “dance” music of the time, and best of all, Latin. All of the sudden, now that the percussion section was more than just headbanging or keeping the beat, dancing in public was fun! (Plus the anonymity of being in a club with a couple of thousand people who I would probably never see again, as opposed to my entire HS graduating class, helped with the self-consciousness.)
And yes, a guy who can dance is a huge turn-on. I tend to be attracted to rather cerebral guys, but sometimes when I see that they know how to handle their physical side, it gets my imagination revved up. (This goes for things like backrubs as well as dancing.) The best is when some one who looks like the quintessential rhythmless white boy gets up and shocks the hell out of everyone with his moves; I had a co-worker like that once. We went on a work outing, and this shy, mild-mannered, slightly nerdy, redheaded, freckled Wisconsin small-town boy revealed that he could leave a large proportion of the Latin guys in the dust when it came to salsa and merengue. (And respectfully, too; unlike some of the other guys one runs into at Latin dance clubs, one didn’t have to constantly peel his hands off one’s derriere.) Believe me, he got plenty of action after that.
The kind of music being offered can make a difference.
All through high school and early college I wouldn’t dance, mainly for reasons of shyness. Then one night at a party in my junior year, I tried it, and found it to be a lot of fun. I also spent my junior year in Germany, where it seems that a 50’s and 60’s rock revival was taking place. There was a private disco attached to my dorm that had this type of music three times a week, and we all went and danced our heels off. As I was finishing up my BA, back in San Diego, hard driving rock was the norm for parties and dances on campus, even though this was the late 1970’s and everyone was supposed to be dancing to disco. But that dog wouldn’t hunt at UCSD. So during this time of my life I loved to dance.
But now that everything’s gone hiphop, techno, industro, or whatever, I just can’t do it. Not only do I not like most of the music, but I can’t get the feel of it enough to dance without embarrassing myself.
I don’t dance as I don’t have anything to prove come on, other than enjoying yourself and trying to get laid;), what is a guy trying to do other than prove he’s better than you at something?
I’m really bad at it. I wish I was better at it but I there is just no way to get me to dance without lots of drinks and I’m not a big drinker.
Once a female friend of mine wanted to dance and tried to get me on the dance floor. She assured me that ‘Everyone can dance’, so after a couple of songs worth of pleading I relented. Half-way through the song she suggested we sit down and then apologized to me as she was wrong. I almost got her to write me a note excuseing me from any further dancing.
I like to dance, I really do. I’m a white male (“age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me”).
I actually keep time very well in freestyle dancing (this has been verified by many [well, some] women). I try to vary it up a bit, so it doesn’t get to boring. I can actually not look awkward on the dance floor 
Anyway… often heard that women have such a hard time getting men to dance that they appreciate guys who do dance. Used to go to clubs quite often (where, I suppose, a larger percentage of the men do like to dance - oh well, so much for the appreciation), well before dance clubs had that brief period of being the ‘trendy place to hook up’ (and consequently fell out of trendyness). I did this because, a. I like to dance and b. I like to dance with women. Don’t go so much now because…
Women don’t seem to want to dance with guys now. Tthey’d rather just dance by themselves (meaning with groups of their friends - only guys will dance by themselves), and turn down any guy who asks them to dance (not just me mind you - lots of other guys, decent looking ones too). Or, at the very, very best, you get the ‘Oh, all right, I got some time to kill’ go-through-the-motions dance. Woo-woo. :dubious:
Thought I had left that crap behind in college, but apparently it followed me to my late 30s.
Also can do latin dancing (Merenque very well, Salsa not so much), but don’t appreciate a whole night of Latin music (which is what the latin nights around here tend to be - for you locals, think Douglaston Manor on Wednesday, Winner Circle on Fridays, and so on) - and when I’m at a regular club and the latin set comes on, there’s usually no ladies who like latin dancing.
(I dance to reggae quite well [er, used to - see above], except I never had the guts to do the bump/grinding [freaking] manuevars on someone I just met).
So, I vote for changing this topic to ‘Why the hell don’t Women want to dance with men anymore?’
I wish I was a good dancer. If I was, I’d get down like a Backstreet Boy wherever I went.
I mean, I like dancing, I like rhythm, but unless you get a really funky groove on or get me really drunk, I’m not going to do it. I just have no idea what I’m doing.
It’s like, “where are my arms going? Why am I doing this?” and “so what should my legs be doing right now?”
I’m a straight, white, male. It’s a terrible curse.
Straight White Guy here, and the generalization fits. Reasons? OK, in descending order:
a) The Music. Unless you include square-dances, the crap they play is nearly aways some variation on disco / top 40. I don’t voluntarily listen to that crap. Gimme that old time rock 'n roll music.
b) The Courting Rules. I don’t like being the one to ask. And I’ve never been involved with someone who wanted to go to dances as a couple. And if I’m gonna go some place to pick up / be picked up, it’s going to be an environment where I can have conversations. You can’t talk at a dance, too damn noisy.
c) Age and Generation. Aside (once again) from square dancing, the dancing I learned coming of age was the American “do your own thing” stuff that came into being in the late 60s and persisted until past the era in which I graduated from High School. You kind of stood by yourself in the general proximity of your partner, looked with glazed eyes off into nirvana, and danced without touching. I’m sort of under the impression that this would look silly these days. Not that I mind looking silly but it might be counterproductive as far as it being a pleasant experience for my partner is concerned.
d) Square Dancing, in its own Category. I could, I know how, or once did. But when I learned it as an adolescent, everyone else was long-married and about a generation and a half older at minimum. I know there are probably places where square dancing (or contra dancing) is a real happening thing with folks who aren’t collecting social security yet, but most of them probably aren’t in Manhattan. Besides, I’d imagine it’s culturally linked with country-western culture which in turn seems to have strong threads of Christianity and social conservatism and marriage-mindedness, probably not the ideal environment for a longhaired semiWiccan hippie pseudoPolygamous anarchist poet geek kind of guy to make friends and socialize.
[irrelevant aside: thanks to preview, managed to avoid posting this in the “What went wrong with Nazism in Germany” thread!! Talk about your discontinuities!]
Ahh, but we do! We’ve just given up out of frustration. Or we go to Latin clubs, where the old rules are still in effect.
One night last summer, I went out with a girlfriend to a merngue (well, actually more like Latin hip-hop) concert (check out www.fulanito.com). We had an absolute blast; didn’t get off the dance floor until 3:30 am, soaked in sweat. We only gave up because we just couldn’t keep up with the guys. I can dance merengue or salsa if the person leading knows what he’s doing, but well, I didn’t grow up doing it, so eventually I run out of steam. That, and the cigarette smoke was really getting to me. Yes, I had to peel various Dominican hands off of various personal portions of my anatomy here and there, but we were having fun, so it was well worth it. It was my friend’s first time in a Latin club, and we were pretty much the only native English speakers there. She commented on how everyone was dancing, and well, too.
The following night, the same friend and I went to a regular bar (the Cubby Bear, for you Chicago folks) to see my guitar teacher’s band (www.underwaterpeople.com). They do straight rock covers, mostly, with a few originals…and the atmosphere was pretty much like a bad frat party. Boys on one side (pretty much as white as a boy can be), girls on the other, people mostly concentrating on drinking watered-down domestic beer and maybe bobbing their heads more or less in time to the music. It sucked. If my friend and I didn’t both have such a huge crush on the guitar teacher (plus we really do appreciate him as a musician), we would have left pretty much immediately.
I’m all for cultural diversity, but please, non-dancing white boys, please at least try! We need some more company out there!
Oh, and **SirRay, ** too bad you’re not local…
I hate dancing. I can’t do it well, look stupid when I try, and feel embarrassed the whole time. I guess I don’t have the balls to be humiliated in public over and over until I get better.
You people who are suggesting other kinds of music are missing the point. We don’t know how to dance and are quite happy for it to stay that way. At least I am.