Why men dance...

I hope I explained why I dance in my first blog entry. There’s something really rewarding about leading and following. I wouldn’t deny, though, that part of the attraction is the simplicity of the relationship: man leads, woman follows, it’s the man’s job to guide and protect the woman. It would be very boring if the rest of life was like that, but it’s quite refreshing (and it was put this way to me by a woman who is a very strong feminist) to have one area of life where it’s legitimate.

But some men seem to have strange motiviation. There are the (fortunately fairly rare) creeps who go because it’s their only way of getting near women. And there are also the guys whose main motivation seems to be to patronise women. I recently watched a friend enduring a dance with a highly competent but unattractive individual whose moves mostly seemed to be designed to take the piss or ‘amusingly’ involve suggestive contact. She can normally smile through anything but looked aghast through most of the dance and then told me that he’d only smiled when he’d managed to get her on the wrong foot.

Two other things that annoy me are the lecturers: you know, the woman can’t follow the move so the man stops dead in the middle of the dance floor and explains it to her in detail. Particularly ludicrous when the woman is a much better dancer than the man and if he’d led it properly she would have followed it!

And why is it that the guys you see most often trying to do salsa trio (dancing with two women) aren't very good dancers? Salsa trio looks good when someone like Than does it: but if you can’t do it well, you don’t look a stud, you look a prat.