This is the part in the show where Alex goes way out of his way to demonstrate to the world how lame and square he really is by drafting a long polemic seeking to justify his squareness. Be warned graphic stiffness contained hearin read further only with extreme caution.

Still here? Good (I guess). I need to get something off my chest about dancing. I don’t like it. Never did. I realize this puts me on the outs with like 90% of the world’s population, but I’m a weird guy and I will understand if I get banished to Utah or something for my feelings. Not to say that dancing is the end of the world, and certainly there are many, many worse things out there than dancing. But still. I don’t like it, and I feel a need to express it.

I spoke about dancing tonight with my housemates. One of my housemates dances all the time, mostly Swing, and enjoys it very much. The other housemate isn’t a big fan. To try and assuage our hangups about dancing, my Swing dancing housemate shared some personal experience with us. It took her a bit to get into dancing herself. When she first started dancing seriously she was nervous and uncomfortable about it. She said that she had always infused simple gestures such as holding hands with romance, and it made her uncomfortable to start holding and touching men she didn’t know and perhaps wouldn’t know again. While something small, it was something that had meaning behind it. Over time she says, she got over this uncomfortableness. The holding and touching she once associated exclusively with romance now became meaningless. So, she assured us, once you get used to it and these actions lose meaning they are no longer uncomfortable.

Well I don’t want them to lose meaning.

My housemate meant it quite innocently, but I feel it expresses the objection I have quite well. When once romantic actions become mechanical, then doesn’t that cheapen many aspects of love and romance? Doesn’t it strip away the meaning from that too?

Sure I may be over reacting, especially to my innocent Swing dancing 40-year-old housemate. But most dancing that I see has moved onto a level or two beyond Swing. It is far more explicit, far more sexual, and far more physical than dancing of 50 years ago. Not to say that the current generation has perverted and sexualized a purely innocent affair of yesteryear. No, dancing has always been a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, but now its just much more so.

Perhaps more bothering than the increasing explicitness of dance is how impersonal and anonymous it is. You aren’t rubbing up against someone you care and cherish, you are rubbing up against someone you don’t know. Worse yet - over an evening - rubbing up against a dozen people you don’t know. Now so much more than holding hands has been cheapened and made meaningless. What’s next? Oh you know where I’m going.

So often dancing is merely a warm up to another dance. People go to parties and clubs not just to dance, but to find someone to go home with. And honestly, why not? After so much of the romantic experience has had the meaning stripped from it, what is stopping one from pushing through that one extra step?

Oh what’s that? All this makes you uneasy? No problem, a few drinks will solve that. Any hang ups you have about this arrangement can be washed away with a magic elixer. Many people rightfully have qualms about the hook up culture dancing has become, but so easily and willfully they seek to remove those archaic moral pangs with a few shots, sips, drinks and drafts. Further handing over control to their passions and switching off the other side of their brain that is unfashionable in such situations.

To me dancing is just one aspect of the booze adled promiscuous club culture that makes me so uncomfortable. It is from this context that I come to dancing, and from which I criticise it. It is this ‘feel good - do it’ culture into which dancing nestles itself so nicely that I really take issue with, but I find it hard to seperate the two in my mind. Alcohol is the social lubricant and dancing is the fuel that makes this sexy two-seater convertable run.

People go to clubs or parties or bars and get good and liquored up so they are more comfortable with rubbing up against complete strangers in a meaningless, wordless embrace. Touching, grabbing, grinding, teasing, and holding onto people with which you have nothing in common but sexual desire and proximity. No concept of love or tenderness or caring, just pure animalistic, mechanical desire. Like the dance scene in Matrix: Reloaded which was an example of ‘profane’ animalistic love (contrasted with the more tender, ’sacred’ love between Neo and Trinity). This clothed orgy happens all the times at clubs and parties all across the country.

Just like the Matrix, this scene is but a simulation. Dancing is a simulation of sex, and sex is a simulation of love. An empty simulation. All humans desire love and connectedness with others. In the isolated age in which we live often robs us of that connectedness we seek. Ageist oppressive parenting perhaps robs us of the love we should feel growing up. Getting back to that is difficult. It may take months or years to find it.

Unfortunately our instant gratification culture doesn’t have the patience to wait for it. We demand our news now, we demand our food now, we demand love now. Clubs and parties have become the fast-food joints of romance. Serving up simulated love just as McDonalds serves up simulated food. Its hard to swallow but add on enough alcohol (or ketchup to the later) and it becomes tolerable. Pretty soon you forget what the real thing is like.

Except it never fully replaces the real thing. Empty calories and empty hearts. Your visitor leaves in the morning and soon that lonely, empty feeling returns. Only to be temporarily filled up again that night.

So I know I am unusual, but I’ve unplugged myself from the matrix. I don’t want to allow a simulation to leach meaning away from something vivid and beautiful and pure. Call me a freak, a relic, a 70-year-old Mormon wannabe, I don’t care. This is just how I feel, and I want to express it to all who will listen.

As for dancing with someone you do care about and love? Well I guess I just have irrational hang ups. A loving monogomous dance involves none of the dangers that worry me above, yet because of my worries its more difficult for me. It is something I am definitely uncomfortable with, and always have been. But its not without reason.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.