Thoughts on gender balancing and gendered dance in general

[playfulfordian]

The other day, I got a Facebook message promoting a dance event. The relevant bits are quoted here, "It is NOT too late to register for X and get the Early Registration Discount! We are about half way full - just a few weeks into Registration so ...Gentlemen, please register soon and take one of our wait-listed ladies out of suspense!! Couples:

Comments

[nullsurface]

It seems like the impulse to gender-balance a dance event comes from women who don't like dancing with other women. This is a weird impulse to me because, like a lot of people here, came from the Swarthmore/TriCo school of dance where the classes were 75% ladies and all the men there were either arhythmic nerds in it for the P.E. credit, guys who were dragged there by their female friends without really having a clue what they would be getting into, guys who only joined because they had a crush on someone else there, or some even freakier fourth category that's probably better left undescribed (disclaimer: I fall into at *least* one of those and anyone reading this is exempt). So it makes sense that the ladies there had no problem partnering with the other ladies. Thus that is totally normal to me.

But I guess it's a little different when just any old person can crash your event. Then you run into something you might call the Sketch Problem. The Sketch Problem might actually be a special case of a more general Undesirable Problem but that term has all kinds of bad connotations and ups the political incorrectness metric for this comment, so we'll stick to sticking it to the sketchy. So organizers need some way to deal with the Sketch Problem. One conceivable way of limiting sketchy attendees is to require everyone to come as a couple -- whether or not they're married, dating, friends with benefits, etc. The theory here is, I think, that the truly sketchy will be unable to find the time ask anyone of the opposite gender to sign up for this event with them as their partner because he or she is too busy sleazily extruding themselves over someone while asking them to do the next dance during a swing. Or so I've been told.

I think the point I'm making is that my reaction to gender-balancing depends on its implementation. Like, if a bunch of ladies don't want to dance with other ladies and thus will cap the number of women but let any old freak with a sweatband into their dance, I'd say it's time to vote with your feet. But if they are just asking people to pair up before coming as a way of controlling the Sketch Problem -- and I'll admit I have no idea if anyone even does this -- that seems to me to be more like a sketch control measure with the side effect of gender balancing. Theoretically, that scheme annoys me less.

Do you know if predominantly-contra events gender-balance more than predominantly-non-contra ones? I'll call that the Contra Gender Balance Hypothesis (CGBH). I'd bet that it's true. I think that's a little unfortunate because contra it's easier to dance as a man or as a woman. You are practically doing the same thing. So if we believe the CGBH, it follows that they're not gender balancing to protect beginners or anything, but probably because in a gender-skewed contra environment, you have to get all up-close-and-personal, repeatedly, with members of your own gender. Not only does this magnify the Sketch Problem, but it probably irritates people who, like, think that their own gender is all icky or whatever. At the very least it takes people out of their comfort zone, which to some extent relies on the idea that contra dances thrust you into close proximity with members of the opposite gender roughly once every fifteen seconds.

My suggested fix for this problem is to increase the prevalence and popularity of dances that involve swinging your neighbor's partner. I can't even say for a fact if I've ever done one. But the more it happens the less people would be weirded out by it. English, by the way, has a decent number of dances where you two-hand-turn someone of the same gender, but it's not quite as physically close as swinging.

So, that's my ramble.