Why Did Men Stop Dancing?

Being a "good dancer" used to be a strategy for attracting women, but not anymore.

Photo by Christian Harb on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I came across a video of an older man prompted by his adult child to dance the way he did in the eighties. The video went viral because he was an excellent dancer, but also because the way he was dancing was both delightful and about as unfamiliar to young people as Mesopotamian fertility goddess pottery.

Similarly, videos of ‘90s dancing on MTV Spring Break have circulated, and most of the people watching them can’t help but notice how everyone is dancing. And not just loosely grooving to the music, but full-on dance dancing with no embarrassment or self-conscious lip-biting. Even fratty-looking white guys in tank tops are basically voguing.

But by the time I came of age in the 2000s, the dancing had stopped—especially for the aforementioned white guys. We had school and camp dances, but there were basically two options for dancing: standing there while a girl rubbed her butt on your crotch, or slow dancing. Both required almost zero movement from the boy.

Of course, some boys at my school still danced. We had a Bulgarian exchange student who, for lack of a better description, acted and talked exactly like a more flamboyant Borat. He was obsessed with American culture, but was stuck in another era, so he frequently appeared onstage during our daily morning meeting to do elaborate disco dancing routines, sometimes impersonating John Travolta. But this guy, beloved as he was by the student body, was a bit of a joke. Nobody saw his dancing (which was actually pretty good) and thought Oh yeah, THIS is how I get the babes. In fact, I think his dancing rendered him fairly gay-coded, even though I don’t know if he was actually gay or not.

Perhaps it was that kneejerk fear of appearing gay that put an end to dancing in the early 2000s. Boys were terrified of seeming gay, and perhaps as gay men gradually became more accepted in the media (even if frequently featured in stereotypical ways) they felt more of an urge to distance themselves from homosexuality. Gay guys wore tight pants, so their pants had to be fucking enormous. Gay guys took care of their appearance, so straight guys had to create the identity of “metrosexual” to excuse their engagement in basic fashion and grooming that would have been very uncontroversial to a man in the 1950s, let alone the 1700s. Perhaps “dancing” fell into this verboten category of “things gay guys do.”