| What is the general feeling amongst ballroom dancers about same-sex dance partners, especially at social dances? |
| As others have posted, it appears that you see women dancing together more often than men dancing together, but you do see both. I usually go dancing with a primarily college age crowd and for the most part no one really seems to mind. Sometimes people get a kick out of watching it.  In particular, I knew two brothers who would dance quickstep together and change lead/follow roles in the middle so smoothly you wouldn't even see it. One moved away from the area though, so we don't see that much anymore. There are two male friends who regularly dance Viennese waltz together though and they also switch lead/follow roles in the middle. We seem to be in the semi-unique situation of having more men than women at times (no, no one here can really explain why), so we may see a few more male/male couples just because of that. Sure, I'd rather dance with women, but if they're all taken or have chosen to sit out and another man wants to dance, I won't turn him down. Perhaps different groups of people view it differently, but at least with our college crowd people seem to take the same sex couples in stride. ------------------
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall |
| While I would much rather follow than lead (especially since I can't lead very well), there are times when there are just not enough guys to go around. I dance with my female friends all the time, and I see other people doing the same. As people have said already, guy/guy dancing is more rare, but it still happens enough so that it is not a complete shock to see guys dancing together. Of course my background in dancing is in swing, and it might be different in the ballroom community--I cant imagine same sex latin dancing and ballroom dancing seems so formal and everything. ------------------
Trees are people too!
¡Viva los árboles! |
| I don't see many same sex partners socially- 1 male/male couple occaisionally comes to our studio's social/practice party. I see many female/female partnerships at collegiate and amateur competitions (? lack of male partners). Towards the end of our studio's social/practice parties, I sometimes dance the lady's role with one of our male instructors. Most people get a kick out of it, but I do notice a few people are offended.- that's why I wait towards the end. Personally, it doesn't bother me to see a same sex partnership at socials/comps. |
| We have a few upper level male dancers that like to work on their follow technique. There are only a few female leaders though. So mostly here we will see an occasional male-male dance. We all find this highly humorous because I dance at a country bar, and this gets occasional hoots from the cowboys. The guys like to pretend they are flirting and have little contests to see who gets embarassed first, the lead or the follow! It's a riot. None of them are actual couples though, I'm sure that wouldn't go over too well with the cowboys, and there might be problems. |
| Dronak, just on the matter of predominantly male college dancing: Imperial College, London, UK, have the same problem as far as I know, in contrast to any other uni I know in the UK. They are also rated as one of the top three in the country, and have a greater intake of ethnic minorities' applicants than most. I think that the ratio male:female is high as well.
If I were to make an attempt at explaining this, I would say that from my own observations, ethnic Indians embrace dancing more than caucasians, especially Latin American, maybe because it is similar to dances of their cultures. The same goes for those of African origin, as far as I can see. They don't seem so hung up about their stereotyped masculinity. I think it would be fair to say that among some, certainly not all, but some Indian and other ethnic minority communities in the UK, women are less likely to apply to universities, so that in ethnic minority groups in universities, the males outweigh females. This could account for what we observe in London. London University as a whole does not seem to have this problem, so it seems to be related to Imperial College's reputation.
Just my thoughts on the matter. Are there similarities to your college? |
| I have found that it really depends where you are and the general atmosphere of the crowd. I live near a town noted for liberal attituteds and a thriving lesbian community. Same sex partners are fully accepted and lesbians and nonlesbians alike dance with each other. (I find more hestation for this among males). In the less liberal communities in which I dance, same sex partners are usually looked at askance. There will aways be people who find somethings threatening. However, if the crowd is upbeat and having everyone is having a "rollicking good time" people usually relax, relize there are never enough male leaders and just have fun. It really depends where you are and whom your with. |
| Hmm, those are interesting comments, Philipp. I don't have any statistics on hand, but as far as I know, our campus' male:female ratio is roughly even. I'm sure it's not exactly 1:1, but I don't think it's strongly biased one way or the other. I think our campus does have a rather large population of minorities, possibly in greater percentages than the general population. Your comments about certain cultures having a stronger connection to dancing is probably correct. If you're right about people of Indian and African origin embracing dancing more than other groups, then that doesn't really explain our group here -- I believe our ballroom club is made primarily of Caucasians (including a fair number of Russians) and Asians. There are a number of other colleges around the area (Washington, D.C.) and I think all of them have more women than men in their clubs. When we go out social dancing we tend to balance each other out since we go to the same dances, but our club is bigger than all the others, so we can still end up with more men at the socials. It's an interesting topic. It would be nice to see more comments from people in similar situations, but I have the feeling that not many people from our ballroom club read the boards here. ------------------
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall |
| ...or maybe the mix of cultures creates the atmosphere necessary for males to be able to live out their passion for dancing? I've noticed some Russians and Chinese competing successfully at my club, but whether that's significant, I don't know, neither do I know the exact composition of the IC (Imperial College) dancers right now.
Just one little note about racism here: I don't believe in races. I think human populations in different regions have been interbreeding frequently with each other for as long as we have embellished the face of this planet, so we're all just members of a continuum of colour and other, external features. I believe that culture is the only thing that causes nationals of certain countries to tend to develop in a certain way, e.g. be reserved or extrovert.
Careful now, we're diverting from the original topic of this thread :> |
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