A reasonable alternative, compatible with all aspects of your argument, is dance. Salsa or Jive or Swing or whatnot give you some workout and lots of fun. It tends to become a lifestyle, which is always a good predictor for inherently motivating activities, but is helped by it also giving lots of opportunities for dating.
If you’d like a nerdy evopsych context / motivation for dancing—or you’re a guy and need a reason why so far you haven’t danced that doesn’t require you to decide you just don’t like it—try this long-ish but funny and very rational piece.
Yes, for people who can learn it. I find dancing brutally devastating, psychologically speaking, because it feels like it is a hard test of my masculinity in a purely sexual sense. I cannot explain it better. I tried and failed two salsa courses (I could step as long as it was just counting, but when they turned on the music the rythm made me hopelessly confused about what to do), and saw that it is not like learning to play tennis and then being a bit clumsy and taking 3x as long is okay, because I could see on other couples—even those who were not romantic, just paired at the course—that the whole thing, every movement is through and through erotic. And failing at it feels like failing at being a man in the corest erotic-sexual sense. It is utterly devastating.
Actually I have found not only these more formal kinds of dances but just club fooling around is like that, a brutal test of sexual masculinity. It happened when I was young that we were at a non-music bar and talking, friends, mixed gender group, some people trying a pick-up some just chatting, but overally we judged each other on things like smarts, humor or looks. Guys who dressed well and talked well made some progress with the girls etc. Then we went to some dance club or music bar with a floor and basically… the gloves came off. Dancing even in that informal, irregular sense was such an brutal test of erotic self-confidence, that guys with more of it basically beat guys with less of into the ground—all this happening on the body language and unspoken feelings level. I have seen making 80% progress towards a girl completely destroyed if you danced hunched back and timid in a don’t look at me way and some other guy came there confidently shaking out the moves and enjoying himself. I have seen long-standing couples visibly having their relationship by a dance, women being unable to hide their contempt over their smart, succesful, well-dressed man being such a wimp with competing with other men on the floor. It was so bad, it was 15-20 years ag and I am still scarred by it emotionally. I think dancing is the test where all civilization comes off and you are just judged as a stud in the rawest sense. Failing it means feeling like a failure in a very deep inner cores.
Thanks for the opportunity to rant, it was therapeutic.
BTW why is this such a brutal test? Because you are expected to be both relaxed and confident. In many tests of mascunility it is okay to be stressed and obviously look like someone who is concentrating hard. In many cases of being relaxed, you are not tested. But enganging in sharp alpha-male erotic competition while also trying to look relaxed, easy, natural, and pretending you enjoy it instead of suffering of nagging self-doubt: this is the hardest thing ever. I would rather go on a sparring match with a serious boxer, there at least I am allowed to be stressed look like someone who is concentrating hard, I don’t need to look easy, relaxed and casual.
it was 15-20 years ago and I am still scarred by it emotionally.
Oh no :( If you want to eliminate this, here’s some unsolicited help, from one shy and awkward nerd to another: I didn’t like dancing either before undergrad, but I really liked hanging out with my friends, and my friends went out dancing all the time. Now I do like dancing, and I also know why I didn’t like it before.
Certain cultures see things as music and dance as a Serious Fine Art, to be Performed On Stage for the Benefit of the Audience, and you have no business doing it it you’re not good at it. For other cultures, music and dance are natural self expression practiced since childhood with parents and uncles and aunts, and no one cares if you’re a tone deaf klutz. (This is the source of stereotypes about which groups can dance and which can’t). If you were raised in the first culture, going on the dance floor is kind of like going on stage with no preparation—pretty scary!
If you were raised in the first culture, you first have to unlearn the emotional association of dancing/singing with Performing On Stage. This is accomplished by drinking the often conveniently available and potently anxiolytic alcohol to remove feelings of self-consciousness. After 4-7 sessions the association will mostly vanish and you won’t need alcohol anymore. (This is also why it’s easier to get drunk people singing.)
As a corollary to un-learning the idea that dancing is about impressing people, you must also unlearn the idea that dancing is inherently and primarily some sort of mating dance aimed at impressing the opposite gender. Salsa is explicitly heterosexual, sure, but you can dance with your male friends, you can dance with your family, you can dance all by yourself in a corner. There’s nothing inherently sexual there. That’s just you psychologically framing it as a Performance again...I never had this particular misconception, so I don’t have any advice for unlearning it, but I think it’s mostly a subset of classifying the activity under “Perform” rather than under “play and fun” combined with never having been exposed to spontaneous dancing in a family-friendly setting.
Obviously, if you barely ever dance, you’re psychologically on stage, and you are under the impression that the main purpose of this activity is to ask a girl out using the medium of interpretive dance, or something, an activity which comes easily to small children will feel like an extremely high-pressure situation to you. Un-learn this.
If I were to distill (pun intended) this into practical advice: Drink until you aren’t nervous the first 5-6 times (less alcohol is needed each time), go with people who you trust to not make fun of you, enjoy the music and sing along (no one can hear you), and just jump up and down or step side to side or whatever until you stop feeling self conscious and start getting into it. Oh, you also, you have to like the music being played, or you won’t ever “get into it”.
I think your ideas would be excellent for me 15 years ago, now we never go out to dance because our 1 year old would feel really lonely alone at home, and I have a drinking problem anyway, the last thing I need is more. At 37 I think I can do the rest of my life without it. But I think your advice needs to be gotten out to younger “mes” definitely.
(To be fair, I think that is how I developed that drinking problem. It began with loosening up to dance or to approach girls. Didn’t work but liked the feeling. Since I mostly ended up doing nothing just standing there, getting drunk and going home, I associated that drunk feel with “being entertained, going out like a normal person not staying home like a nerd” and then it went a bit downhill from here—and it was still at 19.)
As for culture, I am just more or less standar (Central) Euro, none of that impressive Argentinian stage stuff, neither that wonderfully careless joy-dancing religious Jews do. I think, in between. Normal club stuff.
That’s a very interesting link, but I’m left with at least one question—why did a lot of modern cultures mostly stop teaching young men how to dance? I’m not talking about formal instruction—most people through history wouldn’t afford that.
Why, because the music changed! I am 36. My parents danced to rock and roll and beat rumba, which is something to learn. They tried to teach me, but when I first went to the clubs to try to find my first girlfriend around 17, around 1995, they weren’t playing music like that, they were either playing techno-house-trance or this R&B—funky—pop—disco kind of stuff, I remember this and this being very popular for the girls. Boys just went for the girls. Around 3-4AM, when people began to get tired and go home, the DJ took pity on the boys who could not score and played music they would like then everybody went home. At any rate, there is nothing really to learn about these musics dance-wise, at least not on the club level, on the competition, acrobatic level of course yes.But techno is just slicing the air and this kind of funky is just swaying with some hand moves, people find their own moves and style after a while.
I think if I really wanted I could remember some rock and roll moves, but for what? It is not like I will ever use them, they are not trendy anymore. Not a lot of people are buying Paul Anka records anymore. And not a lot of places play them.
There seem to be a lot of men who don’t dance, and this seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon.
I’m going to modify my comment above to make it less extreme.
Second thought—is neglecting to teach a lot of young men how to dance an unconscious way of lowering their chances of courting/seducing women? If so why would that have happened?
A reasonable alternative, compatible with all aspects of your argument, is dance. Salsa or Jive or Swing or whatnot give you some workout and lots of fun. It tends to become a lifestyle, which is always a good predictor for inherently motivating activities, but is helped by it also giving lots of opportunities for dating.
If you’d like a nerdy evopsych context / motivation for dancing—or you’re a guy and need a reason why so far you haven’t danced that doesn’t require you to decide you just don’t like it—try this long-ish but funny and very rational piece.
Yes, for people who can learn it. I find dancing brutally devastating, psychologically speaking, because it feels like it is a hard test of my masculinity in a purely sexual sense. I cannot explain it better. I tried and failed two salsa courses (I could step as long as it was just counting, but when they turned on the music the rythm made me hopelessly confused about what to do), and saw that it is not like learning to play tennis and then being a bit clumsy and taking 3x as long is okay, because I could see on other couples—even those who were not romantic, just paired at the course—that the whole thing, every movement is through and through erotic. And failing at it feels like failing at being a man in the corest erotic-sexual sense. It is utterly devastating.
Actually I have found not only these more formal kinds of dances but just club fooling around is like that, a brutal test of sexual masculinity. It happened when I was young that we were at a non-music bar and talking, friends, mixed gender group, some people trying a pick-up some just chatting, but overally we judged each other on things like smarts, humor or looks. Guys who dressed well and talked well made some progress with the girls etc. Then we went to some dance club or music bar with a floor and basically… the gloves came off. Dancing even in that informal, irregular sense was such an brutal test of erotic self-confidence, that guys with more of it basically beat guys with less of into the ground—all this happening on the body language and unspoken feelings level. I have seen making 80% progress towards a girl completely destroyed if you danced hunched back and timid in a don’t look at me way and some other guy came there confidently shaking out the moves and enjoying himself. I have seen long-standing couples visibly having their relationship by a dance, women being unable to hide their contempt over their smart, succesful, well-dressed man being such a wimp with competing with other men on the floor. It was so bad, it was 15-20 years ag and I am still scarred by it emotionally. I think dancing is the test where all civilization comes off and you are just judged as a stud in the rawest sense. Failing it means feeling like a failure in a very deep inner cores.
Thanks for the opportunity to rant, it was therapeutic.
BTW why is this such a brutal test? Because you are expected to be both relaxed and confident. In many tests of mascunility it is okay to be stressed and obviously look like someone who is concentrating hard. In many cases of being relaxed, you are not tested. But enganging in sharp alpha-male erotic competition while also trying to look relaxed, easy, natural, and pretending you enjoy it instead of suffering of nagging self-doubt: this is the hardest thing ever. I would rather go on a sparring match with a serious boxer, there at least I am allowed to be stressed look like someone who is concentrating hard, I don’t need to look easy, relaxed and casual.
Oh no :( If you want to eliminate this, here’s some unsolicited help, from one shy and awkward nerd to another: I didn’t like dancing either before undergrad, but I really liked hanging out with my friends, and my friends went out dancing all the time. Now I do like dancing, and I also know why I didn’t like it before.
Certain cultures see things as music and dance as a Serious Fine Art, to be Performed On Stage for the Benefit of the Audience, and you have no business doing it it you’re not good at it. For other cultures, music and dance are natural self expression practiced since childhood with parents and uncles and aunts, and no one cares if you’re a tone deaf klutz. (This is the source of stereotypes about which groups can dance and which can’t). If you were raised in the first culture, going on the dance floor is kind of like going on stage with no preparation—pretty scary!
If you were raised in the first culture, you first have to unlearn the emotional association of dancing/singing with Performing On Stage. This is accomplished by drinking the often conveniently available and potently anxiolytic alcohol to remove feelings of self-consciousness. After 4-7 sessions the association will mostly vanish and you won’t need alcohol anymore. (This is also why it’s easier to get drunk people singing.)
As a corollary to un-learning the idea that dancing is about impressing people, you must also unlearn the idea that dancing is inherently and primarily some sort of mating dance aimed at impressing the opposite gender. Salsa is explicitly heterosexual, sure, but you can dance with your male friends, you can dance with your family, you can dance all by yourself in a corner. There’s nothing inherently sexual there. That’s just you psychologically framing it as a Performance again...I never had this particular misconception, so I don’t have any advice for unlearning it, but I think it’s mostly a subset of classifying the activity under “Perform” rather than under “play and fun” combined with never having been exposed to spontaneous dancing in a family-friendly setting.
Obviously, if you barely ever dance, you’re psychologically on stage, and you are under the impression that the main purpose of this activity is to ask a girl out using the medium of interpretive dance, or something, an activity which comes easily to small children will feel like an extremely high-pressure situation to you. Un-learn this.
If I were to distill (pun intended) this into practical advice: Drink until you aren’t nervous the first 5-6 times (less alcohol is needed each time), go with people who you trust to not make fun of you, enjoy the music and sing along (no one can hear you), and just jump up and down or step side to side or whatever until you stop feeling self conscious and start getting into it. Oh, you also, you have to like the music being played, or you won’t ever “get into it”.
I think your ideas would be excellent for me 15 years ago, now we never go out to dance because our 1 year old would feel really lonely alone at home, and I have a drinking problem anyway, the last thing I need is more. At 37 I think I can do the rest of my life without it. But I think your advice needs to be gotten out to younger “mes” definitely.
(To be fair, I think that is how I developed that drinking problem. It began with loosening up to dance or to approach girls. Didn’t work but liked the feeling. Since I mostly ended up doing nothing just standing there, getting drunk and going home, I associated that drunk feel with “being entertained, going out like a normal person not staying home like a nerd” and then it went a bit downhill from here—and it was still at 19.)
As for culture, I am just more or less standar (Central) Euro, none of that impressive Argentinian stage stuff, neither that wonderfully careless joy-dancing religious Jews do. I think, in between. Normal club stuff.
That’s a very interesting link, but I’m left with at least one question—why did a lot of modern cultures mostly stop teaching young men how to dance? I’m not talking about formal instruction—most people through history wouldn’t afford that.
Why, because the music changed! I am 36. My parents danced to rock and roll and beat rumba, which is something to learn. They tried to teach me, but when I first went to the clubs to try to find my first girlfriend around 17, around 1995, they weren’t playing music like that, they were either playing techno-house-trance or this R&B—funky—pop—disco kind of stuff, I remember this and this being very popular for the girls. Boys just went for the girls. Around 3-4AM, when people began to get tired and go home, the DJ took pity on the boys who could not score and played music they would like then everybody went home. At any rate, there is nothing really to learn about these musics dance-wise, at least not on the club level, on the competition, acrobatic level of course yes.But techno is just slicing the air and this kind of funky is just swaying with some hand moves, people find their own moves and style after a while.
I think if I really wanted I could remember some rock and roll moves, but for what? It is not like I will ever use them, they are not trendy anymore. Not a lot of people are buying Paul Anka records anymore. And not a lot of places play them.
Did they stop? I learned to dance, and I’ve seen a bunch of impromptu dance lessons at weddings.
There seem to be a lot of men who don’t dance, and this seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon.
I’m going to modify my comment above to make it less extreme.
Second thought—is neglecting to teach a lot of young men how to dance an unconscious way of lowering their chances of courting/seducing women? If so why would that have happened?