CHICKS DIG GUYS WHO CAN DANCE...OR SO A STUDY CONCLUDES
It is unclear how much effort most guys actually put into dance moves. Good dance moves are not a huge part of the equation because, at the risk of racial profiling, most white guys can't dance. I know this fact from a lifetime of my own bad white guy dance moves.
It's the main reason country music is popular with white guys. If you can teach a white guy to march in basic training, then you can teach him how to line dance to country music.
The principle is the same.
Anyhow, it may be time to learn how to dance after a recent study indicated that women are more attracted to good dancers. The experiment filmed guys on dance floors and then made their images into computer avatars with no definable features.
It turns out that men who moved their necks, torsos and hips on a dance floor were more attractive to women than guys who flailed their arms wildly while moving in a circle.
There goes my best dance move.
The fact that the study eliminated other important factors like actual physical appearance of the men, and level of intoxication of the women, undermined its validity.
Personally I have to draw from many years of time spent on a dance floor. My first experience was in junior high when we danced to records in the gymnasium. We lived for the slow dances like the long version of 'Crimson and Clover'. Bob Seger was right-we were "working on mysteries without any clue", but we had to start somewhere.
Slow dances require little actual dance skill, but it was always a barometer for the evening and endless possiblities- well almost always. I remember a magic moment in my early 20s when I was treated to an incredibly close slow dance that was probably illegal in a dozen states.
The song was 'Tonight's The Night', she was a complete hottie, she asked me to dance, and she was long gone about five seconds after the song ended. To this day, that moment is one of the most memorable and frustrating moments I have ever experienced on a dance floor. Would I do it again? You betcha- in a hormone fuelled heartbeat. Maybe I would finally get that happy ending.
There was a phrase scratched into a wall in a university washroom during my youthful years. It stated that dancing was a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. For men, that is one of the most accurate assessments of dancing that most of us will ever know.
But what we didn't know is that women prefer that we are actually good at both vertical expression and horizontal desire.
Jim Sutherland @mystarcollectorcar.com
