Politics and Sex

This is a first draft of a prosepctive series on politics and sex.

Dance and the Vocabulary of Sex

Back in the dawn of the 80’s, when the world was only slightly less stressed than it is now – the same equivalence of evil, destruction, death, and senselessness prevailed, only it moved at a slower pace – an itinerant preacher named Brother Jed would attract clusters of attentive listeners down by the fountain on State Street, at the edge of the University of Wisconsin Campus. There he proclaimed the evils of society, evils he had seen first hand, had participated in materially, in entertaining and enthralling ways, until his epiphany, which eventually led to him heeding a call to save those of us for whom the lure of listening was confined exclusively to the delightfully detailed accounts of his sordid past and not his now all consuming attempt at deliverance.

Like any good preacher, Brother Jed did not travel alone. His left hand woman was Sister Cindy, a bible waving thigh high boot togging brunette who Jed had saved, only to now expose the two of them to rampant accusations as to whether they were indeed living in the sexual sin they so accused the student body of. Jed was immortalized by Madison’s own T-shirt artist: a shit brown “I Found God in A Burger King” T-shirt hung proudly at all times on the master’s T-shirt cart, right next to the Fuck ‘em Bucky T-shirt, (the original) and my favorite till I killed t with too many washings, Kissinger riding an H-bomb down upon Madison is full Strangelovian splendor.

Bound by the truth, I must admit there was a slight error in the Brother Jed T-shirt. Brother Jed did not find God in the parking lot of a Burger King. He found God on the shores of Algeria while on an LSD rampage, replete with the burning cross and sand devils. He gave himself over to Jesus’s mission in the Burger King parking lot. I was a big fan.

Jed and Cindy’s technique was to rail at the audience. After whipping the crowd into a frenzy with nuanced tales of their dissolute pasts (why can’t I have a sex life like that, I prayed), they would then simply accuse all the doubters and hecklers of being sinners. For instance, when the more senior members of the audience would remind Brother Jed that although he repeatedly said he taught at Wisconsin, which everyone in this audience would mean Madison, what he really meant to say was that he taught at the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse, untenured of course, a classic lie the equivalent of which would be saying you were in the Show, instead of being in AA ball. To remind Jed of this fallacy would cause you to be publicly branded a HOOOOOOOOOOOmosexual. You know how sensitive college guys are to that.

Sister Cindy, the lesser star, would go off on dancing, while rocking back and forth herself. Dancing was enough to get you burning in hell, I gathered from her not too clear chain of events, because it led to sex. If dancing led to sex, believe me, we all would have been dancing, instead of getting drunk every weekend. To be a dancer labeled you a fornicator, bound to burn in hell. I never really did quite understand it.

Welcome now to our post-apocalyptic world. Popular books include 1491, the tale of the apocalypse of European disease ravaging our hemisphere. Popular actions include a US military adventure in the Middle East, an out and out provocation to a genocide oriented apocalypse in direct response to a outlandish bombing by rogue Muslims fanatics, whose intent was to incite a nuclear holocaust that would deliver their peculiar apocalyptic vision, a dream of the world as it was 600 years ago. The rest of the world suffers silently through poverty, disenfranchisement, intolerable governance, despair, and food shortages. Through all of this, dancing remains popular, desirable, and typically illegal. For instance, even in New York City, you just can’t get up and dance in a bar, that would be illegal. Who knew?

Some would say dancing is inherent, genetically preprogrammed. My neighbor’s toddler was dancing spontaneously on her own months ago, even when that meant one bounce up, one corresponding splay on the floor. I will say that her dancing coinciding with my noticing her proclivity to place and leave a finger on her clit the moment her diaper was removed. (The parents will kill me for saying that!) This combination of movement, stimulation and pleasure, ecce dance. Okay, here we go.

Sunday morning, when my friend Stefan Springman called to ask me to come to a dance lesson, my first impulse was no. However, I shook that wave off, and agreed. I’m a bit self conscious dancing, never really learned to do it well. That this was for Stefan’s TV show didn’t bother me, I am inured to cameras. Once at the dance studio – if ever there was architecture tasteless enough to cause the apocalypse it would be bad Chinese – Stefan introduced me to my dance partner to be - Jing, a cutie! I said hello with food in mouth, but before anxiety set in, we were standing in front of Vlad, following his warm-ups. I’ll admit to a few co-ordination issues. Jing must have noticed. I should be the man, she said. No I said, shades of my last little asian dominatrix dancing in my head (everything had to be her way). Okay, here’s the Salsa position, said Vlad. Hold hands out here (left for the man), the other hand on the shoulder, head up. Legs were used to step into that space between the legs you don’t normally go, back and forth, and then side to side. Let me say that Jing has all those little touches of grace and flow a beginner like myself would lack, including hair tosses and staying in perfect time. Clearly she’d done this before. My idea of an accomplishment was being able to clap in 4/4 time.

Just as it seemed Jing and I were getting comfortable, Vlad called for a partner change. Jing flew away, right to Vlad the instructor. I turned, but everyone seemed to be taken, and after a moment of anguish I realized the only option was Jens, a tall burly fellow who I had met a few nights ago when he was playing the bass out in a bar. Well, what the hell, the shoot was for the Logo Network. But a few moments later, I was feeling so much better. Jens and I were equally challenged as dancers, and comfortable with our skill levels, got down to the task of learning the steps.

When the call to return to our partners went out, Jing, clearly with no intent to dance with me again, stayed as far away as possible. I drifted over to the side of the room, equally content with not dancing and chagrined at being partnerless (the stress!) when Brigit, quite the nice looking blond and I, partnered up. In seconds we were holding hands and going forward and back. The first steps, the easy ones. We almost had them, and then of course Vlad went on to the next part of the step, and then the next. We would follow Vlad some, and then I suggested (always being the teacher, or the perfectionist, the realist, the meddler, the individualist) that we work out the step we didn’t have that sort of threw us off for the rest of the sequence. Then we would return to following Vlad, then back to our own little world.


One more change of partners brought Natalie running from across the floor. Natalie was Jing’s friend, and she was running to dance with here, but Jing wasn’t giving up Vlad, so Natalie ended up dancing with me. As the next instruction, Vlad reminded us the man must always give direction, so I pulled and pushed (directed!) Natalie through the spin move. What could be more parallel to codified sexual behavior of the past, I thought, especially that mythical virginal honeymoon encounter: Trust me honey, I know exactly what I am doing? Such is the unmistakable intimacy in Salsa dancing. Hands held, movements in unison, separation and relinking. In this frame of mind, I repeated Vlad’s instructions to Natalie, that looking away removed her balance. She didn’t really look up, but that cute little smile never did flee. Afterwards Natalie, said she had so much fun dancing with me, almost with the emphasis on me. I was very impressed. Let’s go dancing again I said. We had that opportunity sooner than expected. Everyone come back and dance so we can get one more shot, we heard. The scene ends with Natalie and I back on the dance floor.

Afterwards, as I happened to be riding down the elevator with Brigit, she remarked how fun dancing was, that it was hard to find a dance partner. That should be your boyfriend I said. She said even that was hard to enforce, not being quite sold on the idea. Of course, I once had a girlfriend Katie, who was very upset I wouldn’t dance with her, although I decried our very disparate skill levels. We broke up soon afterwards.

So now we can ask, and answer, why does everyone like to dance, while wondering, why would there be such a vehement reaction against dancing in conservative, reactionary circles?

Everyone likes to dance because dance offers the vocabulary of sex, without sex. Holding hands, eyes six inches apart, unison hip motions, directing and following, and legs between legs: for most of us these actions happen more during sex than anywhere else, or for us in the non-dancing crowd, only happen then. Additionally, one’s body reacts to stimulus, they call these autonomic reactions, that is, your body is going to react whether you want it to or not, or are conscious of that reaction, or not. Dancing provides a wealth of stimulation, particularly tactile stimulation which can have powerful reactions indeed. How many people believe they could innocently sleep with their arms wrapped around an attractive member of the opposite sex you’ve just met without something happening? A rather rare event, I would say. Likewise, after an hour of dancing, I found myself all jacked up, various nether regions were likewise at alert. One would be amiss not to suggest women have equal reactions as men here. Add to this the stimulation of satisfying multiple partners, very little risk of disappointment, the releasing effects of a musical beat, the intimacies we explored in some detail above (physical contact in a realm of give and take towards a mutual goal), now all this coupled with the removal of the risks of sex – risks no matter how much are diminished today, are still life changing whether they be birth, death, rejection, regret, disease -- all in all, the attractions of dance are quite clear.

So why would Sister Cindy be so adamantly opposed to dancing? The definition of politics is telling other people what to do, not the removal of those pleasures or powers for yourself. The Christian preachers from the heydays of the 1980’s (Brother Jed included) all turned out to be spectacular fornicators and cheats, the Muslims all went to Beirut aka their Vegas. The Romans, the Greeks, and the Christians saw children first and foremost as the necessary engine of war (note how little changes, WWII was exactly 20 years after WWI!) -- what these cultures defined as “moral” sexual behavior was reproductive behavior for military strength. Fornication, homosexuality, and the other litany of sins were obstacles to proper child bearing and rearing. Do not underestimate the validity or the power of these views.

What probably triggered Cindy off was what she saw dancing to be in 1980. Solid Gold. Disco. This is not pairs dancing. No intimacy, no togetherness, no compromise of action for mutual reward. At best the wild gyrations were used as a lure to self-satisfaction. If you got pleasure from my pleasure, well then okay, but that’s secondary. Now take in Cindy’s mind that this dancing was the blueprint for sexual behavior, no wonder she was in conniption fits. That blueprint was not happily ensconced with her political aims.

What now of our dancing crowd, including myself? Well, we’re not 18 anymore, and no one really pairs up at that point. You can imagine the power of dancing then. You get to experience everyone in a most intimate way, being surprised that who you want to dance with may not have been who you easily had fun with, who you remember at the end of the night. Now pairing is a late 20’s thing, a 30’s thing, a desperate hope for those beyond that age group, and once again, dance is there, that intimacy, that learning, that vocabulary of sex without sex, perfect once again as the vocabulary of “moral” ie fecund sex. Whether you wish your kids to be involved in the apocalyptic political struggles of the day or not.