The Internalized Misogyny of the Follow

I’ve been on a bit of a dance hiatus for a long time after feeling a bit of a plateau and some serious anhedonia issues that left me feeling uninspired by dancing. However this week I finally got back in the saddle and made it out to a dance. Overall I found myself having somewhat lackluster dances as tends to happen after you’re gone for a long period of time, but my last two dances were with Anthony Chen and they were fantastic. Now that in and of itself is not a surprise, as it’s always fun to dance with Anthony, but what surprised me was how I felt about myself and my dancing during and after the dancing.

In the past, one of the things I’ve loved about dancing is the feeling of losing myself. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to plan, I can trust someone else to guide me and get me where I need to go. I’m not generally very good at trusting others, particularly with my body, and so for a long time I thought that this was progress: I could trust someone with my body, to place my body, to let someone else be in charge for a while and let myself simply go with what was happening.

It’s a feeling a bit like being on a roller coaster: you feel almost out of control, but you trust that you will be safe.

This dance was different. I found that instead of being told where I was supposed to go, I put forward my own energy and found someone else there with me. I contributed. I usually am extremely self-conscious of adding any flare or styling to my dancing. I get scared of screwing it up or looking stupid. I worry that it won’t fit into what my lead is doing. This wasn’t even on my mind during this dance. I simply DANCED and happened to be with another person. Each time one of us added some energy in, the other saw that and raised their own energy level to match. It was lovely.

I realize that this is not a revelation. There has been a robust discussion ongoing in the dance community about changing attitudes towards the lead/follow relationship and about the importance of equal partnership in dancing. I even was aware that this was the ideal in dancing for a long time before I had this dance (there have been few others where I’ve actually felt that I could achieve something close to this ideal). Rather what was a revelation was my own personal attitude towards the experiences of dancing equally and dancing not in partnership. I cannot speak for anyone else when it comes to these types of attitudes, but I strongly suspect that there are other women out there who share them.

I feel more comfortable when I’m not in control of my own body. I feel more safe. I feel as if I’m doing something right when I give up some of the autonomy that I have and let someone move me. It feels like an intense relief to me. Looking objectively at these two experiences, I can see that I dance better when I am on equal footing with my partner, but I am deeply uncomfortable with contributing something of myself to the dance. Instead, I simply want to get it “right” and do what the other person is asking me: be the perfect follow that is just an extension of the lead.

I have noticed this in other areas as well. For all that I hold feminist ideals and strive to be independent and autonomous, I often feel the most comfortable when someone else is telling me what to do, particularly when it comes to questions of the body. I prefer not to be particularly ostentatious with my body. I know that I have internalized these attitudes because society has told me to be more submissive than men, has told me that my body is dangerous, has told me that my body is an object.

Some people might deny the link between the objectification of women and the tendency for female follows to be passive in their dancing, but I know that it is true in my personal experience and I strongly suspect that it may be true for others. I worry that by encouraging women to be follows and that by continuing to teach follows to be an extension of the lead, we are solidifying the internal misogyny of many women. I know it has encouraged me to continue taking a backseat in my own body and in my own motion. It has not encouraged me to take up space, something that I have always found difficult and that I have actively worked to do. It has not encouraged me to be intentional with my body.

And so I worry that the way dancing is approached by many women is from a mindset of internalized misogyny that not only sets them up to dance worse than they could, but also to continue to put themselves in vulnerable positions. I don’t think it’s a stretch that the way we present our bodies and relate to others in dancing can carry over to many other places, even so far as sex (I’ve found that I’m very passive in both contexts out of much of the same motivation: fear of screwing up, fear of disappointing my partner, fear of looking stupid). But more than that, it seems that dancing could be a wonderful place to experiment with new attitudes, new rules, and new behaviors. It’s a fairly safe space (the worst that happens is you have a bad dance), and it’s one of the few places where we actively learn what we’re supposed to do with our bodies. In my mind, this gives dance teachers (especially those who are teaching beginner students) a great deal of power to make a positive impact in the lives of their female students. It certainly means that they should be careful with the language they use (e.g. I once heard a teacher refer to follows as a trailer hitch. Not helpful), and at the very least spend some good time with follows early on in dancing to set up the concept of equal partnership in dancing.

I’d really like to encourage other follows to think about the dances they prefer, the dances that make them feel comfortable and ask themselves about how that might reflect on their relationship with their body or gender. I’m certainly going to be more intentional going forward about not letting myself slip into a passive role, and I am setting myself a goal to learn how to lead. I would be very interested to hear other people’s thoughts about the relationship between gender and style of dance. Sound off in the comments!

What Lindy Means To Me

So for those people who don’t know me personally and have just stumbled upon this blog out of the internet wasteland, I have a completely new topic to introduce. I am a lindy hopper. I swing dance. I LOVE swing dancing. I’ve been starting to get engaged with some lindy blogs, and I want to share a bit of my feelings and thoughts about dance, since it’s also a part of who I am and something that I feel is important and should be shared.

So as I was reading some blog posts, I came across one that was about things that good lindy hoppers do/ways to get better at lindy. And one of those things was “Develop a unique voice and perspective on dance. You’ll need to figure out what this means to you. I can only promise that this is usually a difficult process. But hey, you’re looking for hard things to work on and making your own discoveries now, right?”

I have lots of thoughts and feelings about dancing and why it’s so important to me, but I want to make some of them more coherent, figure out my unique perspective on dance. So that’s the goal of this blog: why do I dance, why do I feel dancing is important, what does dancing mean to you, and how do I view my progress in dancing so far?

So the first thing that swing means to me is something that I absolutely did not understand at first, but is something that has come to mean the world to me. It’s something that I first started to experience with taiko, and since have found even more of in swing. Lindy hop lets me be big.

You might be giving me a funny look right now because that makes no sense. Justified. To explain: I spend a lot of my time trying to be small. Sometimes this is emotionally. I try not to bring up things that bother me. I try to mold myself to what other people want, what might please them. More often than not, it’s physical: as someone with an eating disorder, my life has been consumed by the concept of smaller for four years. It has been my goal, my overwhelming certainty that I need to take up less space in this world. I have nearly killed myself trying to be smaller.

You cannot dance without taking up space. You cannot follow without making your body solid in certain ways, with being willing to move into and out of space and fill spaces. Dance is the expression of self in space. To be a good dancer, you have to be willing to make your body an extension of your self, a part of your identity, and then use it to fill up space.

And it’s enjoyable. Taking up space with my self can make me smile. That is the hugest gift that dancing has given me, and I think that it’s one of the most important things that it does for many people. We rarely are encouraged or allowed to express joy or self with our bodies. We’re not really told to jump up and down with glee. Sexuality is fairly repressed in this country. Bodies are hardly celebrated, and are rarely viewed as an integral part of self (see my post about tattoos). So think about how revolutionary it is to get a bunch of people in a room together, tell them that their bodies are a form of art, and that they can be joyous while being big and beautiful and expressing themselves in a purely physical manner. And it’s not dirty. It’s not bad. It’s completely platonic for most people. Holy. Shit.

If you’re going to be a good swing dancer, you have to be willing to extend your movements, to raise your hands over your head, to show all of your body and make it appear bigger than it is, because if you want to compete you need to have a presence. That is the antithesis of what I’ve done for many years, and very much not something women are encouraged to do very often.  It is SO POWERFUL in my mind, and is so often overlooked as one of the joys and beauties of lindy. It’s often discussed in the lindy scene that there are some sexist overtones with the lead/follow dynamic, but in my mind the expression of beauty and self through the body is so empowering to anyone who does it that it trumps anything else that might be going on (which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss the sexist bits).

In addition to this there’s another really important piece of dance that relates to my mental health. Honestly I think that swing is the perfect therapy for me, and that many of the thing I love about it have illustrated how to move forward in my life. Anyway. Whoosh. Yeah that’s the second thing. Whoosh. In case you haven’t noticed, my brain has its own vocabulary for lindy hop, and it might take some getting used to. Whoosh is about trust. Whoosh is the feeling that you get when you’re doing a really good swing out and your partner catches you and you hit that moment of movement that’s just…whoosh. You can’t stop yourself at this point. Your momentum is already going. It’s almost out of control. It’s almost a little scary if you don’t trust your partner to catch you or put you back where you started. It’s exhilarating. It’s exciting. And it doesn’t work without taking the plunge to prepare your body and then let it go.

Obviously you want to be in control of your body throughout the entire dance, but there are moments when you give yourself to the momentum of your body. I think this happens particularly often for followers, since a good follower will follow their momentum wherever it goes (still working on this). And that means that you have to be willing to prepare yourself (have your footwork right, have good balance), but then simply trust your body to end up in the right spot, to follow its momentum. In swingouts, it also means trusting your partner a great deal. It means that in many ways you give up control. While you still get to choose where and how you move your body, you let someone (or something) else tweak it or shape it or work with it. When you try to control too much your dancing is rigid and you can’t follow well at all. When you let go of some of your control and simply let your body react and trust that you have prepared well, you get whoosh. Which is REALLY FUN.

Another place where I’ve found whoosh is on roller coasters. You trust that everyone has done their prep right, that you’re safe, you put yourself in a scary situation, but when you let the fear happen and wash over you, you get the whoosh of fun and speed and movement.

The idea of letting go of control in order to succeed, in order to trust, in order to trust MY BODY of all things is CRAZY to me. It’s difficult. It’s terrifying. It’s hard to trust others, it’s hard to trust the world in general. But it’s a skill that’s necessary. It’s the kind of leap of faith that pisses me off in many situations (because I think faith is not rational and thus shouldn’t be trusted) but that is so necessary in relationships, and often when making difficult decisions in life. If I could make that same kind of leap of faith with my recovery, and fall into the whoosh of it instead of holding on to the control and the fear, I have no doubt that I would be healthy. I’m sure this is true of all sorts of bad habits that people have. We can learn a lot from the whoosh of swing. We can also learn a lot about relationships from it: sometimes you have to trust your partner.

Speaking of relationships, one of the other things I love about lindy is the dynamic of follower and leader and how if you’re going to be a good dancer (or so I’m told) it often has to be like a good relationship: it’s not one person speaking and the other listening. It’s each person listening to the other, and molding the shape of the momentum in the dance together. It’s about a suggestion, and then taking that suggestion and building on it. I’m loving learning how to do that. I spend a lot of time trying to be aware of the other person while also being aware of myself and expressing myself. It’s a lot to keep track of at once, but so is life. It’s good brain training.

This is getting to be a really long post, and I think these are my main points. I may come back to swing thoughts later on, but for now I’ll just leave you with some of my swing dancing goal:

1.Work on tandem Charleston. Learn how to distinguish a lead into that from a lead into a turn. Stop stepping on people’s feet.

2.Listen to more music. Get the feel of it back.

3.Work on my bal.

4.Ask more people to dance more of the time.

5.Start working exercise back into my routine (slowly. I promise mom, very slowly) so that I can keep up my stamina at dances.

6.Go to more classes for added practice.

7.Practice on my own: triple stepping through turns.

8.Take more solo dance classes. Overcome paranoia of mirrors at said classes. Overcome paranoia of people seeing me dance without a lead.