There's lots of reasons. A lot of guys I know get very self-conscious about dancing. Some men tell me they think it's girly. Someone told me he thought it was gay.
But recently something else has been forming in my mind. I've had a few conversations with guy friends recently when they've lamented the fact they never got taught to flirt.
"I just wish I was Brazilian," a mate told me over coffee. "They're born flirting. No one teaches Kiwi guys."
I couldn't help thinking that a lot of the skills flirting teaches you are applicable to dancing. Flirting, provided it's the right type, can help you dance.
Flirting in New Zealand is a weird thing. We seem to have this strange idea that if you flirt with someone it has to end up in sex. Flirting is apparently about conquests. Set target, engage flirting, retrieve sexual encounter. It's most typically exemplified in the Friend Zone mentality. That's a guy thing, where you have about a two-week window to get a girl into bed, after that it's pointless because you've been friend-zoned. So you have to flirt hard in those two weeks to achieve your goal. It's a bit ... well, predatory.
It can also have mixed results. It can come across as a touch aggressive, or worse, desperate. This can sap the fun out of it and tip into sleaziness.
But more importantly, have you seen a flirt master at work? They don't do this type of flirting.
A friend of mine explained it to me once. Good flirting isn't about instant success and getting someone to sleep with you. It can be. But it's also about saying to another person, "hey, you're human, I acknowledge your sexuality, have a wink".
It's something nice to cheer someone up. It's done from compassion, humanity and empathy. Everyone likes to have his or her desire for affection recognised.
Hence why these Casanovas flirt with people of all ages and don't expect anything from it.
Also as it's not about results then they're free to be fun, nice people. It means they build fun, nice connections with others. Which makes them pretty sexy.
Back to dancing. Dancing is often a way of flirting with another person. When you're out in bars and clubs, it's a way of building connections with someone. Good dancing is about having fun, being confident. It's about having an enjoyable connection with someone, and not trying to make it anything more than a booty wiggle.
It's hard to do if your version of flirting is the aggressive sort. Largely because dancing doesn't give immediate sexual gains so it's seemingly irrelevant. So people looking to pull don't focus on it. It also requires you to be lost in the dance. Which is hard to do if you're using energy trying to get in someone's pants. It's also about having fun. But if you're in a club to pull, you're too determined to have fun. So all in all, you just can't shake it.
But if you approach flirting as something chilled and fun, which doesn't have to lead to sex, you can relax into dancing. Being relaxed and happy is still, surprisingly, the best way to dance.
So when we stop worrying about trying to score so much, we'll get better at getting down.
